No abstract

After 36 years of mostly authoritarian rule and often bitter civil conflict in Guatemala, the December 1996 Peace Accords prepared the ground for a new phase of reconstruction, democratisation and social and institutional reform. Prior to the Peace Accords, policing in Guatemala had been often violent, repressive and subordinated to the counterinsurgency logic of the military. Security sector reform intentions included the abolition of existing police forces and the creation of a new National Civil Police (PNC). The PNC was meant to give substance to a new way of policing in tune with the building of democratic governance and effective law enforcement. This paper examines the general background of the reforms, discusses the limitations of the results so far, and takes a particular and critical look at one of the key components of the police reform: the recruitment and training of PNC aspirants, using the case of the 1999 Fifth Promotion that entered the Academy of the PNC.

To promote discussions of methodological issues associated with cross-gender research in criminology, we focus on two women's studies of Latin American police. This uncovered five working propositions about women studying organizations dominated numerically and structurally by men. First, feminist scholarship provides some guidelines for such research, but its applicability is neither direct nor immediate. Second, for example, much cross-gender research requires negotiating and maintaining power differentials between researcher and researched. Third, particularly in cross-gender research on secrecy and danger, inter-gender dynamics can thwart some research objectives and promote others. Fourth, inter-gender dynamics can complicate the ethical dilemmas associated with research on powerful agents and agencies of the state. Finally, the emotional reflexivity associated with such inter-gender research is epistemologically relevant for understanding research outcomes.

The outbreak of COVID‐19 has turned out to be a major challenge to societies all over the globe. Curbing the pandemic requires rapid and extensive behavioural change to limit social interaction, including physical distancing. In this study, we tested the notion that inducing empathy for people vulnerable to the virus may result in actual distancing behaviour beyond the mere motivation to do so. In a large field experiment with a sequential case–control design, we found that (a) empathy prompts may increase distancing as assessed by camera recordings and (b) effectiveness of prompts depends on the dynamics of the pandemic and associated public health policies. In sum, the present study demonstrates the potential of empathy‐generating interventions to promote pro‐social behaviour and emphasizes the necessity of field experiments to assess the role of context before advising policy makers to implement measures derived from behavioural science. Please refer to Supplementary Material to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement