Reforming to Avoid Reform: Strategic Policy Substitution and the Reform Gap in Policing

Abstract

Institutional reforms often diverge from substantive problems and societal demands that originally prompted reform, raising questions about democratic responsiveness. Such reform gaps are prevalent in policing, wherein some police forces improve capacity and performance, while extrajudicial violence persists. I argue that police evade pressure for reform through strategic policy substitution, pressuring politicians to replace reforms that threaten bureaucratic autonomy with favorable reforms that preserve it. I describe how police act as veto players, thwarting high-threat structural and oversight reforms demanded by advocates to address violence and corruption by enacting low-threat operational and marginal reforms. Drawing on evidence from Colombia and Brazil, I demonstrate that operational reforms, (e.g., body-worn cameras and community policing) preferred by police can produce constrained institutional change. Such reforms may improve performance, but by preserving bureaucratic autonomy, they increase the police’s structural power and ability to resist future structural reforms, complicating efforts to address police violence.

Does Police Militarization Increase Repression?

“…For example, the amount and type of training varies greatly between policing institutions. Future research should explore this and other institutional design variations, though recent work warns us to be wary of the difficulties in reforming the police that stem from politics and the police themselves (Flom 2022; González 2019, 2020, 2023). Further, future work could better capture the institutional variation of police militarization.…”

The Consequences of Militarized Policing for Human Rights: Evidence from Mexico

“…A common reason that militaries are called on to conduct law enforcement tasks is because of civilian police's inability to address public safety concerns. In Latin America, not only have violent crime rates increased considerably in the last decades, but the police have been notorious for corruption, incompetence, and abuse (González, 2022). Because the police are often poorly trained, poorly funded, and even complicit with organized crime, they frequently engage in human rights violations (Basombrío, 1999).…”

Implementation of Bureaucratic Reform to Improve Public Services

“…This review covers 249 articles published in the Journal in the period 1998 to 2020 (Pangarso et al, 2022). The findings concentrate on the lack of detail about the processes and results of change and the gaps between the general theories used to study evolution (González, 2022). We propose an agenda for the study of bureaucratic reform of public organizations that focuses on the complex nature of building theoretical bridges and conducting more in-depth empirical and comparative studies of change processes (Akbar et al, 2021).…”