The Judicial Response to Police Killings in Latin America PDF Download

Author: Daniel M. Brinks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113946650X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 11

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Book Description
This book documents the corrosive effect of social exclusion on democracy and the rule of law. It shows how marginalization prevents citizens from effectively engaging even the best legal systems, how politics creeps into prosecutorial and judicial decision making, and how institutional change is often nullified by enduring contextual factors. It also shows how some institutional arrangements can overcome these impediments. The argument is based on extensive field work and original data on the investigation and prosecution of more than 500 police homicides in five legal systems in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. It includes both qualitative analyses of individual violations and prosecutions and quantitative analyses of broad patterns within and across jurisdictions. The book offers a structured comparison of police, prosecutorial, and judicial institutions in each location, and shows that analyses of any one of these organizations in isolation misses many of the essential dynamics that underlie an effective system of justice.

Author: Daniel M. Brinks
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781107180673
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This book examines the effect of social inequality, political influence, and institutional design on the effectiveness of legal systems in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. It demonstrates the inequality existent in these systems, as well as the occasional successes. Its focus is on the criminal prosecution of violent police officers, but it draws implications for democracy, the rule of law, court functioning, and police violence. The book describes judicial, prosecutorial, and police structures and operation, as well as the nature of and response to lethal police violence in each location.

Author: Niels Uildriks
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 073913230X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Profound distrust commonly characterizes not only the relationship between citizens and state institutions, but also social, as well as inter- and intra-state relations. This impacts the effectiveness and quality of the service provided by state institutions. The degree to which police and judicial reforms are able to generate trust on these fronts is therefore an important yardstick to judge their relevance under varying circumstances of 'post-authoritarian rule', but this question is largely ignored inthe current literature on policing and reform. From this perspective, Policing Insecurity: Police Reform, Security, and Human Rights in Latin America suggests an agenda of future reforms for the region, drawing and building upon policing reform experiences throughout the Latin America, looking at issues such as impunity, professionalization, community policing, as well as accountability and training of the police. By explicitly linking issues of state-social trust, democratic transition, human rights, and security, these case studies provide a basis for the wider discussion in the book about prerequisites for the success or failure of police reforms, thus adding to our empirical and theoretical knowledge in these areas and introducing an importantdimension to the literature on police reform, security, and human rights.

Author: H. Hugo Frühling
Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press
ISBN: 9780801873843
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Offers timely discussion by attorneys, government officials, policy analysts, and academics from the United States and Latin America of the responses of the state, civil society, and the international community to threats of violence and crime.

Author: Luz E. Huertas
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816533040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
"The book is a collection of essays looking at histories of crime and justice in Latin America, with a focus on social history and the interactions between state institutions, the press, and social groups. It argues that crime in Latin America is best understood from the "bottom up" -- not just as the exercise of power from the state. The book seeks to document and illustrate the "every day" experiences of crime in particular settings, emphasizing under-researched historical actors such as criminals, victims, and police officers"--Provided by publisher.

Author: Mark Ungar
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421429403
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
2011 Winner of the Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize of the International Political Science Association Latin America’s crime rates are astonishing by any standard—the region’s homicide rate is the world’s highest. This crisis continually traps governments between the need for comprehensive reform and the public demand for immediate action, usually meaning iron-fisted police tactics harking back to the repressive pre-1980s dictatorships. In Policing Democracy, Mark Ungar situates Latin America at a crossroads between its longstanding form of reactive policing and a problem-oriented approach based on prevention and citizen participation. Drawing on extensive case studies from Argentina, Bolivia, and Honduras, he reviews the full spectrum of areas needing reform: criminal law, policing, investigation, trial practices, and incarceration. Finally, Policing Democracy probes democratic politics, power relations, and regional disparities of security and reform to establish a framework for understanding the crisis and moving beyond it.

Author: Gema Santamaría
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806158816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
According to media reports, Latin America is one of the most violent regions in the world—a distinction it held throughout the twentieth century. The authors of Violence and Crime in Latin America contend that perceptions and representations of violence and crime directly impact such behaviors, creating profound consequences for the political and social fabric of Latin American nations. Written by distinguished scholars of Latin American history, sociology, anthropology, and political science, the essays in this volume range from Mexico and Argentina to Colombia and Brazil in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, addressing such issues as extralegal violence in Mexico, the myth of indigenous criminality in Guatemala, and governments’ selective blindness to violent crime in Brazil and Jamaica. The authors in this collection examine not only the social construction and political visibility of violence and crime in Latin America, but the justifications for them as well. Analytically and historically, these essays show how Latin American citizens have sanctioned criminal and violent practices and incorporated them into social relations, everyday practices, and institutional settings. At the same time, the authors explore the power struggles that inform distinctions between illegitimate versus legitimate violence. Violence and Crime in Latin America makes a substantive contribution to understanding a key problem facing Latin America today. In its historical depth and ethnographic reach, this original and thought-provoking volume enhances our understanding of crime and violence throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Author: Enrique Desmond Arias
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392038
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Despite recent political movements to establish democratic rule in Latin American countries, much of the region still suffers from pervasive violence. From vigilantism, to human rights violations, to police corruption, violence persists. It is perpetrated by state-sanctioned armies, guerillas, gangs, drug traffickers, and local community groups seeking self-protection. The everyday presence of violence contrasts starkly with governmental efforts to extend civil, political, and legal rights to all citizens, and it is invoked as evidence of the failure of Latin American countries to achieve true democracy. The contributors to this collection take the more nuanced view that violence is not a social aberration or the result of institutional failure; instead, it is intimately linked to the institutions and policies of economic liberalization and democratization. The contributors—anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians—explore how individuals and institutions in Latin American democracies, from the rural regions of Colombia and the Dominican Republic to the urban centers of Brazil and Mexico, use violence to impose and contest notions of order, rights, citizenship, and justice. They describe the lived realities of citizens and reveal the historical foundations of the violence that Latin America suffers today. One contributor examines the tightly woven relationship between violent individuals and state officials in Colombia, while another contextualizes violence in Rio de Janeiro within the transnational political economy of drug trafficking. By advancing the discussion of democratic Latin American regimes beyond the usual binary of success and failure, this collection suggests more sophisticated ways of understanding the challenges posed by violence, and of developing new frameworks for guaranteeing human rights in Latin America. Contributors: Enrique Desmond Arias, Javier Auyero, Lilian Bobea, Diane E. Davis, Robert Gay, Daniel M. Goldstein, Mary Roldán, Todd Landman, Ruth Stanley, María Clemencia Ramírez

Author: Daniel M. Brinks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108803172
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Analysts and policymakers often decry the failure of institutions to accomplish their stated purpose. Bringing together leading scholars of Latin American politics, this volume helps us understand why. The volume offers a conceptual and theoretical framework for studying weak institutions. It introduces different dimensions of institutional weakness and explores the origins and consequences of that weakness. Drawing on recent research on constitutional and electoral reform, executive-legislative relations, property rights, environmental and labor regulation, indigenous rights, squatters and street vendors, and anti-domestic violence laws in Latin America, the volume's chapters show us that politicians often design institutions that they cannot or do not want to enforce or comply with. Challenging existing theories of institutional design, the volume helps us understand the logic that drives the creation of weak institutions, as well as the conditions under which they may be transformed into institutions that matter.

Author: Yanilda María González
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108900380
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
In countries around the world, from the United States to the Philippines to Chile, police forces are at the center of social unrest and debates about democracy and rule of law. This book examines the persistence of authoritarian policing in Latin America to explain why police violence and malfeasance remain pervasive decades after democratization. It also examines the conditions under which reform can occur. Drawing on rich comparative analysis and evidence from Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, the book opens up the 'black box' of police bureaucracies to show how police forces exert power and cultivate relationships with politicians, as well as how social inequality impedes change. González shows that authoritarian policing persists not in spite of democracy but in part because of democratic processes and public demand. When societal preferences over the distribution of security and coercion are fragmented along existing social cleavages, politicians possess few incentives to enact reform.