Police reform as foreign policy.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 01 August 2005
• Author: Bayley, David H.
• Published date: 01 August 2005
• Author: Bayley, David H.

This article discusses the worldwide enterprise of assisting in the reform of police institutions in order to support democracy. It describes the current scope of activity, the changing context for this kind of work, and the key lessons, both substantive and tactical, that have been learned about engaging in such assistance. It concludes with two recommendations about the most powerful levers for engendering democratic change in foreign police forces.

**********

Police reform has been widely undertaken in recent years m many of the world's developed democracies, such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. What has not been recognised, however, is that the reform of the police has also become an objective of foreign policy. All the aforementioned democracies have bilateral programs of assistance for police in other countries, designed in general to accomplish two purposes--to enhance the capacity of local police to control crime and disorder, and to develop 'democratic policing'. The total amount spent on such assistance is impossible to estimate in any reliable way because police assistance is not a consolidated item in governmental budgets. It is done under various programmatic headings and often by more than one agency. With many qualifications, I estimate that the United States, which is the dominant bilateral provider, currently spends about US$750 million a year on programs that contribute to developing police forces abroad (Bayley, 2005).

Multilaterally the United Nations undertook 38 peacekeeping missions between 1990 and 2002, most of which involved the reform or reconstruction of local police (United Nations, 2002). In 2004, the United Nations deployed over 4000 civilian police (UNCIVPOL) in eight missions (Serafino, 2004). As many as 40 countries have participated in these missions. Furthermore, UNCIVPOL's mission has expanded from monitoring ('naming and shaming') to advising, training and reconstructing (Hanson, 2002). In a major departure from past practice, UNCIVPOL has been given executive authority for enforcing laws and has been armed for that purpose. This occurred first in Haiti (1994), then in Kosovo (1999) and later in East Timor (2001; Perito, 2003).

Finally, international programs of police development are carried out by several other multilateral institutions, including the European Union, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Inter-American Development Bank. For example, in 1999 the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) created a Strategic Police Matters Unit, now based in Vienna, under the direction of Richard Monk, a former Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police and UN Commissioner of Police in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Reform in the character of police has not been the objective of all of this activity. I estimate that as much as 90% of American bilateral assistance has gone for capacity-building rather than democratic reform. The balance between these two objectives varies among countries, and charting the differences among major donors would be an important contribution to understanding the foreign policy of police assistance. The United Nations has been more deliberately involved in police reform, in addition to capacity-building, than many countries. The reason for this is that it intervenes in order to assist political transformations or to reconstruct failed government institutions. In both cases, it must address the character as well as the competence of local policing. It does not have an international law-enforcement agency, as countries do, that places continuing cooperation with local police above insistence on reform.

Notwithstanding the attention given to capacity-building by the international community bilaterally and multilaterally, it would be fair to say that since roughly 1990 a window of opportunity opened for the development of democratic policing. There were several reasons for this, all related to changes in world politics: the emergence of democracy as the dominant political/economic paradigm; the recognition that economic development, especially reducing poverty, could be undercut by disorder, crime and instability; and the relaxation of ideologically based big-power rivalry, which allowed cooperative political reform to replace the search for military alliances in foreign policy.

This article will examine this new dimension to foreign policy, and in particular the goal of facilitating democratic reform. Specifically, the paper (1) defines democratic policing operationally; (2) presents evidence about success in developing it; (3) specifies shortcomings in international reform; (4) explores how a blueprint for reform would be constructed; and (5) makes two recommendations for doing democratic police reform better.

Democratic Police Reform

A considerable consensus has developed during the last decade about what democratic policing looks like. The first attempt at operationally defining democratic policing was taken by the international community in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1996, with the publication of The Commissioner's Guidance for Democratic Policing in the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (UNMIBH 1996). It laid out a plan for creating a police service that would live up to seven basic principles of democratic policing--operate in accordance with law, be regulated by a professional code of conduct, protect life by minimising the use of force, be accountable to the public, protect life and property through proactive crime prevention, safeguard human rights and dignity, and act in a nondiscriminatory manner. Democratic policing has since become synonymous with adherence to international principles of human rights as outlined in the International Human Rights Standards for Law Enforcement: A Pocket Book on Human Rights for the Police (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 1996) and the European Code of Police Ethics (Council of Europe, 2001).

Undoubtedly the most comprehensive and thoughtful plan for the reform of a police service in service to democracy was provided by the Independent Commission on Policing in Northern Ireland, the so-called Patten Commission (1999). The Commission...