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"Magaloni, Beatriz"
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Institutionalized Police Brutality: Torture, the Militarization of Security, and the Reform of Inquisitorial Criminal Justice in Mexico
How can societies restrain their coercive institutions and transition to a more humane criminal justice system? We argue that two main factors explain why torture can persist as a generalized practice even in democratic societies: weak procedural protections and the militarization of policing, which introduces strategies, equipment, and mentality that treats criminal suspects as though they were enemies in wartime. Using a large survey of the Mexican prison population and leveraging the date and place of arrest, this paper provides causal evidence about how these two explanatory variables shape police brutality. Our paper offers a grim picture of the survival of authoritarian policing practices in democracies. It also provides novel evidence of the extent to which the abolition of inquisitorial criminal justice institutions—a remnant of colonial legacies and a common trend in the region—has worked to restrain police brutality.
Journal Article
The Game of Electoral Fraud and the Ousting of Authoritarian Rule
How can autocrats be restrained from rigging elections when they hold a huge military advantage over their opponents? This article suggests that even when opposition parties have no military capacity to win a revolt, opposition unity and a consequent threat of massive civil disobedience can compel autocrats to hold clean elections and leave office by triggering splits within the state apparatus and the defection of the armed forces. Opposition unity can be elite-driven, when parties unite prior to elections to endorse a common presidential candidate, or voter-driven, when elites stand divided at the polls and voters spontaneously rebel against fraud. Moreover, the article identifies some conditions under which autocrats will tie their hands willingly not to commit fraud by delegating power to an independent electoral commission. The article develops these ideas through a formal game and the discussion of various case studies.
Journal Article
Killing in the Slums: Social Order, Criminal Governance, and Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro
State interventions against organized criminal groups (OCGs) sometimes work to improve security, but often exacerbate violence. To understand why, this article offers a theory about criminal governance in five types of criminal regimes—Insurgent, Bandit, Symbiotic, Predatory, and Split. These differ according to whether criminal groups confront or collude with state actors, abuse or cooperate with the community, and hold a monopoly or contest territory with rival OCGs. Police interventions in these criminal regimes pose different challenges and are associated with markedly different local security outcomes. We provide evidence of this theory by using a multimethod research design combining quasi-experimental statistical analyses, automated text analysis, extensive qualitative research, and a large-
N
survey in the context of Rio de Janeiro’s “Pacifying Police Units” (UPPs), which sought to reclaim control of the favelas from criminal organizations.
Journal Article
The Beheading of Criminal Organizations and the Dynamics of Violence in Mexico
In 2006, the Mexican government launched an aggressive campaign to weaken drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs). The security policies differed significantly from those of previous administrations in the use of a leadership strategy (the targeting for arrest of the highest levels or core leadership of criminal networks). While these strategies can play an important role in disrupting the targeted criminal organization, they can also have unintended consequences, increasing inter-cartel and intra-cartel fighting and fragmenting criminal organizations. What impact do captures of senior drug cartel members have on the dynamics of drug-related violence? Does it matter if governments target drug kingpins versus lower-ranked lieutenants? We analyze whether the captures or killings of kingpins and lieutenants have increased drug-related violence and whether the violence spills over spatially. To estimate effects that are credibly causal, we use different empirical strategies that combine difference-in-differences and synthetic control group methods. We find evidence that captures or killings of drug cartel leaders have exacerbating effects not only on DTO-related violence but also on homicides that affect the general population. Captures or killings of lieutenants, for their part, only seem to exacerbate violence in \"strategic places\" or municipalities located in the transportation network. While most of the effects on DTO-related violence are found in the first six months after a leader's removal, effects on homicides affecting the rest of the population are more enduring, suggesting different mechanisms through which leadership neutralizations breed violence.
Journal Article
Warriors and Vigilantes as Police Officers: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Body Cameras in Rio de Janeiro
Research Question
Can requiring police to wear body-worn cameras (BWC) on duty restrain police misconduct in contexts such as a
favela
in Rio de Janeiro, where police use militaristic and highly aggressive tactics?
Data
We collected quantitative and qualitative data on a wide range of behaviors, including police wearing BWC, turning on the BWC for recording citizen contacts, use of force by and against police officers, stop and search, responding to citizen requests for police assistance, and police supervisors wearing BWC. A total of 857 different police officers were tracked during the 1-year study, with a mean of 470 officers each month participating in the test of BWC across 52,000 officer shifts.
Methods
BWC status was randomly assigned by shifts to all officers in the shift, within five different kinds of police units. Analyses focused on intent-to-treat effects, with high compliance of wearing BWC but less than half of measured encounters recorded. Regression analyses provided estimates of different effects for officers who had previously been injured or had injured civilians.
Findings
Camera assignment, regardless of whether police turned cameras on, reduced stop-and-searches and other forms of potentially aggressive interactions with civilians. Cameras also produced a strong de-policing effect: police wearing cameras were significantly less likely to engage in any activity, including responding to calls and dispatch and street requests for help. These changes in police behavior occurred even when in 50% of the registered interactions with civilians, officers disobeyed the protocol that required them to turn their cameras on. Yet when officers’ supervisors wore cameras, policing activities and camera usage increased. Police surveys, interviews, and focus groups strengthen the findings.
Conclusion
The potential of BWC to reduce police abuse finds limitations where an organizational culture that perpetuates a lack of compliance with internal protocols and violence persists.
Journal Article
Partisan Cleavages, State Retrenchment, and Free Trade: Latin America in the 1990s
This article accounts for the role that partisan divisions played in shaping variation in mass preferences for market-oriented policies in Latin America during the 1990s. Most of the existing studies on attitudes toward market reforms have focused on issues such as the timing of reforms, the presence of economic crises, and how economic performance shaped citizens' preferences. Fewer studies have investigated whether partisan cleavages translated into divergent preferences toward market reforms. Were there systematic differences between left- and right-wing voters in their preferences toward market reforms? Did left-wing voters oppose these policies and right-wing voters favor them? Which of these structural transformations--state retrenchment or trade liberalization--witnessed greater mass polarization along partisan lines? This article answers these questions with the use of a mass survey on public opinion about market reforms conducted by Mori International in eleven Latin American countries in 1998. /// Este trabajo estudia las divisiones partidistas entre el electorado con respecto a sus preferencias sobre las reformas de mercado que fueron implementadas en la década de los noventa. La mayoría de los estudios sobre opinión pública se han enfocado en cómo factores como crisis económicas, el momento de inicio de las reformas y el desempeño económico afectaron las preferencias de los ciudadanos. Pocos estudios han investigado la manera como los clivajes partidistas se tradujeron en diversas preferencias. ¿Existieron diferencias sistemáticas entre votantes de izquierda y derecha en sus preferencias sobre políticas de mercado? ¿Los votantes de izquierda rechazaron estas políticas y los de derecha las apoyaron? ¿Cuá de las transformaciones estructurales--liberalización del comercio o reducción del estado--crearon más división partidista entre el electorado? Este trabajo contesta estas preguntas mediante el análisis sistemático de una encuesta de opinión levantada por Mori Internacional en 1998.
Journal Article
Presidential Approval and Public Security in Mexico's War on Crime
To fight criminal organizations effectively, governments require support from significant segments of society. Citizen support provides important leverage for executives, allowing them to continue their policies. Yet winning citizens' hearts and minds is not easy. Public security is a deeply complex issue. Responsibility is shared among different levels of government; information is highly mediated by mass media and individual acquaintances; and security has a strong effect on peoples' emotions, since it threatens to affect their most valuable assets—life and property. How do citizens translate their assessments of public security into presidential approval? To answer this question, this study develops explicit theoretical insights into the conditions under which different dimensions of public security affect presidential approval. The arguments are tested using Mexico as a case study.
Journal Article
AIDING LATIN AMERICA'S POOR
Once nominally financed by contributions, most of these programs are now in fact funded more or less directly by taxes. Because \"the regressivity in social insurance schemes has not been helped by any significant progressivity in tax financing,\" these schemes foster a \"reverse Robin Hood effect\" in which the poor are made to pay for the benefit of the rich.3 Latin American social policy, in other words, has mostly worked backwards, making preexisting economic and social inequalities wider rather than narrower.
Journal Article
Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy (II): Aiding Latin America's Poor
Social policy in Latin America has traditionally failed to benefit the poor. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the main redistributive efforts in the region went into building welfare states. Social insurance schemes generally foster a \"reverse Robin Hood effect\" in which the poor are made to pay for the benefit of the rich. In addition, subsidies—another form of social policy commonly used in Latin America—have historically tended to go disproportionately to the urban middle classes. If the tremendous income disparities that characterize Latin American life are not mitigated, the stability of the region's democracies may be jeopardized.
Journal Article