In recent years, many Latin American cities have had the dubious honor of being labeled the “murder capital of the world.” Cities such as Caracas in Venezuela, Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, San Pedro Sula in Honduras, and others have taken turns being branded the most violent city in the world, above conflict-ridden cities in the Middle East or Africa. However, it is a paradox that these cities, with extremely high rates of homicide and criminal violence, have also undergone ambitious and sweeping institutional reforms in their police and criminal justice apparatuses during the last two decades. In many cases, these reforms have been implemented as part of a democratic overhaul. The stated aim of Mark Ungar's book is to explain how Latin American countries have carried out citizen security reforms, precisely during a period characterized by a spectacular rise in crime, the expansion of criminal organizations, and political efforts to secure democratic rule. For an informed reader, the most relevant question beyond the book's objective might be why these reforms, oriented to revamp law enforcement institutions in Latin America, have largely failed to bring more security to citizens across the region in a period when most countries can be considered under democratic governance.

Policing Democracy is a project to develop a comparative analytical framework to explain why reforms of criminal justice institutions face so many hurdles and setbacks, and how they can be overcome in the context of the democratic rule of law. In developing such a framework, Ungar identifies five issues that reforms have addressed in the region: structural organization, professional support for the police, control mechanisms, legal changes, and community policing. For each of these topics, he examines three areas. First is institutional relations: how law enforcement institutions establish relations that advance or curtail the reforms; second, daily policing: how criminal justice officials experience their jobs in the context of the reforms; and finally, what the author calls the “spectrum of reform”: a comprehensive analysis of the actors, conditions, and dynamics that shape the process of reform.

At the core of the book lies the argument—or rather, a series of arguments—that reforms in law enforcement institutions should be directed toward problem-oriented policing, away from the traditional practice-oriented approach to policing, which constituted the backbone of law enforcement procedures during authoritarian eras. Legacies of such traditional approaches have blended with posttransition moral panic over violence to bring on an era of mano dura policies, with catastrophic results for many Latin American countries. Conversely, Ungar views problem-oriented policing not only as a key to solving the crisis of security but also as instrumental to building democratic legitimacy and governance in the region.

Most of the analytical framework is laid out in Chapters 2 and 3, but the latter provides an interesting examination of the impact of insecurity on governance, especially in terms of the relationships between police institutions and society. In doing this, Ungar joins an increasing chorus of scholars who, in the burst of violent crime in Latin America, see insecurity as a major threat to democracy. However, he goes beyond most of the prevalent scholarship when, instead of focusing exclusively on crime and violence rates, he ponders the effects of performance and policies advanced by police institutions to tackle the crisis of security. For Ungar, since “democracy requires a rule of law that contemporary states are not strong enough to sustain,” reforming police institutions constitutes a crucial enterprise to safeguard democratic rule under the assault of violent crime (p. 18).

Chapters 4 through 7 present case-study analyses of three countries (Honduras, Bolivia, and Argentina) in which police reforms have been implemented with varied results, although none can be considered an entirely successful story, and the author himself is reluctant to single out any country as an overall success. Rather, and this is one of the assets of the book, he delves into the structure of police institutions, their dynamics on the ground, obstacles to reforming them, and thoughtful assessments of ways to deal with such obstacles. A great deal of the richness and breadth of the book comes from this thorough approach as it illustrates the complexities and limitations of well-intended but always politically fragile processes of reform. This approach separates Policing Democracy from other previous volumes about citizen security reform in Latin America. It also allows the author to present a comparative perspective within some of the countries studied, particularly Argentina, where its decentralized institutions rendered mixed results in a national context.

It is the effort to build a road map to overcome obstacles to police reform that makes Ungar's research especially valuable, however. He provides a set of strategic approaches that stakeholders can utilize to tackle the pitfalls described throughout the text. They include the identification of points of tension during the reforms, the consideration of the discretionary power of police officials, the improvement of information-based evaluation systems, the incorporation of structures for citizen engagement in reform processes, and the attention to internal management of security bodies. With these prescriptions, the book appeals to practitioners, policymakers, and administrators of criminal justice reforms, not only in Latin America but also in other developing areas of the world.

While the book is a significant contribution to the debate over the importance of citizen security institutions in democratizing countries, it is hard to share Ungar's confidence on local and decentralized approaches to revamping citizen security institutions without taking into account the importance of power relations within the state. Although the author recognizes that decentralization of citizen security has its limitations and tries to address them by proposing what he calls “Structured Citizen Engagement” (p. 313), he builds his strategy for reform around local management of security and citizen participation. This bottom-up approach sounds sensible, but, as the book largely documents, it also has unexpectedly brought important support for counterreform initiatives. Ungar addresses these setbacks by proposing a number of measures that are more administrative than political, more bureaucratic than encompassing. Here lies a critical shortcoming of the book. His commitment to unscrambling all the elements of citizen security reforms pushes him away from looking at the big picture, namely, the relations between elites and security operatives acting on behalf of the state. In other words, the book falls short of considering the political conditions that determine power relations and that create the institutions and mechanisms of citizen security.

Because the author resists comparisons between successful and failed stories of reform, we are unable to distinguish the key political variables leading to effective and democratic citizen security institutions. Argentina, Bolivia, and Honduras have different levels of crime, but they were not selected on the basis of the varying achievements of their security reforms; rather, they were selected for their diverse socioeconomic conditions. Hence, other than identifying good practices at the local level, the book does not offer an analysis of the ways in which comprehensive reforms advance citizen security at the national level. Democratic rule in Latin America has certainly changed relations between the public and elected officials, but politicians, elites, and security operatives have also learned how to use these new interactions to perpetuate their power and systems of authoritarian domination, frequently against the goal of reforms. Ungar neglects that discussion in favor of a more recipe-like approach that frequently gets extra space in the book by describing the micromanagement of reforms.

In the end, in Policing Democracy, one can find all the specific and numerous issues that thwart ambitious citizen security reforms—and that is a significant contribution in itself—but we are still lacking the ultimate answer as to why most reforms have failed to bring security to Latin Americans.