Under what conditions is the coercive arm of the state in a democracy a source of security and not insecurity? How citizens experience policing significantly shapes their understandings of politics, including their perceptions of the state and of their place in the polity. This underscores the importance of better understanding when the police—the quintessential street-level embodiment of the state—foster citizen trust and state legitimacy or, alternatively, use their state-sanctioned coercive capacity to extort populations, protect criminals, or engage in extralegal violence. Put simply, when do police enforce the rule of law instead of violating it? This is the question at the center of Diego Esparza’s new book on the politics of policing in Latin America.

Policing and Politics in Latin America is a careful comparative study of the sources of variation in patterns of police misconduct in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. Even though organized crime has made Latin America among the world’s most dangerous regions, Esparza correctly urges readers not to lose sight of the crucial role that the region’s police play in fostering violence and insecurity and, more broadly, weakening institutions and fraying state–society relations. Esparza measures police misconduct through the proxy of levels of citizen trust in police derived from existing surveys and secondary sources. The analysis also draws on data collected during fieldwork that Esparza carried out, including interviews with a diverse range of actors from government, police, and civil society. The book harnesses these different forms of data to trace and explain patterns of police misconduct not only across Chile, Colombia, and Mexico but also within each country over multiple periods of time since the nineteenth century.

The core of Esparza’s argument focuses on two factors: centralization and professionalization. As in much of the developing world in the late twentieth century, Latin American governments decentralized the provision of many public goods and services while implementing economic liberalization and fiscal austerity measures. The technocratic logic that accompanied these reforms held that bringing government institutions and bureaucrats closer to society would reduce information asymmetries, making government more efficient while simultaneously better positioning society to hold incumbents and bureaucrats accountable via formal and informal institutional mechanisms. Esparza, by contrast, argues that decentralized rule makes the provision of critical public goods and services, like security, vulnerable to politicization because local political interests have more incentives to compete to capture rents.

Centralization of policing, according to this argument, is better at insulating police from these competing interests while placing the fiscal burden of paying for police on the shoulders of national or mid-level governments, and not on local governments that often lack the resources to adequately support police. The concern for shielding police from capture by external interests, in Esparza’s argument, extends to the focus on professionalization. Here Esparza argues that providing police with a dignified standard of living via adequate salaries and benefits, instituting high and strict standards for recruitment and promotion, and putting into place formal and informal oversight mechanisms combine to make police less susceptible to politicization and corruption. The task of professionalization, however, requires (1) political incentives to pursue this type of reform in a region of the world where local politicians strategically sustain limited professionalization precisely to keep control over police and (2) a level of fiscal resources beyond those available to most local-level governments. For these reasons, Esparza argues that instituting and maintaining professionalization can only occur under a centralized structure of policing controlled by a national or mid-level government. Finally, Esparza is careful to argue that centralized governance and professionalization will only constrain police misconduct when the political regime in place is a democracy. Authoritarianism or autocratic leaders in democratic regimes can politicize police and sanction misconduct under centralized rule, given the police’s dependence on the ruler for salaries and social benefits and the comparatively limited oversight mechanisms available in a nondemocratic or weak democratic regime.

This book makes several important contributions. Methodologically it is a fine example of the analytical power of comparative historical analysis—a point that Esparza does not explicitly discuss but one that is evident in the rich analysis of patterns of policing over time in each of the three countries in the study. Esparza generates invaluable empirical points of reference by carefully tracing historical policing trends in each of the three empirical chapters (chaps. 2–4). The theoretical framework is a provocative intervention in a policy-making literature that sometimes dismisses centralized governance without carefully considering the potential drawbacks of decentralized rule. More broadly, Esparza’s argument is an important contribution to the social science literatures on the politics of decentralization. In particular, the carefully theorized linkages and interactions between centralization and professionalization provide insights relevant for research on public goods and services areas beyond policing.

Although Esparza effectively uses the historical record to structure and advance comparative case studies, the analysis could have benefited from greater description and more engagement with the methods used to collect and analyze the data from field research. For example, Esparza notes that he conducted a survey of police in training in Colombia (pp. 89–90), but there are few details about the survey instrument or sampling strategy. A methodological appendix could also have provided valuable insight on the challenges of surveying police in Latin America, a population that is often difficult for researchers to access while studying sensitive issues like police misconduct.

More broadly, the book’s provocative argument generates several questions. First, although Esparza convincingly shows that decentralized policing generates space for the political capture of police, the analysis omits from consideration the potential role of local society in holding police accountable. One would expect that local levels of social capital, such as the density of civil society, could mitigate against local political interference and generate countervailing pressure on police and political incumbents to keep police misconduct in check. Second, the argument operates at multiple levels of analysis, from the subnational to the national. Although the empirical analysis effectively uses the historical record to foreground the texture and mechanics of political capture at the local level, more attention to the potential for political capture at higher levels of government would have been welcome. Likewise, the local-level capture of police for instrumental ends may not operate solely according to local-level political logics. It may instead respond to demands issued by politicians and party machines situated at higher levels of government and on whom local incumbents depend for resources and political advancement. Third, the study assumes that citizen trust in police is negatively correlated with police misconduct; however, citizens can also support police engaging in forms of misconduct, including extralegal violence, amidst the politicization of security or the high levels of crime and insecurity in much of Latin America and other developing world regions. It would have been interesting if Esparza had discussed whether and how his argument might apply in such contexts.

In brief, Policing and Politics in Latin America is an insightful book that should find a wide audience among scholars of crime, policing, security, state violence, and subnational politics.