Who’s in? Restricting the community to enhance COP in the Dominican Republic

Abstract

ABSTRACT Twenty years into the spread of community-oriented policing (COP) in Latin America, initial assumptions that it would lead to successful transformation of policing in the region are being confounded by continuing insecurity and police violence. Given the disconnect between COP objectives and its implementations, there is a need to reassess the assumption that COP is necessarily a democratic form of policing. This article examines the development of COP in the Dominican Republic with a focus on citizenship policies. It underlines that COP projects have vastly different impacts on individual rights. The inherent community membership boundaries citizenship policies set can condition which groups are to benefit from COP initiatives and which ones are deemed vectors of insecurity. This study is primarily based on a qualitative study including interviews, document analysis, and observation. It finds that Dominican Republic Police (DNP) reforms have improved service provision directed at select groups, which enjoy the benefits of more democratic policing. However, these reforms have also led to an increase in police persecution of Haitian minorities. I demonstrate this population is a target for harder policing because of new citizenship legislation that categorised Haitian descent minorities as outsiders to the community. This adds a distinctively undemocratic flavour to efforts to transform public safety provision in the country.