Doctoral Dissertation Research: Factors Influencing Police Reform and Global Police Designs

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Studies of policing have tended to focus locally on the relationships between police and the communities they serve. But the recent proliferation of global police designs across a diverse range of communities suggests the need for researchers to adapt their methodological approach. This project, which trains a graduate student in methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, explores the different global, national, and local factors influencing police reform. It further asks, what new theoretical and methodological tools are necessary for studying policing - traditionally conceived as an arm of the state - as a transnational institution? Findings will be disseminated to organizations that manage and develop policy for improved policing. The research also fosters international scientific cooperation. Eilat Maoz, under the supervision of Dr. Stephan Palmié of the University of Chicago, will explore what global, national, and local forces influence observable patterns in police reform. Police designs are informed by police knowledge, expertise, and practice, and increasingly these designs are shared internationally. The researcher proposes to document their implementation, and examine how they are engaged within the communities that they are implemented. The research will take place through ethnographic fieldwork in the Jamaican Constabulary Force (JCF). The JCF was established when Jamaica was Britain's most thriving sugar colony, as a highly militarized colonial police force. Today, excessive violence and rampant corruption, still endemic in the JCF, are seen as a colonial inheritance that can be superseded through systematic reform. Paradoxically, however, the reform process launched in 2008 deepens and extends foreign involvement within the Force, and is primarily designed to address global security agendas crafted abroad. A parallel dynamic of continuity and change characterizes Jamaica's socioeconomic configurations. While the socially stratified structure of Jamaican society was molded by its colonial history, the local meanings of difference are continuously refigured by global migrations and transnational cultural currents. This research seeks to understand the interaction between these two processes as they conjoin in the realm of police reform. In the first phase of this ethnographic study, Investigators will study how reform plans are crafted, disseminated, and implemented by the Force. This phase will include observing the operations of three branches of the JCF, participation in police training courses, and documentation of attempts to improve the relationship between the police and local communities. Observations within the force will be complemented by in-depth interviews with local and foreign security experts, to further understand the context, content, and specific goals of the reform as it is currently crafted. In the second phase, investigators will collaborate with two Jamaican NGOs that seek to address social violence and criminality in novel ways, bringing together public and private stakeholders, and extending the links between communities in Jamaica and abroad. Data collected will be used to highlight emerging trends in policing, which bring together public and private, local and global, actors and forces. Finally, data will be used to theorize the changing relationship between the police and the state, developing new ways to understand policing.