Community Policing: A strategic leap for the PNC

The National Civil Police, born of the 1992 Peace Accords, has operated with authoritarian leadership and militarized training for all these years. But a path has been set to change things and develop the community policing model the FMLN government has prioritized, to the benefit of the communities, the country as a whole and the police officers themselves.

Elaine Freedman

The concept of “community policing” is being presented as a logical police response to the problems of violence and crime affecting many communities throughout the world.

But it remains one of the most controversial policing methods and apparently one of the hardest to implement and maintain. In El Salvador the model is just taking its first steps.

President Salvador Sánchez Cerén launched the initiative to develop community policing as an area of the operational actions of the National Civil Police (PCN) as recently as August 11. In the first phase, he explained, some “26 sub-precints implemented community policing…. Now we’ll do it in 48 sectors of the sub-precints of the Historical Center of San Salvador.” To this end, 140 community officers were deployed.

Why initially focus on San Salvador? According to the presidential communiqué, it’s because it is “one of the municipalities with the highest rates of violence but it will be progressively implemented in the whole national territory.”

Sánchez Cerén’s decision was neither innovative nor unprecedented. Much less was the President announcing a version of the “Soviet police,” as Jorge Daboub, president of the National Association of Private Enterprise, insinuated, or an instrument for “authoritarianism, radicalization, repression of political adversaries and total control of the citizenry,” as Carlos Ponce, columnist for the newspaper El Diario de Hoy, put it.

The police force is the citizenry

The roots of community policing lie in the police reform promoted by Sir Robert Peel when he founded the London Metropolitan Police in 1829. The son of English oligarch parents and founder of the English Conservative Party, Peel established a new concept of security by promoting a police reform that sought to reduce crime, the rates of which had shot up due to the increased unemployment and poverty generated by the Industrial Revolution.

Number seven of the famous nine principles underpinning the “modern” era of policing states that “the police are the public and the public are the police.” This now forms the basis of all community policing throughout the world, from Japan to Brazil. According to this concept, the police are merely members of the public who are paid to give their full-time attention to duties incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and peaceful coexistence.

A brief history of
El Salvador’s police

There have always been different kinds of police forces in El Salvador, ever since the time of the Spanish conquest.

The starting point for the modern police was the founding in 1867 of the Civil Guard, which in 1883 became the National Reformed Police, from which the Rural Police then emerged years later. The Ministry of Government says its explicit task was to maintain public order, security standards and good customs. But its implicit task was to keep watch and ensure that nothing interrupted the new economic model based on the large coffee-growing estates.

These new police forces were responsible for implementing the laws dissolving common and communal lands (1881-1882) so they could be concentrated in the hands of the nascent Salvadoran bourgeoisie, as wekk as auxiliary legislation such as the Vagrancy Law, which guaranteed labor for the estates belonging to those same large coffee-growing families.

Following the creation of the Rural Police, these armed bodies diversified further with the creation of the National Guard, Hacienda Police and National Police, which together with the Army formed the backbone of the country’s repressive forces during the 20th century.

The PNC: Born of the peace

The National Civil Police (PNC), was born in 1992 as a result of the Peace Accords. It was to have a new identity because it would be civil in nature, with the Accords stipulating it would be “A new body with new organization, new cadres, new training mechanisms and a new doctrine.” The idea was that these characteristics would distinguish it from the previous security corps, characterized above all by their human rights violations.

The PNC was initially based on a pact that established quotas of participation: 20% former armed force combatants, 20% former FMLN combatants and 60% civilian candidates. The armed force quota inadvertently allowed the incorporation into the PNC’s ranks of members of the Army’s by-then dissolved Immediate Reaction Battalions, responsible for the worst war crimes during the armed conflict.

As Commissioner Rolando Elías Julián Belloso, head of the PNC’s Community Relations Secretariat, recalls, “When we founded the PNC we started from scratch. The people who came from the Army and the security corps were not police officers, but rather members of the military who had been trained to fight against the guerrillas. Those of us who came from the guerrilla forces had no police experience either, and those who come from the civilian population were even worse. We didn’t have our own reference points.”

The PNC evolves toward
being a repressive police

In his 1993 essay “¿ Cuál democracia?” (What Democracy?), Brazilian political scientist Francisco Weffort, at the time a researcher for the Latin American Social Sciences Institute (FLACSO), explained what lay behind the problems in the nascent PNC: “During transition periods old cultural practices tend to coincide within the institutions with the new ones being stimulated, creating in the process an unstable hybrid that erodes efforts aimed at its civil construction... Even with increasing degrees of professionalism, the police began to be a modified version of a body that adopted old and new authoritarian forms, and that phenomenon lost it prestige among the population it had a duty to serve.”

In 2006, David Morales, then a human rights analyst and defender and now the country’s Human Rights Ombudsperson, stated that “the civil and democratic nature of the PNC was undermined from the very beginning when the posts of leadership and responsibility were grabbed up by personnel from the former security corps and the army, who made it operate like a militarized social control apparatus of an ‘interventionist’ stripe, segregated from the community and with profound scorn for the role played by the democratic control mechanisms.”

That same year, the Office of Human Rights Ombudsperson, then under Beatriz Carrillo, concluded that what was consolidated in the Police was “a systematic anti-human rights practice, bad treatment, confinement of detainees in inhuman conditions, arbitrary detention, illicit raids, intimidation, abuse through discrimination against specific groups and even cases of torture.”

Police training came to be confused with military training. The PNC’s Criminal Investigation Division was made up almost exclusively of old members of the defunct National Police’s criminal investigation unit, described by the Truth Commission as “an instrument of impunity and political manipulation.”

A purging process “cleared out” 1,500 police officers in 2000. However, it didn’t clean out criminal elements embedded in the PNC as much as it “settled scores” based on personal or professional rivalries. Jeannette Aguilar of the Human Rights Institute of El Salvador’s Central American University (UCA) described it as a political cleansing mechanism.

Hard-hand and
super hard-hand policies

In the past two decades, the different Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) governments’ security policies were based on repression. The maximum expressions of such policies were the Hard-Hand and Super Hard-Hand campaigns of the governments of Francisco Flores and Elías Antonio Saca, respectively. In 2003, the last year of his administration, President Flores declared “War on the Maras” (the name for northern Central America’s particularly tough youth gangs), launching two complementary initiatives (the Anti-Mara Law and the Hard-Hand Plan) based on the assumption that the maras were El Salvador’s main public security threat.

The Hard-Hand Plan was a strategy to fight the gangs by focusing police and military actions on populations with a gang presence to detect and make sweeping arrests of their members. The Anti-Mara Law criminalized mere membership in a youth gang and certain expressions of gang culture, such as tattoos or ways of dressing. It was a temporary law declared unconstitutional only a month before its expiry date. A year after the Hard-Hand Plan started to be implemented, the PNC reported having captured 19,275 people, 95% of whom went free due to lack of evidence or even lack of a reason for having captured them.

In August 2004, two months after succeeding Flores, Elías Antonio Saca launched his Super Hard-Hand Plan, which he announced with relish: “The party’s over for them! The Super Hard-Hand Plan guarantees that the criminals are really going to stay in jail now!” His plan was actually a continuation of the Hard-Hand Plan with complements of timid prevention and rehabilitation actions.

During the implementation of these two plans, prison overcrowding shot up, causing more problems in the penitentiaries. According to data from the Penitentiaries General Directorate, the prison population increased 137% between 2000 and 2007. But so did the homicide rate. UCA analyst Melisa Salgado says homicides had risen 22.8% after a year of the Hard-Hand Plan’s implementation, with the rate standing at 51.1 per 100,000 inhabitants. During implementation of its successor, the rate rose another 70.4%.

The situation was similar in Honduras and Guatemala, where repressive plans respectively implemented under the names “Broom Plan” and “Blue Liberty” led Heraldo Muñoz, the United Nations Development Programme’s director for Latin America and the Caribbean, to state at the start of 2014 that “we believe the hard hand has failed in the region. It is tempting because people want results and governments feel pressured to act, but it has had negative repercussions in Latin America and a negative impact on democratic coexistence and respect for human rights.”

Community voices
in the midst of repression

The community rhetoric was never lacking during those years. In fact, it was difficult to avoid as the spirit of the Peace Accords and the PNC Organizational Law that grew out of them stressed that the PNC would be “civil” and “not isolated from society.”

The year 1994 saw the creation of the first Community Relations Department within the PNC’s organic structure. Although its mission was to develop policies to get closer to the community, it remained a centralized structure on the periphery of police work during its short life. It lasted only a little over six months and its only legacy was the demonstration that working with the community was not a priority of the new police.

A year later, then-Public Security Minister Hugo Barrera generated a line of work involving Neighborhood Boards. They started in the department of Ahuachapán, against the wishes of the FMLN and human rights organizations, which suspected that this initiative was really about forming a network of informants in a rerun of the Nationalist Democratic Organization (ORDEN). ORDEN had been a pernicious paramilitary organization created in the 1960s by the head of the now-defunct National Guard and was linked to some of the most serious human rights violations of the time.

Community Relations Secretary Belloso recalls that this initiative was clearly politically motivated: “Hugo Barrera wanted to launch himself as a presidential candidate and was seeking to build up backing through the Neighborhood Boards.”

Community matters
were not a priority

Under US auspices, Community Police Intervention Patrols (PIPCOMs) were formed in the PCN at the start of Francisco Flores’ term as President. They reached their highest point in 1999-2004 under the command of then-PNC Director Mauricio Sandoval, who described them this way: “The PIPCOM officers have four slogans: arrest everyone they catch in the act of breaking the law, strengthen contact with the citizens, help resolve problems affecting the community, and improve the residents’ quality of life, reducing crime rates.”

The PIPCOMs were gradually implemented throughout the country, but with time it became evident that only the first slogan—arresting everyone caught in the act—was actually done; the other three ended up buried by reality. In 2004, the UCA Human Rights Institute’s Jeannette Aguilar summed the initiative up in this way: “Although the PIPCOMs were created with the idea of police being close to the community, the attempts to build those links and introduce changes into the human and material resource administration remained at the discretion of the executors and there was no institutionality to back up implementation. This allows us to conclude that despite the benefits a community-focused work plan might have, successful implementation was never achieved in El Salvador and it was reduced to being a repressive and authoritarian police model.”

Separate from those efforts, the Community Relations Unit created in 1999 and the Community Relations Secretariat were consolidated as a more important structure in 2001, although functioning more as a public relations area than as a community relations one. The community aspect was not yet a priority and there was no model to guide community policing.

The exhaustion of
the repressive models

The community model gathered more momentum as the repressive model proved to be increasingly ineffective, both in Central America as a whole and in El Salvador in particular.

The PNC’s Strategic Institutional Plan for 2009-2014 defined community policing as an “issue that cuts across all institutional activities,” but as tends to happen with crosscutting issues, being in everything amounts to being in almost nothing. It was applied by anyone who wanted to and not applied by anyone who didn’t.

“We started training people with a community approach in 2012,” explained Commissioner Belloso, “but didn’t make the jump to working in the streets; that remained theoretical. By pushing and pushing, a few precincts began to take up the model, some more and some less. Progress depended on the precint chief’s interest and their geographic coverage was so small that they had no determining impact on reality, despite the fact that the places where it was developed achieved good results with respect to citizens’ participation, trust in the police and citizens’ security.”

Delgado City:
An exemplary experience

One of those successful experiences has been implemented since 2009 in the Delgado City Police Precinct in
the northern zone of San Salvador’s Metropolitan Area.

The head of that precinct, Deputy Commissioner Hugo Salinas, recalls that “we started to develop community policing experiences in 2010. We did it because our efforts to fight crime weren’t working. The repressive component was being distorted to the point of generating complicated situations involving human rights violations and resentment. I noticed that the PNC Plan already included a community line and there were various theoretical documents that didn’t go any further than that. I opted to try it out, not because it seemed important within our institution, which actually gave it little importance, but rather simply because I could see that the situation wasn’t improving. We started to work on the community organization and prevention component based on the experiences certain colleagues had acquired in other places.

“Our first action was to assess the willingness of the colleagues in the precinct and their work situation. We observed that situations were happening under certain precinct leaders that made the personnel too stressed out to focus their efforts on something less aggressive and avoid leaders’ mistreatment of their subordinates. Based on that, we corrected certain things. We drew up guidelines for correcting subordinates without raising one’s voice or humiliating them. We also identified a series of incentives that could be used to reward an officer’s work, which included expressing congratulations in writing or with diplomas the officer could use for promotion, as well as free-time permits. And we started to implement collective activities such as unit-level get-togethers, celebrations and parties.”

“They enjoy their work more”

Deputy Commissioner Salinas also explains that “we posted the officers territorially so they’d spend a longer time in a given area. We advised them not just to go out on patrol and come back, but also to go talk to people, get to know them and start up a relationship. Previously, their task was just to have a territorial presence. We started to build relations with the Catholic Church, the community boards known as ADESCOs and the mayor’s office, including its promoters and officials. In some communities that even led to implementing tree-planting, handicraft, painting and family barnyard fowl projects.

“The police’s role was to manage material or financial resources in some cases and execute them in others. A community center was recently inaugurated in the area that the police had helped build with the community. Another colleague who knows how to paint gives two groups of children painting lessons. It all depends on the officer’s initiative and creativity. We encourage them to do it, but it depends on each one. When other officers see it, it also encourages them to take up the model because they do better work that way and also enjoy it more.”

Trust is a basic factor

“We’ve learned that it isn’t easy working in a community where there are deep-rooted youth gangs, but it isn’t impossible either. A community with a very strong gang presence may have 5% of the community related to those structures, but the rest aren’t. The first and most difficult task is to break through the individualism, because the gangs exploit the community’s lack of solidarity to isolate their victims. We work to build closer relations of mutual help among the population so they support each other when there’s a threat or an emergency.

“It’s also essential to establish a mechanism for direct communication between the police and the community. In places where the community has chipped in to give the patrol officer a cellphone and all families have the number, the response to emergencies has been reduced by at least five minutes, no matter how far away the patrol may be at the time of the call. This helps make the police actions more effective. Obviously not all communities use this resource and others use it very little. It depends on the officer and his relationship with the community whether the people trust him and also whether they know he’ll respond and sort things out if they call him. The trust factor is basic.”

The police as an example to follow

“We think it’s better for our children to see the police officer as an example to follow, rather than seeing youth gang members as an example to follow,” says Rigoberto Artiga, a resident of the Santa Gema community. “There were one or two homicides a week in our community five years ago, but over four years have passed now without any.” All of this reinforces the fact that the community model is only created by both the officer serving the community and its residents.

The community side of things
is no longer optional

Commissioner Belloso is celebrating a new reality: “Starting June 1, we’re creating a new police model in line with the Peace Accords through government policy. It wasn’t even institutional policy before. This is a radical change because it defines the community model as the fundamental basis of police work and is more in line with the Peace Accords, the laws of the republic and police experience.”

“With the change of government,” adds Hugo Salinas, “all of the PNC leaders are starting to talk the same language because developing community policing is no longer optional; it’s an order from the presidency. Starting this year, 2014, we’ve been told we have to survey the population once a year to evaluate aspects such as trust in the assigned officers. The results will be one element considered in the evaluation of the officer’s performance, in addition to the population’s perception of security and counting the number of arrests made. So the local police officers will start taking the model more seriously.”

The challenge of building trust

Anything new is loaded with difficulties and challenges and the community policing model will be no exception. The biggest challenge for the police officers and the institution as a whole is to build trust.

In 1997, an editorial of Proceso, the UCA’s information bulletin, stated that “there is such an accumulation of police offenses that it cannot be underestimated in advance as an issue of structural vices…. There appear to be well-coordinated interest groups whose practices are very like those of the old security bodies. Their attitude toward the population generates distrust and they are also not alien to crime in its most diverse manifestations—extortion, murder, robbery, kidnapping and rape. The assumption that these groups operate with the greatest impunity, even outside the reach of the PNC’s internal control bodies, is well-founded. Likewise, the limited willingness the security authorities displayed to investigate them and break them up is more than evident.”

Recovering trust against such a backdrop will be no easy task. But if specific steps aren’t taken at some point, it will be impossible to effectively reduce violence and crime.

The weightiest reason people today don’t report a crime and criminals is fear of the police. They believe the information they give the officers will be turned over to the criminals. Another important reason is that they believe “it’s just not worth it because nothing will be resolved.”

The dark figure of unrecorded crimes

What is known as the “dark figure,” i.e. the number of crimes unrecorded in the statistics because they were never reported, is somewhere between 65% and 70% of the total crimes actually committed. It is higher for extortion, disappearances, kidnappings and robbery, and lower for homicides or vehicle theft involving insurance claims. It’s obviously impossible to propose real solutions based on only a third of the information corresponding to the real situation.

Reducing that dark figure would also involve building trust among the population: confidence fist that the police officer is not himself a criminal and second that he’ll actually do something to solve the problem. “The only way to overcome that disparaging is with work,” says Belloso. “A police officer who stigmatizes the citizenry and repeats over and over that everything is a problem of youth gangs isn’t going to win over the people’s trust.”

He also suggests that the only force that can watch over and control the police is the population: “We have to count on citizens’ control. The institution doesn’t have the capacity to control all of its elements, scattered the length and breadth of the country. Only the citizens have that control. They know what they are and aren’t doing and must act in accord with what they know. We’re still a long way from this, but things are only going to begin to change when the community starts making demands, when it says ‘Remove this police officer who’s beating up youths’ or ‘Get rid of him because he’s corrupt.’ People now keep quiet out of fear. And the police officers don’t interact with the community because their militarist, authoritarian thinking makes them believe they don’t owe the people anything and that people ought to be scared of them. But a police officer who performs well shouldn’t be afraid of the people. The people don’t take power away from the police. On the contrary, the community’s backing empowers them.”

Learning to talk to people

To achieve this change, the police have to learn how to communicate with people, call them by their names, be concerned about their problems and happy about their achievements.

The work of a community police officer is virtually that of a promoter who organizes the community to resolve its problems. This is a great challenge because not all police officers are willing to link up with the community to the point of becoming part of it. Even in Delgado City, where the community policing experience has been running for almost five years and has covered significant ground, 50% of the officers have yet to commit themselves to the new model.

The police force is an expression of society, and that including its virtues, defects and problems. While the introduction of community work-related issues into the National Public Security Academy’s curriculum will help change attitudes and capacities within the Police, Deputy Commissioner Salinas believes the most important factor will be the example given.

Changing attitudes
starts with leadership

The PNC is permeated with the old authoritarian, militarized leadership style. A different kind of leader is needed to develop a community policing model, one who knows how to listen and not only give orders. And this has to be reflected at both the institution’s leadership level and the community level.

A linked, coordinated police force

It is well known that criminal activity has multiple causes, one of which is people’s quality of life. Reducing crime requires improving the quality of life in the communities, and that depends on the many state institutions whose duty is to invest in projects that benefit people. Schools and recreation centers need to be repaired and people need to be helped with production.

To change things, there needs to be local-level coordination and the community policing must always seek linkage with the mayor’s office and with the other state institutions, as well as the community organizations. Belloso gives the following example: “The mayor’s office promises to install better illumination in dark areas and to collect the garbage, the health unit commits itself to providing a better supply of vaccines, the school promises to improve its installations and the police start participating in community actions and providing a timely response to activities or suspicious people the community identifies. Then the community will evaluate each of them based on fulfilment of their promises. It’s simple, really; no need to complicate things for ourselves.”

Working conditions also play a part

Police demotivation is one of community policing’s worst enemies and it has to do with working conditions. Job instability is a problem of primary importance that needs to be resolved if this type of policing is to be consolidated.

One requisite is to build trust with the community, because if the officers don’t stick with the people they’ll never be able to get their trust. Also, as Belloso explains, “Transfers got used as a mechanism for punishment and political domination in the Police. And that’s not right because it produces anxiety in the officers’ work and daily life. If a police officer is a criminal, is a thief or corrupt, he has to be put in prison, not transferred.”

Another labor obstacle to developing community policing is quartering. Although it’s said that police officers aren’t quartered, the “police availability regime” amounts to exactly that. Police officers work 14-hour days for four to six days and live in a dirty rented house with hygiene problems. Then they go home for a couple of days. In addition to being a military regime that doesn’t allow police officers to have a normal life or integrate into the community, it also displays a lack of respect for the individuals involved.

One policeman with 12 years’ experience in the institution went on a hunger strike in May of this year to protest such issues. Although his action was considered “against the Constitution” and an internal process was initiated against him, nobody could possibly consider his labor demands to be anything but just.

Making this work is
an unavoidable challenge

There are a thousand and one reasons to think it will be hard to make community policing work in the current context. Justification can always be found to argue that “change is impossible” and not try anything new, even when the old way doesn’t work anymore.

If we examine community policing experiences throughout the world we’ll end up in debates and controversies about contradictions that didn’t exist when militarist and authoritarian models prevailed. We can now expect debates in El Salvador about real contradictions that emerge during the development of this experience, and they will surely be mixed with electoral controversies used to discredit the FMLN government.

The only thing that’s guaranteed is that the violence and crime rates will continue rising at an alarming rate unless this country’s police model is changed. So installing community policing and making it work throughout Latin America, particularly in El Salvador, is an unavoidable challenge.

Elaine Freedman is a grassroots educator and the envío correspondent in El Salvador

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