Chapter 5 explores the prolonged institutional decay of the Colombian National Police, particularly during the 1980s and early 1990s, and considers the factors that impeded comprehensive structural reform. Following a period of generalized loss of legitimacy across the Colombian state resulting from widespread political and criminal violence, the early 1990s saw a range of transformative policy reforms – from health and education to fiscal policy – and an institutional overhaul in the form of an ambitious new Constitution. Reform of the National Police, however, did not gain much traction, despite widespread authoritarian coercive structures and practices, weak institutional capacity, and inefficiency in fighting crime. I demonstrate how the National Police leveraged its structural power – flowing from its primary role in fighting the country’s war against drug cartels and its institutional and financial ties to the United States – to constrain the policy agenda and thwart reform attempts, even in a political environment that was highly conducive to a range of institutional and policy reforms. I then show how fragmented societal preferences over policing and security, often divided along class lines, generated conflicting demands and provided little electoral incentive for politicians to push for police reform, reinforcing institutional persistence.

Chapter 4 traces the development of the Police of Buenos Aires Province since Argentina’s transition to democracy and accounts for its institutional persistence in the face of extensive extralegal violence and predation of the citizenry. Despite the integral role of police in the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s, the transition to democracy in 1983 did not entail efforts to reform the country’s police institutions in accordance with democratic principles, as occurred with the military. As crime rates and societal demands for improved security increased, structural police reform was not on the agenda, and countless short-term efforts to root out corruption largely floundered. While other provincial institutions, such as the judiciary, underwent structural reform, the police strategically used its control over coercion to raise the cost to politicians of constraining police authority. The resulting accommodation between police and politicians largely kept police reform off the public agenda and allowed the provincial police to thwart external accountability efforts. I demonstrate that societal demands regarding policing and security were largely fragmented and often contradictory, such that politicians saw little electoral incentive to address police violence, corruption, and poor performance.