Donor Export and Police Development Assistance

Abstract

As Michael Kempa acknowledges, The industrialised West has for a long time, been hyperactive in policing reform in ‘societies in transition’ (2010: 272) via a plethora of schemes and initiatives. Citing figures from Bayley (2005) he highlights that considered globally around $200 billion is spent annually on policing, and of this one-third is directed to developing ‘democratic’ policing in transitional and conflicted states (Bayley, cited in Kempa 2010: 273). In many respects police and security sector reform has become a global industry where the lines between state and corporate interests have become increasingly muddied. In addition, the police reform landscape is dotted with any number of policy entrepreneurs — often retired police officers, or representatives of small aid agencies — who criss-cross the world’s trouble-spots promoting particular models of policing. As we discuss shortly, the favoured reform template is invariably community policing since this is intertwined with all sorts of assumptions about the nature of democratic policing (Brogden and Nijhar 2005). Increasingly, however, concerns about global terrorism and drugs have meant that key Western states intervene in the security sector of those states deemed to be ‘at risk’ or to pose a risk in some way. This can be done directly, as with FBI and CIA input into specific aspects of police reform in Turkey and Brazil (case studies) and the sponsoring of sympathetic local elites (Iraq/Afghanistan and historically Turkey) or indirectly through ‘tied’ and coercive aid/assistance transfers. In this way policing reform becomes one of the tools used for upholding political economy in recipient nations, rather than something that can truly transform policing democratically.