Retired British police officer Keith Biddle recounts lessons learned from working on police reform programs in diverse contexts, including in Sierra Leone, where he headed the police force from 1999 to 2004, and in Somalia, South Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Biddle discusses the challenges of effective information gathering in police force vetting and recruitment. He emphasizes that recruitment is a community- and school-based process that should not be rushed. He goes on to discuss his experience in Sierra Leone in determining whether to recruit rebels into the police force and describes the types of challenges countries have faced in building more professional and meritocratic police forces. Next, Biddle discusses the importance of effective organizational structures to lead the police and cautions that efforts to recruit new talent may be futile to the extent that new officers enter a corrupt structure with the “wrong ethos.” Training programs, he states, should be developed in-house, with regard to context and existing skills, knowledge, and staff capacity, and include topics such as human rights, anti-corruption, and enforcement standards. Effectively combating corruption, Biddle posits, requires making the police vocation “valuable” in terms of reputation and fringe benefits. Ultimately, Biddle notes, police reform is “part of good governance” and must receive support from the highest levels of government. While police reform may be costly, he concludes, post-conflict countries cannot be expected to more forward without sustainable and effective police forces.    

Case Study:  Building Strategic Capacity in the Police: Sierra Leone, 1998-2008

Rachel Neild describes police reform programs in Haiti, El Salvador and other parts of the world. She discusses extensively the challenges of effective recruitment and vetting, particularly in the presence of poor information. She goes on to discuss the process of integrating former combatants into police forces, noting that while starting police reform from scratch may have been necessary in Haiti, this need not be the case in other contexts if former forces are properly vetted and held to the same standards and qualifications as the rest of the police force. Neild goes on to discuss some of the challenges associated with the effective operationalization of the police force, including force composition, professionalization and community involvement. She concludes that policing is a “two-way street” that involves both developing and building trust of the police and ensuring that people “understand the nature of law and rights and responsibilities.”    

Martin Schönteich, a senior legal officer with the Open Society Justice Initiative, discusses police reform in post-apartheid South Africa. He discusses some of the challenges of the integration and amalgamation of new and old police forces, including in ensuring that the recruitment process was perceived as fair, integrating new forces despite limited retirement of older forces, and the challenges that literacy and resource constraints posed to effectively recruiting and training new forces. He goes on to discuss how South Africa addressed a number of challenges in building its new police agency. Some strategies employed included: increasing pay to attract more and better recruits, implementing new information management systems, and bringing in private consulting agencies to develop internal management structures. Schönteich proceeds to discuss the possibility of greater collaboration between the police and private non-state security actors. He concludes by noting that in countries in transition, developing “sound and effective” institutions takes time. Countries may face an initial increase in crime until institutional reforms are effectively implemented.  

Rajiv Bora discusses some of the major issues and challenges the Assam government faced in terms of law and order, counterinsurgency, and illegal immigration. The Indian state has confronted demographic pressures stemming from the migration of people from what is now Bangladesh. The state has also witnessed several insurgencies, including the United Front for the Liberation of Asom and the Bodo minority. Bora describes his role in monitoring and implementing ceasefire agreements with these groups. He talks about government decentralization efforts as well as steps to secure the India-Bangladesh border. These efforts included constructing a border fence, increasing the number of border outposts, establishing tribunals for foreigners, and creating a national registry of citizens. Bora also outlines the objectives and outcomes of the recently implemented Police Act and the institutional steps taken to reduce police excesses. He describes several tribal and communal conflicts and how the government responded. He also highlights the debate about the effectiveness of offering rehabilitation packages for extremists who have surrendered.

Case Study: Promoting Peace Through Development: Assam State, India, 2001-2009

Johan Burger talks about crime and policing in South Africa. To fight crime, he contends that the focus should be on its root causes, including, socioeconomic conditions, and the criminal justice system. He advocates the adoption of an integrated strategy that involves governmental and non-governmental departments to address these conditions and political factors. Burger discusses the National Crime Prevention Strategy that was adopted in 1996. The strategy failed due to lack of a shared understanding of crime and policing among politicians, lack of funding, a disregard for socioeconomic conditions, and the inability of police to deliver immediate and visible results on crime prevention. He also describes the various operations under the Community Safety Plan and the National Crime Combating Strategy, which focused on serious and violent crimes, organized crime, crimes against women and children, and improving service delivery. Burger recounts his experience working on the change-management team, which dealt with reforming the police. He talks about police demilitarization and rank restructuring. He describes the confusion and the decline in police morale and discipline that emerged as a result. Burger also challenges community policing. While he acknowledges instances of success, he argues that it is idealistic in terms of its expectations on how the police, in partnership with communities, can fight crime. He identifies sector policing as being more practical and tangible. Though it is still a joint effort between the police and the community, the police resolve only what they can and refer what they are unable to deal with to other government institutions.