Policing Violent Democracies: Understanding New Relations of Power and Police Violence in Plurally Violent Contexts.

In liberal democracies, the police are traditionally conceptualized as the State's principle mechanism for deploying non-negotiable coercive force in response to internal threats to social order. However, in many Latin American countries democratization has undermined the State's control over the police and dislodged the State as the main coercive actor. Based on two years of participant observation and interview data gathered in Caracas, Venezuela this paper argues that by creating alliances with non-state armed actors, state actors have inadvertently incentivized police violence. These alliances suggest to officers that the State has withdrawn its protection of and support for them. This subterfuge breeds a sense of vulnerability and impotence among officers, which operates to justify and encourage extralegal violence and excessive force. The narrative produced within this context envisions the police as a perfidious and estranged subject, thus reconceptualizing the relationship between the police and the state. Furthermore, this narrative overlaps with one utilized by citizens. Indeed, while police and citizens in are often posited as antagonistic groups, their understandings of violence and how to best control it often coincide. Narratives of police impotency and vulnerability are even more problematic because they allow officers to justify the unregulated use of force in a way that makes sense to citizens as well. This convergence of narratives makes police reform and the regulation of police use of force increasingly difficult, as both citizens and officers see the police as under attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]