How Democratic Police Reforms Fail: A Law and Development Perspective on Institutional Processes of Change and Resistance

Democratic police reform (DPR) is a type of institutional reform that aims to make polices compatible with democratic political regimes. Though distinct approaches have been attempted in distinct contextual circumstances, promoting DPR has proven remarkably difficult. Successful cases are hard to find; across the globe, DPR efforts have had unsatisfactory outcomes, amounting to little or no sustainable change in dysfunctional police forces. What explains this systematic failure of DPR? Existing research has focused on determining the sociopolitical circumstances and/or reform methods that correlate with positive or negative DPR outcomes. However, there is a gap in the literature regarding how DPR fails – that is, the processes through which the above-mentioned variables interact with the police’s organizational environments, rules, and resistance mechanisms to produce unsatisfactory outcomes/failed reform. This paper proposes that an analytical framework based on law and development scholarship can help police reform scholars address these gaps. To develop this argument, I review and discuss existing theorizations on DPR failure, demonstrating the potential contributions of a law and development perspective. I suggest that a framework based on this perspective nuances existing approaches by emphasizing the contentious processes surrounding reform enactment and implementation. Unpacking these processes can represent a new research agenda for police reform scholarship.