Policing in Partnership: Nicaraguan Policies With Implications for U.s. Police Forces

• Citation: Vol. 32 No. 1
• Publication year: 2017
• topic: Criminal Law

Policing in Partnership: Nicaraguan Policies with Implications for U.S. Police Forces

J. Thomas Ratchford III

POLICING IN PARTNERSHIP: NICARAGUAN POLICIES WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. POLICE FORCES

Introduction

In the face of surging regional violence, processes and techniques developed by the Nicaraguan National Police yield the lowest violent crime rates in the region, in spite of ranking as the poorest country in Central America.¹ Bucking the trend towards militarization in regional police forces, mirroring U.S. policy,² Nicaragua has developed community-centered programs that emphasize restorative justice.³ In this endeavor, Nicaragua is harnessing the intent behind the traditionally backward-looking goals of transitional justice mechanisms⁴ and deploying these tenets towards a proactive state-security model.⁵ This concept is codified in legislation aimed at prioritizing citizen security through programs emphasizing constant reform of security apparatuses in partnership with the population.⁶ Nicaragua's community-policing techniques, informed by the vernacular of transitional justice, are intended to prevent the reoccurrence of

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violence by addressing root causes⁷ rather than reacting to them and perpetuating cycles of violence.⁸

Nicaragua's experiences have not comported with its neighbors, both regionally and globally. In explaining incongruous crime statistics, the Director of Nicaragua's National Police, Aminta Granera, emphasized that her department's greatest strength rests in its commitment to community involvement.⁹ This concept of community involvement is not a uniquely Nicaraguan development. The 1990s saw the rise of community policing in the United States before gang violence pivoted policy towards the militarization of these police forces, a technique then copied by many of Nicaragua's neighbors.¹⁰ In many ways, Nicaragua's policies build on the intellectual antecedents of American community policing, presenting a new modern form, worthy of transfer, that U.S. forces should consider tailoring to their own communities.

Through an examination of Nicaragua's community-focused processes and techniques, exportable and best practices will be distilled. In order to extract uniquely Nicaraguan methods, neighbors' approaches will be compared, highlighting different strategies while distinguishing alternative factors that have been proposed as drivers of violence or peace. Once Nicaraguan practices have been differentiated from the region, they will be contrasted with those in place in U.S. jurisdictions (as it relates to national trends given the lack of a national police force). Specific emphasis will center on the prevention of, and not the reaction to, crime through cooperation with stakeholders, including but not limited to: community members, victims, perpetrators, and the criminal justice system with a focus on law enforcement.

While there are manifold factors contributing to violence in the region, this inquiry will focus exclusively on youth gang violence and the processes by which Nicaragua confronts this challenge. This study will not delve into the

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political process other than that which cannot be divorced from police practice.¹¹ While interdisciplinary scholarship has focused on economics and policies underlying narco-trafficking, this Comment will be constrained to the violence executed by youth gangs and governmental responses. There will be a further emphasis on the frontline community level to address this violence and the ensuing effect on its prevalence and subsequent rehabilitation and incarceration of individuals involved in its perpetuation. Finally, an emerging topic specifically in Nicaragua has been gender-based violence; this category of violence is admittedly broad and will not be subjected to a cursory mention when it is deserving of its own scholarship. This Comment will not delve into political power structures except when necessary to frame youth gang violence within the context of its historical and geopolitical reality.

Part I of this Comment will frame the development of Nicaragua's policies, guided by the overarching aims of transitional justice and shaped by the role of youth gang violence. Gangs and their composition will be surveyed to understand the impetus behind responses and ensuing outcomes of programs in Central America. Against this backdrop, U.S. gang prevalence and responses will be surveyed, setting up a foil to the Nicaraguan approach that will be subsequently unpacked. Part II will analyze Nicaragua's specific initiatives, exposing best practices that operate independently of historical influences and can be distinguished from its neighbors and thus exported. This template, predicated on public legitimacy gained through community involvement, education, and rehabilitation, will then be extrapolated beyond countries transitioning from violence to democracy, specifically U.S. police forces. This process will highlight the critical nature of the police-community interaction as the "first link in the criminal justice system."¹² While definitions of community-oriented policing vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, consensus may exist at a "fundamental level" once "factors contributing to the divergence of definition" have been addressed.¹³ This entire process will be driven by context, as mimetic approaches have exposed the pitfalls of broadly applied yet

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untailored solutions.¹⁴ The conclusion section will promote Nicaraguan components embodied by four factors: (1) political commitment to reform, (2) community involvement, (3) restorative justice through education and rehabilitation, and (4) public legitimacy. These factors can then be tailored to the U.S. system resulting in a modern definition of community policing informed by Nicaragua's transitional justice experience.

I. Background

The field of transitional justice provides a framework informing the transition from violence to democracy.¹⁵ Once truth, justice, and reparations have been addressed, the end goal is institutional reform ensuring non-recurrence;¹⁶ however, existing police culture and strained community relations have become roadblocks impeding progress before, after, and during these transitions.¹⁷ This blurring of the boundary between periods of transition and normalcy has created tension between traditional transitional justice frameworks and steady-state transition.¹⁸ This contradiction predicated on the time horizons of transition makes local context critical in shaping the outcome and legitimacy of the rule of law.¹⁹ Nowhere is this paradigm more evident than in Latin America, specifically Central America, where a "pervasive weakness in the basic institutions of the rule of law" has engendered a marked lack of faith in the criminal justice system.²⁰

This lack of faith in the criminal justice system is warranted, as worldwide homicide conviction rates stand at forty-three out of every one hundred murders, whereas in Latin America less than half, roughly twenty out of every one

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hundred, are convicted.²¹ While the core processes of transitional justice seek justice, reparation, truth, and reform, steady-state transition applies these concepts to instances of "pervasive conflict."²² Central American nations may not be in the midst of traditional transitional periods; however, institutional breakdowns illustrated by gang violence should be addressed within this broader concept of "steady-[s]tate" transitional justice.²³ This "expanded humanitarian discourse" that emerges as a result of the politics of globalization is driven by instability begotten by violence.²⁴ As a result, Nicaraguan approaches can be seen through the lens of two of the transitional justice processes: constant reform targeted at justice in the midst of violence.²⁵

This systemic breakdown, fueled by violence, has resulted in "internal displacement" and "record-level emigration of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) and families to the United States."²⁶ It is this context of violence and diaspora that led the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to declare that violence, specifically gang violence, has created a "refugee-like" situation.²⁷ While the specter of traditional war may have yielded to a democratically elected government, institutional development continues to indicate that this transitional period may not be over, as factors including the "absence of violence," tracked by the Inter-American Development Bank, suggest that Central American countries continue to confront systemic problems.²⁸

As a result, analysis of police-community relations and police culture through the lens of transitional justice,²⁹ couched in the discourse of human

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rights law,³⁰ provides a pathway for achieving stability and peace.³¹ Transitional justice has been characterized as "backward-looking" in its application to prior conflicts,³² but the community policing principles developed by Nicaragua in the crucible of steady-state transition provides a template to escape this cycle of historical "concepts of justice" through a State-Security model.³³ This State-Security model is predicated on the transitional justice tenet of non-recurrence achieved through proactive community engagement by the police force at a local level.³⁴ Through its employment of this approach, Nicaragua has emerged as an outlier in terms of its crime statistics, which result from policing practices guided by both its internal culture and community outreach.³⁵ While developed in an evolving transitional period, this methodology should be considered in other applications given local gang and community contexts that extend beyond the traditional "transitional" period.

A. The Rise of Youth Gangs

In Central America, youth gangs,³⁶ like the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18, are instigators of systemic violence.³⁷ Disagreement exists as to the scope of violence attributable to these gangs, with regional...