Abstract
This book concerns itself with the implementation of human rights strategies within the state police forces of Rio de Janeiro as an attempt to improve policing and enhance police compliance with human rights standards. For the sake of this research, police human rights strategies have been defined as those laws,
... read more
policies, projects, or programs that implicitly or explicitly aim to improve police compliance with human rights values, standards, and norms. Explicit human rights strategies are those in which human rights are the core concerns of the strategy and the primary intention of the strategy creators and stakeholders whereas implicit strategies are those in which human rights are not stated as a core concern and may not be the intention of the strategy creator but whose design and contents include human rights elements. Both explicit and implicit police human rights strategies can have intended and unintended outcomes that have positive or negative implications for human rights. Police and public security reform has taken different forms based on where it is being implemented. For example, in Latin America, police reform was predominantly implemented in the 1980s and 1990s following the transition to democracy and the end of years of civil war in some countries. In Southern Cone countries there was no significant purging of the police forces following the decline of the repressive, military dictatorships and the return to democracy. Those police officers who had committed gross violations of human rights during the military dictatorships were allowed to continue performing their duties, and police reform, if it was implemented, had more to do with countering rising crime rates than the promotion of human rights. In fact, the police forces in Brazil, particularly in Rio de Janeiro, did not undergo reform following the transition to democracy. In many Latin American countries faced with significant increases in rates of crime and violence in their cities, respect for human rights repeatedly bowed to pressures to decrease crime and increase safety. The purpose of this research was to uncover what, if any, police human rights strategies are currently being implemented in Rio de Janeiro, what these strategies entail and how they are implemented, what the outcomes of these strategies are, how they are perceived by the key stakeholders involved in them, whether they lead to greater compliance with human rights standards, and what can be learnt from Rio's experience with implementing these strategies that may be relevant to other Latin American cities. Four strategies were selected to be the focus of this research, these strategies are: training law enforcement officials, community-oriented policing, the delegacia legal (model police station) program, and the disarmament program. Throughout this book, the implementation of each police human rights strategy is described, its influence on the police organization is examined, and the societal and institutional factors that facilitate or impede the implementation of the police human rights strategy are analyzed.
show less
