Introduction
Urban insecurity and violence remain, as of today, among the most important challenges in Latin America, and Mexico is no exception. Strikingly high homicide rates and violence related to drug trafficking are illustrative of this reality. More importantly, Mexicans do not feel safe on a daily basis. The most recent national survey on urban security by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (National Institute for Statistics and Geography, INEGI) shows that 76.8 per cent of Mexican citizens – and up to 81 per cent of women – consider that living in their city is not safe.Footnote 1 Not only do citizens worry about everyday activities, but they do not trust the police – largely perceived as corrupt and ineffective – to ensure their safety.Footnote 2 Insecurity therefore affects citizens’ daily lives and transforms their daily routines, their relationship with the city and, ultimately, restricts the practice of democratic citizenship.Footnote 3
While the Mexican federal, state and municipal governments have historically responded to violence and insecurity with repressive approaches, using mano dura (iron fist) policing strategies,Footnote 4 a handful of municipalities shifted toward a prevention-oriented approach in the early 2000s, implementing public security programmes defined by their focus on building trust and collaborative relationships with the population.Footnote 5 Community-oriented policing (COP) is generally defined as ‘full-service personalized policing where the same officer patrols and works in the same area on a permanent basis, from a decentralized place, working in a proactive partnership with citizens to identify and solve problems’.Footnote 6 More than a concrete model of policing, COP is a philosophy that aims not only at transforming police practices, moving from reaction to prevention, but also at creating a sense of trust among the population. Mike Brogden and Preeti Nijhar identify five general guidelines in COP:
• Neighbourhoods or small communities serve as primary foci of police organization and operations.
• Communities have unique and distinctive policing problems that conventional police organizations and responses have not traditionally addressed.
• Community consensus and structures should guide police response to the community's crime and security problems
• Policing should be both locally accountable and transparent
• Police discretion is a fact and should be used positively to maximize community confidence in the police.Footnote 7
From this perspective, success is not just measured by the reduction of crime rates, but also by citizens’ increased levels of trust in the police and an improved feeling of safety in their daily lives.
On the whole, analysts have evaluated Mexican experiments with COP as mostly ineffective.Footnote 8 Its core principles, inspired by Anglo-Saxon experiments,Footnote 9 were imagined and implemented in conditions that were quite different from Mexican realities. Yet the conditions under which COP is implemented matters. Public confidence in the Mexican police, in particular, is amongst the lowest levels in the world, and they are regarded as systemically corrupt; this means that COP in Mexico requires different approaches from those used in other countries such as the United States.Footnote 10 For example, preventive programmes such as the COP implemented in Mexico City have been plagued by clientelism and corruption, and are generally regarded as failures.Footnote 11
One case nonetheless stands out in Mexico. Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, commonly called ‘Neza’, where a COP reform was implemented in 2003 in the adverse conditions referred to above, is often cited as a success. The participatory focus of Neza's COP programme has been identified as a key element to explain its success.Footnote 12 Neza's COP programme includes redes vecinales (neighbourhood networks) which are organised at the micro-level as virtual and face-to-face spaces where citizens can voice their security concerns directly to the police and participate directly in the definition of policing priorities in their neighbourhood. Today, Neza's programme serves as an inspiration for several other municipalities, but replicating the model has not proven to be a successful strategy.Footnote 13 Why is it that, even in adverse implementation conditions, COP reform has worked in Nezahualcóyotl and not elsewhere? More specifically, what are the mechanisms behind the successful implementation of the participatory redes vecinales, leading to the generally positive assessment of the programme in otherwise adverse initial conditions?
In this paper, we argue that institutional reforms like the one implemented in Nezahualcóyotl have to be contextualised for their operating mechanisms to be fully understood. Participatory security can be key for transforming the relationship between citizens and law enforcement. In reality, however, there are often significant gaps in implementation. For participatory security mechanisms designed from the top downFootnote 14 to fulfil their promise, citizens must be willing to engage in participatory security mechanisms. Participation is not only an institutional feature: it should be evaluated against citizen's practices. Do citizens participate in such institutional mechanisms? Who does so, and how? In effect, because they are implemented by police officers on the streets in a context of high police–citizen distrust, the adoption of such mechanisms by citizens as engaged participants is not a given. What leads citizens to embrace institutional reforms and adopt such participatory mechanisms in their daily practices? Drawing from a relational approach to policy implementation and from the notion of social embeddedness, we argue from the premise that participatory security reforms are implemented not in a social vacuum but rather in pre-existing social networks of different kinds that are key drivers of citizens’ adoption. Participatory security mechanisms should, we argue, be socially embedded to be successfully implemented at the citizen level.
Social embeddedness is key to reform implementation, but our study also shows that all social networks are not equal, and that social networks do not operate in the same manner. This weak assumption probably impacts how participatory security mechanisms work in practice. In particular, Neza reveals a particular reality, where existing social networks are characterised by informality, operating through well established clientelistic networks in a fragmented political environment.Footnote 15 While clientelism and corruption have been cited as an explanation for COP's failure in Mexico City,Footnote 16 informality and clientelism function in a rather counterintuitive way in Nezahualcóyotl.Footnote 17 On the contrary: based on previous observations of recent participatory experiments and practices in NezahualcóyotlFootnote 18 and on extensive fieldwork conducted in 2018 with political actors, police officials and officers and citizens in Neza,Footnote 19 we argue that the existence of former participatory networks activated by local intermediaries associated with the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD) have been crucial to embedding security participatory mechanisms into the local PRD's fragmented but clientelistic structure. This observation points to the role of local social entrepreneurs – here political brokers – as key intermediate actors to articulate and become agents of social embeddedness of the redes vecinales in a context where trust in police officers is, historically speaking, low. This finding, however, highlights variation in levels of participation in the redes, and therefore nuances the generally quite positive assessment of the reform. As the redes are socially embedded through informal and clientelistic networks, their overall transformative potential for police–citizen relationships remains limited in the longer run, since participatory security is generally characterised by relatively low-intensity and potentially non-inclusive forms of citizen participation.
COP in Mexico: Implementing Reforms in Adverse Conditions
Under the Partido de la Revolución Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI), law enforcement agencies were often used to curtail any form of opposition or rebellion against the regime in Mexico.Footnote 20 When the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN) came to power in 2000, the hope of its elected leaders was to reinvest the police with its primary functions: protect citizens and maintain order. However, deep-rooted corruption and the involvement of law enforcement agencies with drug trafficking have, among other things, prevented national public security reform from showing positive results from 2000 onward, both in terms of decreasing rates of crime and violence and in terms of public opinion and trust in the police.Footnote 21 Instead, intentional homicide rates in Mexico increased: from 10 per 100,000 people in 2000, they reached 19 per 100,000 in 2016.Footnote 22 Attempts to reform national public security were characterised by a generally repressive (mano dura) approach toward crime that has proven unsuccessful in reducing insecurity.
At the same time, a handful of municipal governments started to experiment with preventive policing approaches, implementing various models of community-oriented policing at the local level in order to transform police–citizen relationships, build mutual trust, collectively identify sources of insecurity and thereby prevent crime rather than only react to it. Implemented in adverse conditions, however, most of these experiments have not had the expected results, with the possible exception of the reform implemented in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, as we explore below.
COP at the Local Level: Factors for Successful Implementation
The literature shows that COP needs at least three interrelated elements to succeed (with success regarded as reductions in crime rates and increases in public trust and sense of safety): funding, political will and appropriate and continuing training. Firstly, because policing is costly, the level and nature of the resources allocated to the programme by the government is a crucial factor in determining its successful implementation.Footnote 23 Secondly, and directly tied to funding, is the notion of political will. Several studies show that decision makers will allocate funds to the programmes that best fit their ideologies and interests.Footnote 24 The Latin American COP experiments illustrate this point, given that they started to spread during the ‘pink tide’, i.e. the arrival of leftist governments in power in most Latin American countries,Footnote 25 even though their priorities can be altered by economic interests and contextual factors. Thirdly, training, which relies on both funding and political will, is crucial for successful COP, because this implies profound changes in police culture.Footnote 26
While all of these factors certainly impact implementation of COP, other dimensions should also be taken into account. Recent scholarship on community policing has highlighted yet another factor contributing to the success of certain COP reforms across Latin America: citizen participation. Examples from Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua have shown that citizen participation with police officers in the collective definition of local security issues and in the decisions and design of potential solutions to such issues has been key to the success of these countries’ COP programmes.Footnote 27 However, while COP programmes do have a clear focus on police–community relationships, not all of them include an institutionalised participatory dimension. As Yanilda González puts it, participatory security is one kind of COP programme, one where there are ‘institutional state spaces for community input, identification of problems and generation of solutions regarding local security’ in collaboration with the police.Footnote 28 In a context where citizenship rights are often unequally distributed among citizens, leading to a form of exclusive citizenship,Footnote 29 participatory institutions can have a transformative potential. Because citizens who participate become public-security decision makers as well as agents of change and accountability, their relationship to the state (here, the police) can change.Footnote 30 However, citizen participation can also have perverse effects, and participation can occur in ways that remain exclusionary and even punitive.Footnote 31
In Mexico, unsuccessful experience with COP reforms is the general rule. Even in places where there was political will and a certain level of resource allocation, the lack of a targeted approach in terms of new police training goals prevented reforms from having substantial and concrete results.Footnote 32 For instance, when the then mayor of Mexico City, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas (PRD), tried to reform the police in 1997 by tackling corruption, he faced very fierce internal resistance. Police officers refused to cooperate and follow the new rules, with citizens continuing to distrust them, leading to the programme's failure.Footnote 33 Moreover, most Mexican experiments with community policing did not involve a clear participatory component, which might explain why the relationship between citizens and police remained ambiguous and marked by mutual distrust and suspicion.Footnote 34 Police corruption and the instrumentalisation of community policing as a symbol of engagement towards security by political leaders otherwise not fully committed to citizen participation in policing has remained the norm under recent COP reforms, especially in Mexico City.Footnote 35 Nonetheless, the case of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, in the state of Mexico, seems to figure as an exception with regard to participatory security.
The Case that Defies the Odds? Participatory Community Policing in Nezahualcóyotl
Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl was created in April 1963 and is today one of the largest municipalities of the state of Mexico, with 1.2 million inhabitants. Until recently, Neza was known as one of the most violent municipalities in the country.Footnote 36 Its municipal police force was regarded as abusive and corrupt, rather than as an effective response to insecurity and violence issues. The city was governed by the right-wing PRI until the end of the 1990s, but it was under the PRD-led municipal government first elected in 1997 that insecurity became an increasingly salient political issue.
A former PRD president of the municipality explained that the PRI, which was in power for the first 35 years of the municipality's existence, had not invested in professionalising the police. In his view, the result was a poorly trained and poorly paid force known to be plagued by corruption:
It was then that we really started to work more seriously on the theme of public security, that had generally been ignored. Before, when the PRI was in power, the police went out and had to find a way they could ask for money and make money to pay for fuel, tyres, oil and car repairs…Footnote 37
Police corruption thus became the main target of PRD local administrators when they assumed the municipality's leadership. COP was not developed in the early years, however, as the first PRD mayor,Footnote 38 Valentín González Bautista (1997–2000) did not undertake any major police reforms. It was under his successor, Héctor Miguel Bautista López (PRD, 2000–3), that there emerged the idea of fighting police corruption while transforming the way public security had historically been approached in the city. Bautista López's mandate was clear, according to a local PRD activist: ‘When we entered [came to power] in 2000 this [the corruption] stopped, all of this [the police department] was taken care of by the public administration.’Footnote 39 Bautista López also declared war on drug trafficking, but his initial efforts, with existing police forces partially trained under the PRI administration, were unsuccessful.Footnote 40 Luis Sánchez Jiménez, mayor during the 2003–6 PRD administration, dramatically changed the municipality's approach to public security. In order to respond to the double challenge of violence and insecurity in the city, the municipal government of Nezahualcóyotl invited José Jorge Amador Amador to take on the role of director of the Dirección General de Seguridad Ciudadana (Directorate-General of Citizen Security, DGSC) and, with his support, designed and implemented a novel public security programme, characterised by its COP approach. Amador is a lawyer by training and holds a Ph.D. in sociology; he was one of the founders of the Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (Socialist Workers’ Party, PST), and, from 1997 to 2000 (under Cárdenas's PRD administration in Mexico City), a member of the team responsible for liaison with the municipalities that make up the metropolitan area.
The initial moves of the local administration were to purge the police force of its corrupt elements and to hire new police officers who would be trained under a different regime. As explained by one of the PRD municipal presidents:
When I began, I had to start from almost zero. The first thing I told them on the second day of my mandate, I regrouped all the policeman on the municipal platform […] and I told them: ‘These are the rules, corruption is not accepted, we won't tolerate corruption, I offer you a voluntary retirement programme and we get rid of those who think they can't comply with these rules, those who stay have to comply.’ There were about 600 police officers then, with the programme about 200 left, and 400 stayed.Footnote 41
If the PRD's government police reforms involved getting rid of corrupt officers, it does not mean that these practices completely disappeared. Although those at the top of the police hierarchy may show zero tolerance for corrupt practices, it is difficult to detect corruption, given the street-level discretionary power that conceals corrupt practices – a problem common around Latin America.Footnote 42
Efforts were nevertheless especially invested in training the police force and in turning them into accountable and effective public officers.Footnote 43 After a three-year interruption (2009–12) when the PRI was back in power,Footnote 44 the programme was reinstated with new objectives under the mayorship of Juan Manuel Zepeda Hernández (PRD): its community orientation was strengthened and its participatory features developed in order to create venues where police officers and citizens could meet, discuss security issues and jointly bring about public security. In 2012, Zepeda reappointed Amador as head of the DGSC and pushed reform a few steps further.
The main feature of this reform was to design and implement the system of cuadrantes (delimited areas comprising a few streets) as a core feature of the COP programme. According to a former PRD municipal president, the idea was to:
Really give something to society, and so we started to create this system here. This was Jorge's [Amador's] idea of the cuadrantes: ‘we will create the cuadrantes, here there [will be] more resources’. I received 600 police officers and I left 1200, or the double.Footnote 45
Nezahualcóyotl is divided into 100 cuadrantes, which are under the supervision of a group or a pair of police officers on a 24/7 basis. The cuadrantes programme is based on proximity between the population and the police as well as prevention, thus falling within the definition of the aforementioned COP model. This model differs from others in a core participatory feature: the redes vecinales. Implemented in 2013, the redes promote equality in participation and direct interaction of citizens with their local police officers in the definition of public security issues, problems and potential solutions. From 1996, Neza had already had Consejos de Participación Ciudadana (Citizen Participation Committees, COPACIs),Footnote 46 in which citizens had been formulating security-related issues as part of their urbanisation concerns, without much success.Footnote 47 The municipal government from then onwards supported the creation of a mechanism for citizens to specifically formulate demands and discuss security questions directly with police officers. These redes, located at the level of the cuadrante, are comprised of both residents and police officers (two per shift, four in total) assigned to that area. Residents and police officers interact regularly in two main participatory sites: one virtual and one face-to-face. The virtual forms of interaction take place via WhatsApp social network groups bringing together the residents of a specific area – a cuadrante – and their locally assigned police officers. The WhatsApp groups are a central element of the redes, as they allow citizens and police officers to interact on a daily basis: they constitute a forum for discussing public security concerns, for collective surveillance and for the rapid reporting of crime and police intervention.
The face-to-face dimension is also key to the participatory nature of the redes, albeit one that is sometimes overshadowed by the virtual forums in descriptions of the reform. When a red is created,Footnote 48 police officers are supposed to meet the residents on a regular basis (at least monthly) in order to gather their feedback regarding the public security issues raised during the previous meeting. During the meetings at street level, police officers complete an official meeting report explaining the issues encountered on that particular street during the last month, and the proposed actions or solutions discussed between residents and police officers. Residents complete and retain their copy of the same report, in order to ensure a follow-up from one meeting to the next. Then, police officers are expected to give copies of these meeting reports to their superiors so that the latter can not only gather data on the cuadrante and on their sector (which data provides the basis for local crime statistics), but also so that they can take appropriate public security decisions in their sector.Footnote 49 Theoretically, this collaboration between residents and officers provides the police with micro-local knowledge and qualitative data that can have a deep impact on public security. Not only do these meeting reports give valuable information on each street's problems from the residents’ perspective, but they also provide potential solutions based on the inhabitants’ knowledge of the locality as well as on policing knowledge from the police officers assigned to the area.
Current assessments of the COP programme in Nezahualcóyotl define it as successful, especially its participatory component, the redes vecinales.Footnote 50 The aggregated levels of participation and citizen involvement with the police through the redes vecinales are overall quite high. As Figure 1 shows, all Neza's sectors are almost fully covered by neighbourhood networks (except for Sectors 14 and 15, where only 65 and 75 per cent of the territory is covered). Figure 2 demonstrates that the population participates in those networks – if at a low level – and that cases of absolutely no participation are the exception.
Figure 1. Redes vecinales: Coverage by Sector, Nezahualcóyotl, 2019
Source: Authors’ elaboration on data provided by the DGCS, Nezahualcóyotl.
Figure 2. Redes vecinales: Levels of Participation by Sector, Nezahualcóyotl, 2019
Note: Participation is recorded by the DGSC on the basis of number of residents participating in redes (i.e. number of residents included in the WhatsApp group of their cuadrante as a proprtion of total residents) and on whether regular meetings are held. This determines the level of participation in a cuadrante (high, average, low). Cuadrante data is then aggregated to create sector-level data.
Source: Authors’ elaboration on data provided by the DGCS, Nezahualcóyotl.
While we cannot affirm that participation actually impacts crime, the data in Figures 1 and 2 demonstrate that implementation has been quite successful in terms of citizen involvement with the police. Moreover, since the implementation of the programme, criminality rates have decreased.Footnote 51 Given their institutional design, in large part virtual, the redes vecinales are quite easy to implement locally. Not much in the way of financial or organisational resources is required to set up a WhatsApp group, but it is visible to the public, serves to channel social demands regarding public security and has the potential to prompt discussion among citizens. As a former municipal president explained, these redes are presented by local politicians and administrators alike as having created proximity and organisational capacity among residents, which is an indicator of the programme's success in the official view: ‘the formation of those redes, which organise the whole street and put them [the residents] together in a WhatsApp group, make it way more organised, that is way closer [to the residents]’.Footnote 52 However, if participatory security can be key to transforming the police–citizen relationship, the participatory democracy literature has taught us that institutional change is only one part of the equation: in order to be transformative, participatory institutions require engaged citizens who interact autonomously with the state (here the police).Footnote 53
Participatory security mechanisms are no different. On the one hand, participation does not prevent police from using discriminatory and/or violent approaches to crime control and some issues, such as police abuse, are not necessarily subject to discussion.Footnote 54 On the other hand, designed from the top downFootnote 55 by police administrators and politicians and implemented by the police officers on the streets without citizen input and in a context of high police–citizen distrust, their adoption by citizens as engaged participants is not a given and is a better indicator of success than mere implementation. The implementation of participatory security mechanisms can be located on a continuum (Figure 3), from the formalisation of the participatory mechanism to the co-production of public security outcomes through proactive forms of citizen and police officers’ interactions and participation. In Nezahualcóyotl, for example, formal implementation is characterised by holding a first meeting between the police officers assigned to a cuadrante and the residents of a subcuadrante, by completing the official documents creating the red vecinal – with the residents’ contact details and addresses, the four police officers’ names (one pair per shift) and the sector chief officer's name and contact information – and by the creation of a WhatsApp group.Footnote 56 Indicators of institutional adoption in daily practice would be: holding monthly meetings at the subcuadrante level, following up the issues raised during previous meetings and giving feedback on the actions taken, regularly checking on and communicating through the WhatsApp groups, bringing citizens’ concerns to their superiors, for example. Finally, indicators of transformative co-production of public security practices would be: the collection and systematisation of information to inform and structure police interventions and collaborative work between citizens and police officers to develop and implement innovative preventive action.
Figure 3. Levels of Success for Assessing Participatory Security Reform: From Implementation to Adoption in Practice
Assessing the success of participatory policing reforms (and here more specifically of the redes vecinales) therefore involves qualitatively investigating the institutional adoption process, and looking at citizens’ and police officers’ daily interactions within the redes to observe their interactions, practices and initiatives. Unlike other work on the COP reform in Neza,Footnote 57 our definition of success focuses on what happens once the redes vecinales are created virtually through WhatsApp, and on the actual interactions between the police and citizens within the redes. This then provides an appropriate portrait of how these redes are actually adopted, appropriated in the daily practices of their participants (inhabitants as well as police officers, and subsequently their superiors) to eventually become transformative.
What then explains the fact that participatory reforms have been successfully adopted by both citizens and police officers in the field? Under what conditions are participatory security mechanisms best implemented and appropriated by local actors in their micro-level interactions and practices? While the current literature on participatory reforms provides some indicators as to why elected and policy officers implement participatory reforms and how they do so at the decision-making level,Footnote 58 we know much less about the mechanisms explaining their success in practice. In Neza, in particular, most evaluations of the programme are based on aggregated quantitative data produced by the DGSC, which only reports on the formal implementation of the redes vecinales as virtual WhatsApp forums in each cuadrante. This tells us little about the adoption of these top-down mechanisms by citizens in their daily practice.
As we shall see below, our approach to qualitatively assessing successful participatory policing implementation uncovers the notion of social embeddedness. This is a hitherto unexplored mechanism that helps explain why and how otherwise unlikely participatory institutions and practices bringing together police officers and doubting citizens take root in certain municipalities and not others. Furthermore, in order to explain the successful local adoption by citizens and police officers of participatory security reforms designed from the top down we must consider varying levels of social embeddedness, as these are key. Moreover, as the case of Neza reveals, the nature (formal or informal) of the networks within which the participatory security reforms are socially embedded also matters, and may have implications for their democratic and transformative potential.
Explaining the Institutional Adoption of Participatory Security Reforms: When Informality Matters
Participatory spaces created to co-produce security outputs in COP reforms are generated at the level of policy makers and implemented from the top down through the work of police officers, but they are not implemented in a social vacuum. With Markus-Michael Müller, we argue that empirical studies in community policing should better account for ‘the embeddedness of such policing imports in wider sociopolitical relations and local “cultures of control”’.Footnote 59 Institutionalised mechanisms designed to foster citizen participation in policy making or, as in this case, security policies, indeed perform best in places where previous associational networks already exist.Footnote 60 Moreover, local social networks and relationships among citizens and with social and political organisations predate participatory security reforms. Given this, we argue that the social embeddedness of the reform in historically constructed formal or informal networks is the most important predictor of the successful adoption of participatory mechanisms by local actors.
Our relational approach to social embeddedness highlights two interrelated mechanisms that lie at the heart of our explanation of the successful institutional adoption of the redes vecinales in Nezahualcóyotl: firstly, citizens engaging in participatory processes are individuals who are socially situated within their own micro-level social networks; these are defined by both formal and informal interactions and operate according to mutually understood and therefore locally and socially situated norms of reciprocity and trust. Secondly, the institutional participatory mechanisms are socially embedded in these social and organisational networks via local social entrepreneurs who play an important role, building pivotal positions within the network as agents (or not) of social embeddedness leading to reform. These two interrelated mechanisms, we argue, vary considerably from one place to another at the micro-level and affect the depth and breadth of social embeddedness of participatory security reforms and contribute to explaining their unequal adoption in different municipalities and, as the case of Neza shows, within municipalities across sectors.
The notion of social embeddedness is not new and has been widely developed by social movement theorists aiming to understand the conditions under which people engage in collective action from a relational perspective.Footnote 61 The idea is that collective action does not arise in a social vacuum, and that people are more likely to participate when they are socially embedded in an existing social network. Individuals are socially situated at different levels within networks and webs of social relationships in both the private and the public spheres (within families, groups, workplaces, social organisations), which means that they are more or less socially embedded within such networks at the local level. Such networks are composed of groups of individuals who are directly or indirectly interconnected through ‘nodes’, that is organisations and/or social entrepreneurs whose role is to connect the network's components from within, amongst one another and with society at large. Social network components share mutually understood norms of reciprocity and trust, horizontally and vertically constructed through social interactions and exchanges among actors and organisations within the network. Social networks thus vary in their nature, functioning and reach; some are defined by patterns of social interactions and exchanges dominated by informal logics and relationships among actors while others are organised around formal organisations and institutions. The level and nature of individuals’ social embeddedness within such pre-existing networks is determinant in understanding patterns of individual engagement in collective endeavours,Footnote 62 as social networks intervene at different stages of an individual's decision to participate in the public sphere. As Florence Passy notes,Footnote 63 social networks construct collective meanings through social interactions and, as such, shape individual preferences and perceptions in decision-making processes with regard to participation in collective action.
Our understanding of the mechanisms for the institutional adoption of participatory security builds on this approach to understanding why certain participatory institutions take root and become routinised in a network and its practices. For this, we argue that it is essential to explore the depth and nature of a given participatory institution's social embeddedness in the local social networks within which it is implemented. Participatory institutions in particular rely on resident engagement and agency in order to function, and are therefore socially embedded.Footnote 64 This is especially true for participatory security reforms that involve direct participation of citizens alongside local police officers – not necessarily a given for all Mexicans, as their relationship with the police has historically been defined by a general lack of trust and mutual suspicion, a perception that can affect actors’ initial willingness to engage in participatory mechanisms. While COP aims at transforming this relationship by bringing police officers closer to residents, this enduring perception can delegitimise the idea of participating alongside the ‘untrustworthy’ and lead to its rejection by residents and/or police officers in practice. Social network entrepreneurs can play a crucial role here as institutional social embeddedness agents. Located at the intersection of policy makers and participants, social entrepreneurs (intermediaries, brokers) who adopt the reform can mobilise support and participants within their network, thereby conferring legitimacy on the participatory security mechanism and its promoters (here the police force and local government). Their position of leadership is built through relations of trust and mutual reciprocity within and outside the network, and creates (or not) the enabling conditions under which residents can decide to adopt the reform and to engage collectively in participatory security mechanisms at the local level.
In Nezahualcóyotl, the informal nature of the social networks functioning at the local level is a key mechanism for socially embedding the reform at the local level. The particular case of Neza indeed shows that the redes vecinales’ social embeddedness in existing participatory social networks matters to the successful implementation of participatory security reform, as these networks operate under multiple local organisational and relational logics. In Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, the political and social context is indeed characterised by the prevalence of informal social networks, historically organised around a web of social organisations closely linked to the political arena through clientelistic ties.Footnote 65 As we will see, clientelism is the main locus of social networking in the city, and has therefore become a key mechanism for socially embedding participatory security reform and allowing the redes to take root in Nezahualcóyotl. Clientelistic networks – based on face-to-face exchange relationships and informally defined and mutually understood (and often unequal) norms of reciprocity between the PRD municipal government and citizens, in particular – are mediated by a web of brokers who play an important role in socially embedding reform. Often located within social organisations and closely associated with the PRD's main factions, these brokers articulate and mobilise their local social networks – composed of ordinary citizens – through participatory spaces and resource redistribution that create an enabling environment for the institutional adoption of participatory security reform by local actors in their everyday life. In this way, the informal nature of the well-established clientelistic relationships, interactions and exchanges within these networks situate key social brokers.
Clientelistic Networks as the Main Locus of Social Networking in Neza
Clientelism, generally defined as vertical, voluntary, reciprocal but unequal relationships between clients and patrons and intermediated by local brokers, is a mode of constructed social transaction based on the exchange of mutual benefits;Footnote 66 it often encompasses but actually goes beyond vote buying, which happens fairly intermittently.Footnote 67 As a mechanism of interest intermediation, clientelism is based on the existence of socially embedded informal networksFootnote 68 articulated around centrally positioned political brokers who play an intermediation role between patrons and clients, as they mobilise political support within their network in exchange for privileged access to public services and resources. As such, clientelism nurtures informal exchanges and permeates social interactions and networks at the micro-level.
In Nezahualcóyotl, clientelistic social networks are organised at the grassroots level, and are mostly problem-solving networks. Constructed around social organisations closely tied to political parties, they can therefore ‘bridge the gap between the state and citizens’: the social networks tap into their own redistributive capacity and participatory spaces in order to address the people's needs and make up for their lack of access to public goods and services. These participatory spaces are managed and mediated by local operators or people who enjoy ‘considerable standing in the community’, and thus are ‘able to jalar gente (“pull”, mobilize people)’.Footnote 69 Ciudad Neza, originally settled illegally on land with no infrastructure or public services, gained recognition as a municipality in the 1960s as a result of the struggles of neighbourhood and social organisations well embedded within the local social fabric.Footnote 70 While the local PRI – which ruled Neza from its foundation in the 1960s until 1997 – rooted its power in clientelistic networks, the PRD opposition that emerged from groups of activists affiliated with local social movements and organisations in the 1980s additionally developed significant informal social networks throughout the municipality, mostly organised through three main groups: the Movimiento de Lucha de Nezahualcóyotl (Struggle Movement of Nezahualcóyotl, MLN), the Movimiento Vida Digna (Decent life Movement, MOVIDIG) and the Unión Popular Revolucionario Emiliano Zapata (Emiliano Zapata Popular and Revolutionary Union, UPREZ).Footnote 71 In a context of high levels of social and economic inequality, as well as of a profusion of urbanisation demands (urban planning, access to electricity and to public security), social organisations dedicated to providing access to public services and defending basic rights were sure to find a social base in the municipality, and they did indeed all attain deep and strong social support. Although the above organisations – which are participatory and redistributive mechanisms – have differing ideological principles, they joined forces under the PRD banner in the 1980s and created a strong opposition, well organised and deeply embedded within society, that ousted the PRI from municipal government in the early 1990s and has kept a strong grip on power since then.Footnote 72 Among the three organisations, one in particular still carries weight: MOVIDIG.
MOVIDIG is the PRD's main faction in Neza. It was indeed key in the formation of the PRD and, most importantly, it is intimately connected to the mayorship.Footnote 73 For instance, the last six PRD mayors of Neza since 1996 have come from the ranks of this organisation, including its current leader, Héctor Bautista López (2000–3), cofounder of MOVIDIG with his brother Víctor (2006–9). MOVIDIG provides an illustration of the way clientelistic social networks operate in Neza, and allows us to understand how these networks become a quasi-participatory space that both mobilise citizens who are politically and economically marginalised and provide them with material and symbolic benefits – such as legitimacy – and access to public services in exchange for their support.
Present throughout the city, MOVIDIG's day-to-day mobilisation capacity is spatially located and organised at the micro-level through two main participatory mechanisms: MOVIDIG's own committees and citizen participation committees, the COPACIs. Firstly, the city's territory is divided by MOVIDIG into what they call rutas (‘routes’), which correspond to a few streets or to demarcated areas of the city. Each ruta is assigned a local official and committee by the central leadership. The local committee is composed of a selected group of volunteers (living in, or with previous ties to, the designated area), who are responsible for the ruta and publicly identified as such: they walk or drive around the area on an almost-daily basis on behalf of MOVIDIG (wearing t-shirts with logos or travelling in MOVIDIG–PRD vans) to meet and chat informally with residents about their concerns and needs. All rutas and micro-local committees are supervised by sector coordinators who are responsible for making sure that the rutas work well and that local events for citizens (festive street gatherings, events for kids) are held on a regular basis. They are also in charge of organising MOVIDIG sector meetings: these are held on the same day every week and on the same street corner – participatory spaces bringing together MOVIDIG leaders, affiliated and locally based PRD-elected municipal officials, the local committees and ordinary citizens. Whilst observing MOVIDIG meetings held in 2018 we learned that these meetings aim to work as participatory spaces: locally defined social and municipal issues raised by citizens in their encounters with local officials and sector coordinators are brought to the fore and tentative solutions are offered/discussed by the organisation leaders who, in turn, make it clear both in words and visuallyFootnote 74 that they can activate their own informal and privileged PRD networks not only within the municipal administration, but also at the state and national levels.
Secondly, MOVIDIG also takes advantage of its strong presence in formal municipal participatory mechanisms like the COPACIs to mobilise citizens. The COPACIs, established in Neza in 1996 in order to create participatory spaces where citizens could formulate demands and define municipal priorities in conjunction with the local administration, have actually been extensions of the main parties’ organisational bases since their creation.Footnote 75 While they are officially composed of elected citizens who are, in principle, autonomous and distinct from political parties, research has shown that the election of the COPACIs is in fact plagued by partisan divisions.Footnote 76 The election platforms are closely associated with the main parties and their partner social organisations, including – in the case of the PRD – MOVIDIG. COPACIs are then assigned to parties across the municipality through informal discussions and negotiations, more or less in proportion to their representation on the municipal council, and according to their respective zones of influence. Our fieldwork reveals that the COPACIs are no longer as politically significant as they were under the previous PRD administrations, but those that are closer to the local administration (through the involvement of MOVIDIG members, for example) remain quite active and provide a space for mobilising citizens that nurtures the clientelistic nature of local informal social networking in the city. By contrast, COPACIs that are deemed ‘autonomous’ or non PRD-affiliated (through their elected members) remain marginalised and barely active at the local level.Footnote 77
MOVIDIG is able not only to mobilise its members, but also to distribute branded goods (such as t-shirts with MOVIDIG logos) to citizens and volunteers to sustain their loyalty and activism. MOVIDIG's capacity to distribute incentives is, however, dependent upon its close association with the PRD, whose political dominance gave it access to resources and positions of power that were central to the consolidation of MOVIDIG in Nezahualcóyotl.Footnote 78 As explained by a high-ranking MOVIDIG administrator in an interview,
[…] as the organisation grew we had the opportunity to occupy […] elected positions [with the PRD], […] that is to say the comrades who had the opportunity to occupy those spaces, […] because they contribute an amount of their salary precisely for the organisation.Footnote 79
MOVIDIG has thus been able to gain privileged access to municipal resources to be redistributed by the PRD. The Bautista López brothers, for instance, were central to establishing the redistributive capacity of MOVIDIG, organising the distribution of food vouchers, of milk and of other benefits.Footnote 80 Leaders of MOVIDIG often occupied strategic, high-profile bureaucratic positions within the municipal administration, including at the Sistema de Desarrollo Integral de la Familia (Family Comprehensive Development System, DIF), in charge of several social programmes in the municipality.Footnote 81 Examples of direct redistribution through MOVIDIG networks were also observed during our fieldwork and described to us in interviews. Firstly, MOVIDIG's weekly meetings, attended by all PRD and MOVIDIG leaders: in a meeting that we attended on a Saturday afternoon in December 2018 wheelchairs, crutches, prosthetics and walking sticks were widely distributed to the elderly and citizens with handicaps. During the speeches it was made clear that this largesse was possible because of MOVIDIG's close ties to PRD federal deputy Mónica Bautista (wife of former PRD mayor Víctor Bautista, brother of Héctor, former PRD mayor and senator).Footnote 82 Secondly, more indirect support is provided through MOVIDIG leaders of the rutas or committee members, who might accompany citizens to City Hall to help them pay their taxes or fill in paperwork, for instance, thereby manifesting to citizens their privileged access as facilitators in the PRD administration.Footnote 83
MOVIDIG thus acts as a powerful clientelistic agent closely tied to both the municipal executive and to citizens through different mobilisation and distributive mechanisms that are the pillars of their multiscalar local social network, defined by its informal and clientelistic nature. At the same time, COPACI members have, ever since the creation of the committees, often mentioned security as the main problem to remain unresolved through existing networks and public policies. As we shall see below, this local social context situates citizens’ interactions and creates an enabling, almost natural, environment for socially embedding police reforms. This means, on the one hand, that a social organisation like MOVIDIG is able to mobilise people concerned by security issues, and, on the other, that political brokers who embrace the reform – because of their direct links with the PRD, which instigated it – can contribute to socially embedding the police and police reform within the MOVIDIG network in order for it to be adopted by local actors in their daily practice.
Adopting Participatory Security in Neza: Socially Embedding the Reform through Informal Social Networks and Local Brokers
The redes vecinales, as an institutional reform, are not implemented in a social vacuum. As we have argued, their adoption by citizens who are individually and collectively situated within existing social networks is often facilitated by local social entrepreneurs who play an important role as agents of social embeddedness leading to reform. In Neza, the redes have been implemented in a very complex social fabric, mostly defined by the predominance of clientelistic networks in which local brokers act as social entrepreneurs on the ground, and as such play a pivotal role in socially embedding the PRD's police reform, as the example of MOVIDIG shows.
Local brokers are increasingly understood as pivotal in articulating these informal social networks and have become a focus for the analysis of clientelism and machine politics in the recent literature.Footnote 84 If not all scholars agree on the identity of the brokers, most of the literature converges in observing that these pivotal actors build their position and construct informal social networks through their privileged position vis-à-vis the holders of power. Although most studies focus on brokers who are agents of a political party, like the PRD for instance, recent scholarship shows that brokers are often only loosely associated with political parties in democratic contexts, being members rather of relevant social or interest organisations. As Alisha Holland and Brian Palmer-Rubin state,
leaders of interest associations often mediate clientelistic exchanges. They serve as political brokers – ground-level intermediaries between parties and voters – who can identify the needs of clients, distribute goods, and monitor behavior.Footnote 85
In our case, the web of brokers present in local social networks in Neza includes leaders and members of social organisations associated with different factions of the PRD (whose internal organisational structure gives some mobilising/redistributive responsibilities to specific individuals who also become brokers at the micro-level). These brokers, like the MOVIDIG ones, occupy a very strategic position from which to facilitate the institutional adoption of a reform by citizens at the local level, especially in this clientelistic context. Firstly, they are closely tied to the PRD administration on which their privileged access to power depends. As such, they tend to support PRD policy proposals as proof of their loyalty and political support for political elites. Secondly, they have a pivotal role in activating informal social networks at the local level, among citizens, providing them with policy responses and resources to meet their needs. In the particular context of the participatory public security reform, the brokers have an interest in promoting it to citizens, as it provides them with a concrete response to a long-time societal demand formulated by the citizens with whom they interact on a daily basis and whom they try to mobilise. As the current leader of MOVIDIG explained, the organisation saw potential for the reform to benefit their members: it adopted the idea and made it an integral part of its own interventions with citizens, without taking over the participatory space:
I think there has never been [a] formal invitation [from the police to MOVIDIG to participate in the redes programme]. For example, now that [María] is here and she already has that direct contact with the commanders [through the gender violence training programme] … Before [i.e. before she had that direct contact] she would talk to me, or she would talk to Juanita, who is the girl who works here, and she would say ‘I need a patrol’, and Juanita would talk to me, and I would talk to Roberto, so it was a very long network. So now the benefit is […] that they [MOVIDIG members] immediately see that a patrol is requested or a person requests it, they can request it, because there is trust so that there is that communication.Footnote 86
Thus, in many ways, brokers such as María play a central role in mobilising citizens in the creation, activation and adoption of those redes that would otherwise be hard to implement by police officers who lack the trust of citizens.
The role of local brokers can play out in different ways: through symbolic or direct actions aimed at making reform (and the police force) legitimate and relevant for citizens. María, whom we met at the MOVIDIG office in November 2018, is a good example of the brokers’ role in MOVIDIG's informal clientelistic network. Through her social leadership position and involvement with police officers, she participates in making police actions and collaboration with the population conceivable, even acceptable, to citizens (despite the historically very poor perception of the police), helping to socially embed the reform within her networks. María has been volunteering for MOVIDIG for more than 20 years. She started as an ordinary volunteer inspired by the organisation's social causes, helping out with the rutas and with the organisation of the MOVIDIG events, and eventually became a key member of the organisation. Indeed, not only is she responsible for several rutas (meaning promotion in the organisation hierarchy), but she is also a key social embeddedness broker for the redes vecinales public security reform, especially among women. In fact, having gained recognition as a social leader among women, she became a member of the Red de Mujeres (Women's Network): this is a programme created by the police aimed at preventing gender-based violence by training women throughout the municipality to be ‘capacitadoras’ (instructors) in specific areas and, thus, be able to give information, to provide resources and to alert the police in cases of gender-based violence in those areas. Because of her dual responsibility, María has privileged ‘insider's’ contact with the police while being a key member of MOVIDIG. She is thus essential for promoting the security reforms as a MOVIDIG leader, framing these reforms as a way for citizens to take action in respect of their daily preoccupations and demands; she brings legitimacy and generates a shared sense of trust in the redes police officers among the members of her networks. In other cases, brokers – geographically organised, like the redes – use their positions of influence and local relationships in participatory spaces to facilitate police–citizen collaborations and break down mutual distrust. Our observations and interviews have indeed revealed that MOVIDIG's local brokers – those involved at the street level – are often those who introduce to the residents the police officers assigned to their cuadrante, thereby allowing the first contact to be more legitimate than had it taken place without the help of such intermediaries:
We say [to someone in the police], ‘you know what, we are going to have a meeting and we want to invite the commander of each sector’. Or we see that it is patrol D153 in this area, ‘Ah, I send it [the patrol] to you, let me call them’ and he calls it and sends it, or if we see the patrol, ‘Hey, hey, run, go and get the patrol’ and ‘Hey, look, we want a talk with them’ – ‘Oh yes, of course’, they tell C4 that they are going to come down from the patrol or that they [are going to] send the head of sector or the service chief to talk to that committee. We defend public administration because we are part of it, and if people tell us, ‘Oh, the police are thieves’, [we reply], ‘No, now we're going to bring in the commander, and if you have to point out a police officer you point him out, because you talk for the sake of it, then we're going to bring in the commander and we're going to talk to him and we're going to define any controversy there is or any problem there is with the police officers of any shift.’ In other words, it's not a matter of sending him a job, but that contact or that relationship between friends that there is, is to speed up [the arrival of the police] or bring the police closer to the [MOVIDIG] committee.Footnote 87
To sum up, in Nezahualcóyotl, local informal networks matter for embedding the redes vecinales at the societal level, which in turns creates favourable conditions for the successful implementation of the police's participatory security reform. The case of MOVIDIG indeed shows that, because clientelistic brokers are positioned at different levels between the PRD and citizens, within the structure of MOVIDIG, they (the brokers) act as agents of social networks, linking political elites and ordinary citizens – and in this their role is central. They thereby construct their own position and capacity to, on the one hand, gain privileged access to municipal resources and leadership positions and, on the other, to mobilise people and resources and redistribute goods within the network. However, it is important to clarify one thing: the formal implementation of the redes vecinales is not clientelistic in itself and has not become subject to clientelistic distribution patterns by the DGSC officials, for instance. In fact, Amador made it clear in an interview that the original goal of the reform was that redes vecinales be nonpartisan, distributed equally across the municipality,Footnote 88 a statement confirmed by our ethnographic observation of the daily activities of the police. This means that citizens who are not connected to these clientelist networks can participate in the reform, and receive a response from the police as well. The informal nature of the well-established clientelistic relationships, interactions and exchanges within these networks nurtures social embeddedness and makes the participatory mechanism take root in citizens’ daily practice.
Concluding Remarks: Implications for the Transformative Potential of Participatory Security
If informal social ties and networks are central to embedding the redes vecinales in citizens’ daily practice, this raises issues of inequality: between citizens who are inserted in those informal networks on the one hand and, on the other, citizens who are not so inserted or even citizens who are inserted in the opposition's informal networks. While MOVIDIG represented PRD's biggest faction in Nezahualcóyotl in the early 2000s, its prevalence today is not as marked as it was then, having fallen away since the administration of the divisive figure of Juan Hugo de la Rosa as mayor (2016–18). The electoral landscape is more polarised than before, as are the PRD factions, in particular because of internal disagreements.Footnote 89 This is also the case with other social organisations in Neza. This means that the proportion of the population that benefits from access to the redes through those networks is relatively small. More broadly, this shines a spotlight on the limitations of a reform that claims to be deeply transformative (because of its participatory component, making it innovative in terms of public security), and, above all, nonpartisan, and raises the question of the quality of the participatory mechanism.
The formal implementation of the redes vecinales is necessarily affected by clientelism, although the redes are not distributed along clientelistic lines. The objective of the programme was to make it nonpartisan, as Amador explained:
What happened is that from the outset we did not want to adopt the form of a committee, with the fact that the committee is a moderator of power and [is] therefore [self-perpetuating]. That is why we are making the network […] with total freedom, and in the very sense that the network is not partisan, not religious, that the network is inclusive of all well-meaning residents. The only thing that the network does not include is persistent offenders or criminals.Footnote 90
If we look only at the redes vecinales’ formal implementation rates, we can indeed say that the police reform programme stayed out of power and clientelistic logics. However, formal implementation rates are not the sole indicator of participatory reform success: the depth and nature of citizen participation matter too. In the case of Neza, clientelism remains central to the institutional adoption of the reform by residents, and as such has important implications for the quality of participation, and for its transformative potential: even if the reform is not distributed through clientelistic channels, clientelistic networks generate inequalities in terms of access to participatory security mechanisms.
In line with other assessments of participatory COP, which have similarly reported mixed results,Footnote 91 our qualitative analysis nuances current assessments of the case of Ciudad Neza,Footnote 92 a case which highlights differences in the depth and range of institutional adoption within one municipality, and across sectors, by both police officers – who enjoy a certain level of discretion in the way they engage with citizens in their daily activities – and by residents – whose interactions are socially embedded in clientelistic networks that operate at the micro-level through intermediaries whose positions are not equally distributed throughout the municipality. A closer examination of participatory security practices in Neza shows that the level and depth of the implementation of the redes is indeed highly variable across the municipality, as is illustrated by the sector participation data presented in Figure 2, findings that are in line with studies that show that clientelism has a socio-spatial dimension which defines how participatory programmes will be implemented and received at the micro-local level.Footnote 93
Our interviews documenting the daily use of the redes by citizens confirm that there is a great variation in the way that citizens and police officers participate within them. In certain sectors, participation rates are quite high, and residents are fully engaged in participatory policing processes. A member of MOVIDIG explained that both police and residents in his subcuadrante and sector use the redes on a daily basis, virtually and face to face:
Also, those of us who do thank the police, […], the commander every time we had a problem, he answered us, either by a text message, by a WhatsApp, by a phone call, and even if we did not have it [his number] recorded in the mobile [cell] phone, we could call him from a local telephone and they answered us without any problem, and that is what we wanted, [we wanted] them to answer us because we are the representatives […] that is, we are the voices of the residents, the voices of many people who care about the needs of their family, their siblings, their grandparents, etc.Footnote 94
Participant observations during fieldwork allowed us to uncover some proactive practices by citizens, especially in Sector 8. We accompanied a patrol with a pair of police officers assigned to one of the cuadrantes, during which it became clear that police–resident collaboration in the redes leads to the creation of new preventative tools relating to public security. Not only did the police officers notify the radio operator as soon as they spotted something suspicious (something that not all police officers do), but it was clear that they were familiar with the residents of this cuadrante: they greeted everyone in personal terms and adapted their route according to what was going on in the cuadrante (schools at opening and closing times, commercial area at lunch time). The police officers even created an additional WhatsApp group outside of the cuadrante's existing one – including only themselves and the cuadrante street leaders – to make sure that the relevant security information was shared. Collaboration between police and residents has also led to new tools, like small cards to put in cars to show that they belong to a local resident. One of the street leaders told us that they call the police to come and check on cars that do not display such cards.
Nonetheless, there are also several cuadrantes where a more superficial implementation of the redes remains the norm. We often observed that redes meetings between police officers and residents were mostly a space where the former delivered a basic speech on what the policía vecinal (neighbourhood police force) was, what the redes were, how citizens could contribute to preventing crime and how residents were ‘the eyes of the police’, without much concern for citizens’ demands.Footnote 95 When residents talked about a specific issue, the police officers would say that they should have called or sent a WhatsApp message to their red at the time of the incident. There was little space for residents to formulate demands or express concerns, and even less for collaboration between them and the police.
In terms of public security, this means that the COP reform remains limited and not necessarily transformative. Firstly, a transformative participatory reform should imply equal access to the participatory mechanism and to public security for all citizens, no matter their political affiliation or the informal networks to which they belong. However, as demonstrated above, political affiliation as well as informal networks do actually affect the depth of the institutional adoption of the reform. Secondly, the way public authorities assess the reform prevent it from being transformative: because of the focus on superficial indicators, they place their efforts on quantitative rather than qualitative results (see Annex A). Thus, the assessment only takes formal implementation into account without revealing institutional adoption. Finally, our observations also raise questions about the nature of participation in public security: residents’ input is very much limited to preventing crime, robberies and delinquency from happening rather than participating, co-creating new ways of policing, or bringing about new ways of thinking about public security. The Neza COP reform looks much more like a collaboration between citizens and police to implement a pre-defined programme than a form of participation that would respect the essence of participatory democracy: that is, giving a voice to citizens in the decision-making process.
Annex A: Methodology
We conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Neza from January to March 2018 and two further weeks of complementary fieldwork in December 2018. We undertook field observation of the programme's daily functioning in different neighbourhoods throughout the city, attending several redes vecinales meetings, accompanying police officers during their patrols and attending weekly local meetings with citizens organised by officials from the MOVIDIG and local community organisers. We also conducted 28 semi-structured interviews with police officers, police chiefs, local administrators and social organisers as well as with residents and members of the community, and organised focus groups with local MOVIDIG members in two different neighbourhoods (one with five participants, and the other with eight participants).
Meetings between Police and Residents at Cuadrante Level
Data gathered at meetings remains limited as it does not give much information on what happens after the paperwork is signed off: the meeting reports supposedly generated during meetings between police officers and residents of a subcuadrante could be used to give an idea of how often the police officers assigned to a cuadrante meet with the citizens of the streets that make up each of their subcuadrantes; if there is an increase in the number of residents attending the meetings; if the police provide a quick solution when issues are raised by citizens – all of which could produce more qualitative data. However, they are used rather as a basis for quantitative data (number of redes in the territory, number of inhabitants listed as participants of the redes). Such data has inherent limitations as it does not provide us with an intersectional understanding of the effects of the reform on citizens. This means that we cannot use the meetings data to know how the redes work for people from poorer backgrounds in comparison to those from wealthier neighbourhood; neither can we grasp gender- and/or race-based differences: these access and equality issues require further analysis. Moreover, sociodemographic data (profile of participating residents), numbers (how many people attend the meetings, WhatsApp group sizes) and participation frequency (both at face-to-face meetings and in use of WhatsApp), are not systematically collected. The participation forms filled out by hand by police officers in meetings are often not coded in a central database, which makes access to this data impossible or partial. Participant observations, focus groups and interviews proved more useful for capturing the nature of participation.
Acknowledgements
Research for this paper has been made possible by a grant from the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales de l'Université de Montréal (CÉRIUM), and a PhD fellowship held by Annabelle Dias Félix from the Fonds de la recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (FRQSC). The authors would like to thank all the colleagues and participants who attended the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) panel we organised in Boston, MA, in May 2019, where a previous version of this paper was presented. Their questions and comments were particularly useful in the preparation of this article. In particular, we would like to thank Diane Davis, Arturo Alvarado and Laura Macdonald for their extensive comments on the initial draft, as well as Lee Seymour for his careful read of the article. Any mistakes remain those of the authors.
