MURDEROUS LATIN AMERICA POLICE NEED TO START POLICING THEMSELVES / THE ECONOMIST

Murderous Latin American police need to start policing themselves

Cops unable to quell violence may lose their inhibitions about taking part in it



“SEVEN rats eliminated,” began one voice message in a WhatsApp chat in El Salvador. “What joy!” In a country ravaged by gangs, such exchanges might be expected among hit men. Instead this discussion was among policemen. According to revelations in August by Revista Factum, a website, they gloated over killing gang members, shared tips on tampering with crime scenes and posted videos of detainees being tortured.

El Salvador has the world’s highest murder rate, and its policemen kill with worrying frequency. The fact that police kill people so often in countries wracked by violence may stand to reason: the more armed criminals that officers confront, the more they will need to open fire.

But something particularly alarming is taking place. A study by Ignacio Cano, a Brazilian criminologist, found that the higher a country’s murder rate, the greater the overall share of killings committed by cops (see chart). It seems that police unable to quell violence may lose their inhibitions about taking part in it.

Latin American and Caribbean countries along drug-trafficking routes lead world rankings for both types of killing. Mr Cano’s study found that 17% of El Salvador’s fatal shootings in 2015 were committed by police. Jamaica’s ratio in 2014 was 13%. Those proportions are higher than the 10% rate in the United States, where police brutality is a heated political issue, and dwarf Germany’s 4%.

In theory, these high ratios might stem from Latin American cops facing frequent dangerous encounters. But the data do not support this explanation. In Mr Cano’s view, a ratio of people killed by police to police officers killed by suspects higher than 10:1 implies a misuse of force.

In 2016 El Salvador’s figure was 59:1—meaning some “shoot-outs” were probably assassinations by police.

Moreover, official statistics may understate the problem. Governments only tally killings committed by police in the line of duty. These alone can add up. Venezuela acknowledges hundreds of deaths at the hands of officers on “People’s Liberation and Protection Operations”. However, in countries where organised-crime groups have infiltrated state security forces, off-duty cops often do the dirty work for vigilantes or gangs. Official ledgers do not record such murders as killings by police.

One explanation for the prevalence of trigger-happy cops is the embrace of punitive policing as an antidote for weak justice systems. As recently as 2013, police in El Salvador killed just 39 people. But in 2015, the government reinstated a mano dura (“iron-fist”) approach, warning gang members that officers could shoot them “without any fear of suffering consequences”. Police killed 591 people the next year.

There is little evidence that mano dura works. In Central America’s “northern triangle” (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras), such policies have failed to stem rising murder rates.

They can be counterproductive: as police brutality grows, civilians stop offering tips or seeking protection from the authorities. That makes the public more vulnerable. In a recent poll for the Atlantic Council, a think-tank, 77% of respondents in the northern triangle said they did not trust the police. Nonetheless, Latin Americans seem more eager to punish civilian wrongdoers than to limit police violence. A survey in 2015 found that half of Brazilians believe “a good criminal is a dead criminal.”

Reformers could start to reduce killings by police with technical fixes, such as equipping officers with non-lethal weapons like tasers. But the countries that have drastically reduced police brutality have instituted broad reforms to rid the justice system of organised crime. In the early 2000s Colombia purged 12,000 corrupt officers, while teaching clean ones to investigate crimes more effectively.

Some hopeful signs have emerged in Central America. In Guatemala, a UN-backed team of independent prosecutors secured convictions in 2013 against four police officers responsible for systematic killings of prisoners. And last year Honduras appointed a civilian-led commission to vet its police force. It has already purged 30% of the country’s officers.

Guatemalan and Honduran police are still too violent. However, those countries have at least admitted that their problems stem from a rotten system, not just bad apples. In contrast, El Salvador has fired or charged only a few of the 559 officers it has arrested this year for allegedly belonging to death squads, participating in firefights or committing other crimes. Even the officers in the WhatsApp chat were freed just three days after their arrest. They are back at work, and no one is protesting.