Yanilda María González, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of Authoritarian Police in Democracy: Contested Security in Latin America discusses policing, state violence and citizenship in democracy. Looking at issues of race and class, she shows how ordinary democratic politics in unequal societies can perpetuate authoritarian policing.
June:
Yanilda Gonzales is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is also the author of the book, Authoritarian Police and Democracy: Contested Security in Latin America. Welcome, Yanilda.
Yanilda González:
Thank you, June. Very happy to be with you and having this conversation.
June:
As a new faculty member, can you tell us a little bit about yourself personally? Where did you grow up? Where did you study?
Yanilda González:
Sure. So, I'm originally from the Dominican Republic, and I came to the US when I was seven years old, I grew up in New York City. Just definitely, this background of sort of Dominican American has definitely been something that I think has shaped my work a lot and some of the questions that I work on. I went to school at NYU. And after that, while I was there and after I worked at the New York Civil Liberties Union on issues relating to precisely these questions of security and democracy in the post-9/11 context, and after that, I did a Fulbright in Argentina, where I also got to explore a lot of these questions that are now in my book, but back then were just sort of someone in their early 20s thinking a lot about democracy and police and police violence, at that point with the context of both the US and Argentina.
Yanilda González:
And then I went on to do my PhD at Princeton. And then was at HKS again for a postdoc a few years back. And then was at the University of Chicago for four years as an assistant professor. And just arrived at HKS as you said over the summer.
June:
That's a really interesting trajectory. But how did you actually get interested in the subject of police and policing?
Yanilda González:
I think it had a lot to, as I sort of said, it was very formative for me to be an immigrant from the Dominican Republic growing up in New York City in the 1990s. And police violence was really something that was always in the news. So growing up as a young teen, as a kid, we watched, my sisters and I watched the news a lot for some reason. And one of the things that was always on there was protests against police brutality, police violence, police killings. And it was really something that caught my eye as a really important issue pretty early on.
Yanilda González:
And then in the sort of post September 11 context, when we saw a lot of this notion of contested security that is the subtitle of my book, I kind of had a chance to see that firsthand where I was a young college student on the streets telling people about all these human rights violations happening post-9/11, and seeing that a lot of people were fine with them. They sort of felt that they were necessary to have their own safety, this idea of giving up rights in order to have security. But the flip side of that is actually that you're not giving up your own rights, you're giving up other people's rights on their behalf in order for you to have security.
Yanilda González:
And so, it was really these early experiences as a teen and as a young adult, growing up in New York City and living through 9/11, seeing what happened in the aftermath, in terms of security and democracy, that really generated the key questions for me, that I would then go on to explore in a Latin American context.
June:
You grew up in Queens, right?
Yanilda González:
Yeah. Yeah.
June:
In your own neighborhood, did you witness anything or was this all television news?
Yanilda González:
It was really more television. I think more of what, it was kind of a low key immigrant neighborhood, and one of those neighborhoods I think more marked by sort of absence of the state, absence of police more than the kind of overbearing police presence. It was sort of something that I definitely had much more exposure to through the TV and seeing people on the one hand rising up and protesting against police violence in New York City, and then just learning about the victims, that this was something that kept happening.
June:
So would you say that 9/11 was kind of an aha moment for you in terms of understanding police violence and people's reaction to the police?
Yanilda González:
Yeah. And even more broadly than police, even just the notion of security and what meant, because I think that being able to see sort of security as this multifaceted thing that our societies tend to relegate to law enforcement agencies, whether it's police or the FBI, or other law enforcement agencies, seeing that again, after 9/11, where I'm sort of now, I'm a young adult, I'm in college, I'm learning all these things about democracy and human rights and all that stuff.
Yanilda González:
And then, of course, having gone to school very close to the Twin Towers, it was all something that was pretty salient throughout my, that was my first week of college was 9/11. And so, it was something that I think raised all those questions in real life about what does democracy mean, what relationship does security have to democracy? What relationship do police have to democracy? And then also, what are the societal demands like? What kind of security are people demanding, and which social groups are demanding what? There were all the questions that became really crystallized for me.
Yanilda González:
As I said, a couple years after that, I went to Argentina on a Fulbright. And this was the 30th anniversary of the 1976 coup, 2006. And similarly, a lot of the same questions about democracy, about the state, about use of force, about human rights violations, I sort of saw the connections across two very different contexts, but raising similar questions for me.
June:
That's very interesting. You mentioned in your writing that we ordinarily, those of us weren't experts in studying police think about abusive police or police violations as being kind of a leftover legacy of authoritarian governments. But that's not really true. That democracy itself, ordinary democratic politics are encouraging police forces to be authoritarian enclaves. That kind of seems counter-intuitive to me. Can you explain it a little bit more?
Yanilda González:
Yeah, no, of course. So absolutely. One of the things that I, sort of as an idealistic young person in particular, I really thought we can democracy ourselves out of this problem. That police violence was something that was happening because democracy wasn't working. And so, one of the things that I got very excited about when I was in Argentina in 06 was learning about these participatory security councils, these neighborhood councils in Buenos Aires, where ordinary citizens could go and talk about security problems alongside the police. The infamous Buenos Aires police force. And so I was just like, oh my goodness, could this be a solution to this rampant police violence that is still ongoing in Argentina, that is still ongoing, in particular, in the province of Buenos Aires?
Yanilda González:
And one of the things that became clear to me, both when I was in Argentina and then a few years later when I was doing my fieldwork in Brazil in similar participatory spaces, was that a lot of citizens are actually demanding that police have this so called [Spanish 00:08:35], this so called tougher hand with so called criminals or people that they perceive to be threats. I mention this in the book, where I'm sitting in a community meeting, people are engaging with police officials, and it's a great and democratic exercise. But when the police revealed that they had recently engaged in a shootout with a suspect, the police officer says, unfortunately, the suspect has been killed. And people clapped and said Thank God, Gracias [Spanish 00:09:10], we're happy that they were killed.
Yanilda González:
I saw different iterations of that over my time in the field, that there was a kind of, among certain sectors, a defense of a violent police force, that police should have more leniency. And we see it at the aggregate level too, if you look at like, America is a barometer, LAPOP surveys, you'll find these contradictions, where majorities of people across most of the countries in Latin America will say we don't trust the police, but they also will agree that the police should have more powers to fight crime, even including overstepping the bounds of the law. And so, it's this kind of contradictions that democracies allow for these preferences to reach decision makers.
Yanilda González:
And so, it's that kind of the fact that society is divided among people who want different things from the police enables politicians to say, well, I'm going to pick these guys and listen to them, and that just so happens to be the people that tend to have more power in society who tend to prefer police, that are more violent towards sectors of society that they find threatening. So, just to be concrete, to see a defense of police violence, even though we know that police violence in the case of Brazil, for example, is so predominantly focused on people who are poor and black, black young men. In places like Argentina, similarly, that it is focused on people who are low income living in precarious communities, [inaudible 00:10:50].
Yanilda González:
And so, to see this profile of the typical victim, the disproportionate nature of sort of who is likely to be a victim of police violence and who is not, these are also the same sectors that end up being criminalized. And so, sort of for ordinary folks kind of sitting in the middle, they watch the news and they understand what's going, they experience crime and they think, we just want the police to do something. That ends up crystallizing into these demands that tolerate, and in some cases, defend violent police forces.
June:
You talk about the people who have power. When you're talking about democracy, you're also talking about electoral power and voting. And you've got far more poor people in Latin America than you do people who have power. So, how does that play in? Why don't voting blocks work in favor of police reform?
Yanilda González:
That's a good question. One of the things about Latin America is that, unlike the US, you do tend to have higher turnout among the poor. Whereas in the US, it's still fairly low. I think that one of the things that I found in my research is that this kind of stratification or these divisions [inaudible 00:12:24] also exists in low income communities. So even if you're in a low income area, you'll see these are the areas that do tend to be more victimized by both crime and by police violence.
Yanilda González:
And so you might have the more well to do people, people who are business owners in that community, people who are, that's one of the things that I found in these community security meetings that I participated in particularly in San Paulo, where people who were business owners, people who were sort of homeowners, people who saw themselves as [Spanish 00:12:57] the good citizens, that they were some of the biggest proponents of sort of police having this tough hand. There's a phrase in Brazil that I heard even in the context of these very democratic, very participatory meetings, which is [Portuguese 00:13:15], a good criminal is a dead criminal.
Yanilda González:
It's this kind of feedback loop where you have politicians, political parties, and media as well, who are kind of feeding people that the only alternative is, well, the police have to kill the criminals. And at the same time, people are saying, well, we just want safety. If this is the only thing you're offering us, then so be it. I just want to be able to walk to the train station or to my business without fearing that I'm going to be robbed. And so, it's something that you see these divisions even within the same social classes.
Yanilda González:
The other thing that I would note is that when you have these divisions, if you look at surveys, I'm mostly focused on the period sort of post-democratization, so the kind of 80s, 90s period. If you look at surveys during this period, it's kind of striking that even in the province of Buenos Aires, you'll see people's opinions about the police, sort of whether it's positive, negative or neutral. It's kind of divided across a third. You sort of will see sort of a third, a third, a third across all those things, even though we know that this is a highly problematic police force, and was certainly so at that time.
Yanilda González:
And so, it's something that these divisions tell politicians, well, I don't actually have to take a risk in enacting police reform because this is not really something that society has a consensus on. And instead, they see very profitable relationships of accommodation with police, which is something that I also find in my research, this is another component. So why would I risk giving up this relationship of accommodation with police where they're going to collaborate with my objectives to help me stay in power in order to risk a police reform that doesn't even have this broad based support in society. And so, on either end, the incentives are just not there for most politicians to reform the police, including for politicians coming from left parties that overwhelmingly represent the poor.
June:
Could you explain a little bit more what you mean by accommodation?
Yanilda González:
Yeah, of course. And so, one of the things that I also find in my research, and by no means is it limited to me, sort of a lot of policing scholars have found this, is that police are instruments of power, because being able to control such an important area of the state, like a defining feature of the state is this whole monopoly over the exercise of legitimate force, legitimate use of force. And it's the police that end up exercising that on behalf of the state. And so, when you are the actor that holds that authority, whoever is in power, whoever is a politician, the executive, usually the executive is the one that has this more or less direct control over the police. They understand that that's a resource that can be distributed in politically beneficial ways.
Yanilda González:
Think about our colleague in the gov department, Alisha Holland, and her work showing that mayors in Bogota, in Lima, in Santiago, I believe her case is, depending on who their base of support is, will send police to either enforce the law to kick street vendors out or to sort of scale back on enforcement and allow them to do their work out on the streets. And that's all based on a political logic, where it's not based on what the law is, whether or not you're going to send police out to conduct this, but on political interest.
Yanilda González:
And so it's that kind of exchange that police and politicians engage in. What police get in exchange for that cooperation with these political interests of the politician is that they are left alone, is that they get autonomy. They're able to sort of carry out their business knowing that they'll have little intervention from political leaders. This exchange of cooperation in some areas and autonomy in some other areas is what I mean by accommodation.
June:
That's really interesting. How do you see that playing out in Latin America today in terms of street protests?
Yanilda González:
Yeah, I mean, I think street protest is one of the key areas where you see this playing out. There have been so many [Spanish 00:17:56] we've seen, as it was called in Chile in the last year or so. And the sort of the role of police has come to be front and center in that, sort of the way that they're handling protesters that are very much criticizing the leader in pretty unequivocal terms. They're not sort of protesting some vague injustice or whatever, like in many ways, it is very much oppositional. So we see police responding in very, very heavy handed ways when people are going out and protesting against the government. Whereas you might look instead to the protests in Brazil that were run by Bolsonaro supporters, and you see very different responses of the police. And I think people can find analogs here in the US.
Yanilda González:
And this is one of the more interesting interviews that I did when I was doing my fieldwork in Sao Paulo, to hear from a police captain who was sort of saying like, he was in a downtown area of the city where a lot of protests are held. And he was saying that, our precinct gets a lot of calls from the mayor and from the governor telling us how we should treat different protest groups depending on who is protesting and sort of how it will look to the public. And so he says that there are certain groups that people want to see a tougher hand on. It would be a huge scandal if we were to engage in any kind of violence against them.
June:
That's fascinating. You've done a tremendous amount of field work, Yanilda. Going out with the police, going to community meetings into dangerous neighborhoods. Is there any incident that was particularly scary for you?
Yanilda González:
I would say that I felt for the most part safe when I was doing my field work, even when I was going into areas that are a little bit more complicated. I think that sort of going into vibrant areas, even if it's in a place that sort of are characterized as dangerous, or whatever, where you see people walking around, it just kind of feels, okay, people are just kind of going about their lives, and people aren't really paying attention to you. In some ways, maybe I just blended in and nobody sort of thought that I was an outside researcher or anything like that, and I didn't really call anyone's attention.
Yanilda González:
But I would say that the scariest moments were really being sort of a young woman researcher in the field in very masculine dominated contexts, and sort of being constantly subjected to sexual harassment and hearing rape jokes being made about me. In one interview, and actually, it was in a police station in downtown Bogota where a young girl had been raped and murdered in the early 90s, which is one of the key cases that I studied, ended up in a situation where an officer that I was interviewing ended up sort of locking us in the officers' sort of recreational room, their locker room, and sort of locking us in from the inside so that people also couldn't open the door, and sort of asking very suggestive questions and things like that. And sort of different moments like that, where I just sort of had to just kind of brace myself. And luckily, I did not face any sort of issues beyond that. It was difficult situations to navigate as a young woman in the field.
Yanilda González:
There's a lot of great work that's being done now that's thinking about sort of gender and positionality in the field, and sort of what different situations we might face depending on our identities. And so, I think that this is one, the sort of personal safety as a young woman studying certain contexts, I think is one that certainly resonates with me given these experiences.
June:
As a black woman in Argentina, how did that play out?
Yanilda González:
Argentina was a relatively calmer one, because, well, I suspect that there was sort of a broader array of actors that I was talking to. But that was also one where I was, even in some of my recordings today, in some of my recordings today, I listened to some of the interviews, and hear some of the comments that are being made, I still get uncomfortable so many years later. And sort of fascination about my hair as well. People touching your hair. That was one of the areas where I went into an interview with two police officers in one of their homes and they put a gun on the table during our interview. I don't know why I said it was calmer now that I'm thinking about it. Argentina was one of the places where I did feel more conspicuous, whereas when I was in Brazil and Colombia, I felt like I could kind of go anywhere and blend in a lot more. It was kind of dicey across the three countries in that respect.
June:
Yeah, that must have been very hard for a young researcher.
Yanilda González:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was something that, I guess you have to be in your 20s to do things like that. Sometimes I think back and it's just sort of, I think it's really important to think about how we train graduate students, and to sort of consider, how do you navigate these contexts and how do you protect yourself, because I sort of, I knew that I would experience a lot of sexual harassment, but there were certain lines that I think were crossed that I hadn't anticipated, like the sort of gun on the table situation and whatnot. A lot of bad things could have happened had something gone a little bit differently.
Yanilda González:
And so, I think that one of the things that would have been good and that I think we can kind of invest in now a lot more is to think about how do we train graduate students to make sure that they're aware of these situations and give them some tools to navigate them. Because I would say that I definitely didn't have very much in the way of tools other than just staying calm, which in itself is very important, but not sort of escalating anything.
June:
Within the police force itself, were there women, and how did the role of gender play out in the way that the police officers related to people who had committed crimes or were suspected of committing crimes?
Yanilda González:
Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. I mean, I think I encountered very few women, I would say that very few women in the police forces. They were definitely a minority in all three of the police forces that I was studying. And one of the things that this does is that you make it very clear that sometimes there's not even facilities for them. There was one police station where, it was a community police station in Sao Paulo, where there was no bathroom for them to sort of change in and sort of change into their uniforms and to use because there was only one woman in that little police station. It's something that I think definitely shapes, a lot of their experiences is based around this question of, they don't really know what to do with us.
Yanilda González:
And another piece that I also found more so in Columbia is also an investment in sort of women police officers as a way of creating a softer image. And so, for example, the ESMAD unit, which is this anti-protest kind of very heavy handed so called riot police. I remember doing an interview with a young police woman who was part of a unit within the ESMAD that was all women. And the idea was to kind of create a gentler face to the ESMAD. Which is a kind of a wild thing to imagine, this kind of like infamously heavy handed police force says well, let's just make them all women, and that will sort of change perceptions. And of course, it doesn't. But that the women themselves were aware that they were sort of being utilized in that way.
Yanilda González:
And so, I think that gender imbalance that we tend to see in policing tends to create a sort of, as you suggested, a very sort of masculinity, proving one's masculinity becomes sort of integral to policing, including sort of probably many of the things that I experienced in the field when I was doing my interviews of this idea of masculinity and sort of showing yourself to be a sort of a tough macho man when you're encountering mostly young men that you are subjecting to these different policing practices. I definitely saw interactions where proving that I'm tougher than you ended up being a big part of how they engaged with citizens.
June:
Your next book is on the mobilization of family victims of police violence in Latin America, and to what degree these family members are able to achieve some sort of change. Can you tell us the story of a family member that you have found particularly moving?
Yanilda González:
Yeah. One of the great things about this project, which is otherwise really difficult has been meeting these incredible mostly women, incredible family members who have lost loved ones to police. And I'd love to highlight the case of Debora Silva, who is the founder of a movement of mothers called Maes de Maio, Mothers of May in Brazil. Her son was one of the hundreds of people killed during the May 2006 massacres that took place in San Paolo at the hands of police and para-police forces. And I think it's been really remarkable to get to know Debora and to work with her. And she's someone who sort of talks about how her fight is to make sure that this does not happen to other mothers and that this is something that is really driven by, inspired by her son, that it's really something that that she feels his presence and keeps his presence alive through her struggle.
Yanilda González:
And I would say that she has been such a generative force for a lot of change. And I would say even just when she and I met, she said, I want to connect with other mothers in other countries. And so, that was one of the impulses behind a project that I along with other colleagues in University [inaudible 00:29:53] in Colombia, we ended up working connecting mothers from Colombia, from Brazil and from the US, all of whom are engaged in this struggle against state violence after experiencing its consequences firsthand. And that was something that was born from Debora, from conversations with her. And somebody who has also inspired and mobilize mothers groups around the country, around Brazil. And so, sort of that was one of the first experiences of these sort of organized mothers around police violence.
Yanilda González:
It's very difficult for any change to happen with respect to policing, but a lot of their campaigns have been, one of them was, for example, to get a week declared to the memory of the victims of state violence in Sao Paulo. And that was a law that was passed, I believe, I might get the date wrong, I think it was 2013, 2014 I think if I'm not mistaken, it might have been a little bit later. But that was sort of due to the work of mothers like Debora, who really fought to get that recognition. It's important to sort of find those spaces when the people who are most likely to face state violence might generate some spaces for change.
Yanilda González:
So that's kind of what the sort of this next book project is trying to identify is sort of, what are the ways that they mobilize and how are they seeking to change institutions, and under what conditions can they achieve this institutional change?
June:
One of the places that mothers played a really important role has been in Central America. And one of the things that really confuses me, I covered Central America as a reporter during the 70s and 80s. It's one of the places, and you mention this in your writings, that in the transition towards democracy, you saw the creation of totally new police forces were actually being thought about. And yet, if you look at those countries today, those are precisely where you have the gangs, we have out of control violence, we have people fleeing to the United States because they can't live in their neighborhoods. So, what's going on there?
Yanilda González:
Of course, I have to acknowledge that I don't study Central America. And so, these are sort of going to be more general comments. But I think that it is really striking this contrast that you've just drawn between, in particular, El Salvador and in Guatemala, but we could also think about Nicaragua as another place where they really sought to, let's say, we have to do away with the preceding institution because we can't transition to peace and to democracy while having the same apparatus that was repressing so many of our citizens.
Yanilda González:
And so, part of the peace agreements in these countries involved the creation of the Policía Nacional Civil in both El Salvador and Guatemala. And the Salvadoran case is one I know a little bit better, and it was something where they said, we're really going to be intentional in how we design it. We're going to think about what are going to be the basis, the foundations of this police force, and to have both combatants from the military and FMLN to be integrated as one and you're fighting together in this same police force. They really thought deeply about what would democracy, what would peace require of a police force.
Yanilda González:
And so, I think that the research that that folks like Charles [Kohl 00:33:46] and others have done on the Salvadoran police force I think is really striking because it shows what started as this very lofty ideal. And again, being thoughtful and intentional about what do peace and democracy require, and just it not being enough to sort of stop it from devolving into what then became very ineffective police forces, distrusted police forces, corrupt police forces, very violent police forces. And so, it's very telling about the challenges of having democratic police forces. I don't have an answer as to why that occurred but I do think that the parallel is the contrast between how it's, that meme that's going on right now, how it started, how it's going, the contrast could not be greater.
June:
I know you have a time concern, so let me ask you one more question. Here in the United States, there's a lot of talk, particularly on the left, about defunding the police. Is there any such movement in Latin America and what do you personally as an academic think of defunding the place?
Yanilda González:
I think that this is a movement that's still, I mean, obviously, it's still growing in the US. Outside of sort of activist circles, it's not something that is really that mainstream there, and it's certainly not mainstream in Latin America. But it's something that is starting to gain more currency, this idea sort of abolitionist principles to police and prisons. And I'm especially seeing this taking hold among activist circles in Brazil and Sao Paulo in particular. And so, I think it is kind of a testament to the feedback loop and how sort of movements are in communication with each other around these issues.
Yanilda González:
I think that one of the things that I find really exciting about both conversations about defunding the police and abolition, taking a step back and rather than thinking about what is my opinion about it, but more how does it relate to sort of the stuff that I found, the findings of my research, is that it at least broadens the debate around police reform and around policing in a way that is very needed. So, one of the things that I found pretty disappointing in the post-Ferguson era was that the types of reforms that were being discussed were a very, very minor type of reform that I would characterize as sort of very operational cosmetic type of reforms, such as body cameras, implicit bias training. Chicago, where I was before, ended up just changing the name of an agency and called it something else and then called that reform.
Yanilda González:
We had a very narrow view in our public discourse about what reform means and what reform requires. Think back to Central Americans, we have to completely dissolve this old institution and create a totally new one. Look at this context where reform is literally not even tinkering at the edges, but really doing very little to address structural problems. I think what defunding the police and abolitionist discourses at least get us to think about is what I do think that is at the root of a lot of these problems, and that my research suggest is at the root of all these problems, which is what I call the structural power of police.
Yanilda González:
Because the police occupy such a huge role in our societies, they have a ton of leverage to resist any kind of external oversight, whether by civilians or by the political officials that are supposed to oversee them. And so, if you have police in your schools, filling in gaps in mental health, thinking about this pandemic, they're the ones that are enforcing curfews, lockdowns, mask ordinances, sort of all these things. You've got police collecting traffic tickets, and you've got police sort of raising revenue for municipal governments in all these different ways. That's a huge amount of power and presence that police have to resist any kind of limitations on their activities and on their abuses.
Yanilda González:
And so I think that what defund and abolitionist sectors get right is that you have to reduce the power that police have in society, and that means reducing their role, the over-reliance of so many, any type of contraction and aspect of the state. In one area, it ends up being the police that end up picking up that role in so many different ways. And that's not different from Latin America at all. And so, I think that one of the things that I wish it would bring to the public discourse is this question of, well, what is it that we want from the police? How big of a role should they have? And this understanding that the bigger the role that you give to the police, the more power they have to resist any kind of external oversight. It's unlikely that that will happen. It's unlikely that that kind of thinking will enter our discourse because at this point, they've become slogans that have just been politicized, particularly to oppose any kind of deeper police reforms.
Yanilda González:
But that's sort of my wish, is that we would think a lot more broadly about what it takes to reform the police. And so, two of the reform processes that I study in my book are precisely about this, let's sit down and rethink everything, every aspect of police sort of in the way that, when I interviewed the former commander of the Columbia National Police, he was like, this is the first moment where we brought together every sector of society and said, well, what is it that you want from the police? And I think that conversation is still pendiente, it's still pending here in the US.
June:
Thank you very much. We've been talking to Yanilda Gonzalez. She's an assistant professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author of Authoritarian Police and Democracy: Contested Security in Latin America.