Rehabilitating Police Organizations After Intervention
BY FRANCES V. HARBOUR
One of the tragedies common in failed and violent authoritarian states is that the police force becomes a significant contributor to humanitarian disaster. An organization that should protect domestic order and human security instead is implicated in human rights violations.
When violation is on a scale that provokes international humanitarian intervention, moving toward democratic policing afterward is extraordinarily difficult. However, rehabilitating a police force is necessary, possible, and morally coherent. Rehabilitation is even more challenging than reform because it implies a fundamental change in outlook as well as performance.
This article addresses the ethical issues related to rehabilitation after humanitarian intervention, though practical questions are always intertwined. Not least is a very real dilemma of whether a public institution compromised by human rights violations needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, or whether the existing organization can be rehabilitated. The scale of human rights violations that prompted an international response could not have happened without the resources and coordination of bureaucratic institutions, including the police. Thus, we need to ask questions about the moral status of organizations as a whole, as well as the individuals who carried out heinous acts.
To keep the discussion focused, I adopt Robert C. Johansen’s strict definition of humanitarian intervention. It limits the term to cases where foreign armed forces cross the borders of a state without the permission of a government that would usually represent it, and as a direct response to massive human rights violations. Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, and East Timor are examples of such places. The ethical problems the indigenous police in each of these areas continue to exhibit demonstrate both the difficulty and the importance of rehabilitation.
A new political environment must provide the context for changes, but without a rehabilitated police force, a democratic civil society has very little chance. With the exception of the military, no government institution is in a position to deliver so much intentional physical harm to citizens and the reputation of the new government. The usual phrase in such cases is “democratizing” the police force, making it an organization suitable for a democratic country.
In normative terms, any police force ought to effectively protect society from crime and violence. Democratic policing combines the pursuit of order with justice. This is partly a matter of internal structural change and giving institutional accountability to more democratic national decision makers. In the long run, it also must include a change in attitude by the population at large. To be effective, the police force needs to be trustworthy. A lingering memory of past organizational injustice is part of what makes the police force as an institution so hard to trust. One reason a sense of legitimacy is so difficult to establish may be because most post-conflict police reform does not deal very well with accountability for the institution’s past.
Philosophers have long been interested in accountability, how society ought to respond to wrong and injustice. Punishment is society’s answer to cases of individual legal and moral responsibility, but the end served is less clear. No one justification for punishment is immune to criticism in practical, ethical, or intellectual terms. Aristotle believed that punishment returned society to the balance of justice that had been disturbed by the criminal. Immanuel Kant argued that pure retribution must be the goal. John Stuart Mills and Jeremy Bentham believed that punishment is unjust unless it deterred future crimes. In Jacksonian America, advocates of the Philadelphia System added rehabilitation as a central goal. Contemporary discussions cite restitution, moral education, and reconciliation as goals for holding individuals accountable. Institutional rehabilitation should also contain elements of justice as balance, retribution, restitution, and education of both the public and police force members. Rehabilitation should above all contribute to improving justified trust between people and police.
It makes ethical sense to hold police forces and other security organizations collectively responsible for their past because institutional responsibility goes beyond individual acts. Individuals committing harm are individually morally responsible when they carry out their organizational roles in an unprofessional or criminal fashion. However, they are also representatives and agents of the organization, and employ the resources of the organization as a whole. When the whole policy structure of the institution is deliberately directed toward human rights violations, this further harnesses the collective power of hierarchy and authority, resources, and standard operating procedures. Holding institutions accountable recognizes that an organization is more than simply the sum of its individuals. If that institution is not taken seriously as a collective actor, then we ignore a key source of the past harm and future incentives.
Holding an organization collectively accountable is difficult in practical terms. The organization as a whole should be given new watchdogs and complaint procedures for the future, but what of the past? Societies punish collectives for many kinds of civil actions, especially in the commercial realm. However, punishing a corporation has a different dynamic than punishing a police force. Fining or boycotting a police force weakens its ability to carry out its legitimate mission. Society cannot imprison an organization per se because it does not have a corporeal body. Individual decision makers at different levels certainly can be incarcerated, but this does not constitute arresting the collective body itself.
A kind of capital punishment for the organization itself is possible. It is very tempting in ethical terms to demand that reformers completely restructure the institution and purge all individuals guilty of human rights violations. Doing so creates a fledgling police force untainted by the past, but leaves relatively inexperienced officers facing a very tricky security situation. Usual practice for both emerging democracies and the objects of humanitarian intervention leaves in place a number of individuals who were part of the previous regime. The serious problems with post-intervention indigenous police forces in Bosnia and Haiti show why this can be problematic, but recent recruitment problems in the Iraqi police force show why practical considerations are so compelling.
In two senses, a reformed police department is, or should be, a new collective actor. The central decision-making group should be made up of different personnel basing policies on different operational values. If the broader institutional structure or its personnel remains intact, however, we are looking at change, not complete rebirth. Moreover, although humanitarian intervention by its nature challenges complete sovereignty for states, it does not challenge the notion of the continuity of the state in question. Police are so central to a state that it is difficult to see how one can argue that any police force can become an altogether new institution, short of a complete break-up of the state itself or total liquidation of the original force.
Whether the post-intervention police force is a new institution or the continuation of an earlier one matters in ethical and practical ways. If it is brand new, it needs to do a much better job of respecting human rights than its institutional parent, but it is not morally responsible for any of the actions of the reprehensible old party. If the postintervention force is, instead, a rehabilitated version of the former one, then it will need to deal with its past more directly, and will require considerably greater supervision in the present.
Rehabilitation should include institutional repudiation of past to gain public acceptance in the long run. Engaging the past can reduce the public’s sense of injustice and raise confidence that the future will be different. Since public accountability is a central principle of democratic policing, institutional amnesia will not promote expectations that new problems will be handled properly. Moreover, the police force as an institution has been deeply affected by its own wrongdoing. The organization’s standard operating procedures, recruitment and promotion policies, and institutional culture have been shaped by an environment where core values were defined in terms of the interests of the regime and each individual officer. This affects its collective approach to public order, detention, human rights, and even the law. Without a formal collective response, there is little reason for continuing individual officers and managers to expect the announced changes to be more than temporary lip service to a new political arrangement, to be ignored the moment interveners’ attention wavers.
Dealing with the past cannot be limited to punishing or firing individuals who committed heinous acts. Successful institutional change should include institutional identification and disavowal of unacceptable policies and practices. Concrete actions integrate reforms at the managerial level, and reduce the chances of repeating tragedy in the future. Restoring reputations and returning unfairly seized property serve restitution as well as deterrence functions. Even symbolic changes indicate the future will not look like the past. Nothing can erase past injustice or the knowledge of who committed it, but acknowledging the past without provoking future violence can be an important first step toward real institutional change.
The stakes are very high. As analyst Timothy Donais writes, “Particularly in cases of intrastate conflict, recent experience underlines the fact that those internal security sector institutions underpinning the rule of law are just as important as military institutions in the transition from war to peace.”
Frances Harbour (fharbour@gmu.edu) is associate professor of public and international affairs (http://pia.gmu.edu) and an affiliate of the Center for Global Studies.
