The Need fora Moderate Level of Police Legitimacy

high and extremely disadvantaged neighborhoods, controlling for factors such as residential stability, youth population, and spatial and temporal effects. The rule of law represents justice the more society and/or citizens move away from the rule of law, the more crime-prone they are. This means implementing community policing strategies in postcolonial contexts is even more dubious and challenging.
Community policing advocates might argue that this is looking at the theory of change in the wrong direction. Instead, community policing strategies should be implemented in such societies in order to build needed legitimacy for the police in the first place.
Although it is true that the successful police-community interactions of select community policing strategies can produce outcomes of legitimacy, the Bangladesh experience suggests that this is very unlikely in postcolonial contexts involving extreme political corruption, human rights abuses, and extensive legacies of citizen mistrust. In Bangladesh, citizens report that the types of officers they are more likely to engage with on a daily basis in the streets are not actually the few CPOs assigned to do community policing at the thanas, but rather the poorly trained constables that represent policing to the average citizen. These individuals makeup the majority of the police force, and have little power to make decisions or engage with citizens on solving general crime and violence problems, and instead must wait for orders from more senior officials before taking any significant action. The constables low capacity, and the BNP’s use of them as the ‘frontline’ in the community, continues to limit institutional legitimacy. In these cases, community policing strategies may even exacerbate the problem of alack of legitimacy if implementing authorities are not careful given the disconnect between community challenges and external political factors affecting the ability to form meaningful police-community partnerships needed for true proactive problem-oriented activities.
Future efforts to build police legitimacy of the Bangladesh National Police may require an increasing separation from the Ministry of Home Affairs and the close control it represents to the political party in power. However, this is likely not the best place to begin. Where alack of legitimacy is a prolonged, entrenched reality (as in the case of the BNP), it may make good sense to first lay the seeds for community policing efforts within the community itself through development of a sense of collective responsibility for community safety, or collective efficacy as discussed in Chap. In Bangladesh, well-intentioned external development support such as those from USAID/TAF, UNDP and others ended up simply pushing the community policing model without contributing, or paying attention to the larger needed elements of police reform and professionalization that is necessary for citizen security to truly take root. In fact, this is the case of UNDP in particular, because it supports the wider Police Reform Programme, its officers were setup directly within police headquarters in Dhaka. While this provided greater access to senior police officials and allowed the UNDP to introduce a number of important initiatives – such as the
2007 Police Act, and the national community policing strategy – it also impacted the neutrality of some UNDP staff, who were often overly sympathetic to police challenges of corruption, and reasons to not push a reform agenda too much The Not So Exemplary Example – Bangladesh National Police

Without a sophisticated analysis of the sociopolitical realities in postcolonial societies, implemented Western models of policing will ultimately take the shape of these structures beneath the surface in away that is counterproductive to their original intent.

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