Journal of Human Security

3.1.- Motivation

The most obvious advantage of a civil society approach is that there is a clear incentive for communities to encourage improved behavior and performance from police; they are, after all, the ones suffering most from police abuse, incompetence, or neglect, and they have the most at stake in building an accountable and responsive police force. International actors can take advantage of this fact, rather than relying on ministries whose interest level and capacity for execution are more questionable. For example, one of the earliest organized campaigns for police accountability in Afghanistan came after police were implicated in (or at least failed to prevent) the hijacking of a van belonging to the moneychangers union, the murder of its driver, and theft of millions of dollars. The union arranged a strike by of all money changing services and staged a demonstration outside police headquarters until the police leadership agreed to investigate the case and improve security in the main money-changing district. Self-interest is a powerful mobilizer.

However, weighing against their intrinsic motivation for better police behavior, communities and civil society may be fearful of engaging with police, as pressing for improved behavior may put them at risk of retaliation. Furthermore, many civil society organizations and communities may lack awareness of an alternative vision of policing, and how they themselves can push for the desired changes. CSOs in Afghanistan balanced these competing impulses by initiating programming within the “comfort zone” of community members, their own organizations, and the police. Activities such as joint sports programs or teaching police to provide basic safety information were, for the most part, uncontroversial, building trust on both sides and creating willingness for both police and communities to take further steps toward more extensive, substantive contact. Once the initial hurdle of fear was overcome, CSOs became enthusiastic about the possibilities of such foundational activities, suggesting innovative techniques for engaging the police on a wide variety of issues.

International actors can also play an important role in terms of addressing the initial lack of awareness of community policing and roles for civil society in promoting it. In the project in Afghanistan, the UN identified existing forms of engagement (such as women’s groups running shelters, organizations supporting participatory decision making between communities and civil authorities, and business associations that had conducted advocacy for government accountability) and asked them how they could apply their skills to more direct engagement with police. In addition, the project sought out CSOs that had potential for productive interaction with police (such as Scout groups, journalists associations, and sports federations) and encouraged them to think about ways they could contribute to police reform.

3.2.- Connections, Knowledge, Skills

The second advantage of civil society in promoting reform is that it is more likely to have the connections, knowledge and skills needed for successful community policing initiatives, something that Ministries and police forces may lack in early stages of police reform. For example, most Afghan civil society groups agreed that regular consultations between police and communities were essential for progress toward accountability, but that no appropriate forum existed. Existing dialogue structures (such as the Afghan National Solidarity Program’s community development councils) were reluctant to include police out of fear that police would exploit their projects. It was also problematic to have police organize the consultations, as they tended to invite only the power brokers with whom they were already familiar rather than an inclusive range of society. The level of mutual distrust and hostility between police and people made it essential to use a trusted intermediary from civil society to facilitate the initial “entrée” for police to meet with communities. Familiar with community concerns, several CSOs were able to convince a wide range of community representatives to participate. The organizations then used their expertise in dialogue to create a constructive climate for police community consultations, employing communications and conflict management training and processes for expectation setting and vision building, to eventually reach joint agreements and action plans. They were able to diffuse tensions and facilitate relationship building throughout the course of the workshops and follow-up meetings—actions outside the capability of the police to manage.

Along the same lines, civil society can offer police the ability to draw on its resources in a way that reduces the burden on police and makes them look good at the same time, using a simple concept: referral to services. Some services may be provided only by civil society (such as shelters, counseling, hotlines), but with civil society cooperation, police can learn to refer victims to those services appropriately. For example, one provider of a counseling hotline for domestic violence provided a brochure to police so that they could refer victims to the hotline, even when the police could not provide other victim services. In another case, an Afghan women’s organization developed a strong relationship with the MOI and police districts in Kabul. The MOI regularly sent 20-30 police at a time to the CSO to be trained on domestic violence. The training provided some exposure to ideas of gender rights but more importantly, the CSO framed it as a way for police to solve a problem that had been plaguing them: how to provide necessary (but totally unavailable) services to victims. An officer complained to the CSO about the problem of women victims who arrived at nighttime; he said the police had no options on where to keep them. The CSO representative responded, “If that happens, call us, we’ll come to pick up the woman and keep her in a shelter for the night and bring her back in the morning for the investigation”. The police officer was astounded. “You can do that?” The CSO in effect offered the police a referral service to the organizations that could provide shelter, legal aid, and counseling services for which the police themselves had no resources.

Even in regard to projects that theoretically could be executed by a Ministry itself, such as development and delivery of training, civil society has added value. CSOs are more likely than ministries and police academies to be early adopters of new pedagogical approaches for adult learning. Traditional police training structures in the developing world tend to rely mostly on rote learning and lectures, while CSOs likely have been exposed to participatory techniques like role play, practical exercises, etc. Civil society involvement in the development of training can help ensure that such practices are integrated, making the content of training more valuable, especially when the training is intended for interactions with civilian groups, such as youth. Furthermore, CSOs may be better positioned to improve the process of training development, engaging stakeholders to create continuing relationships between police and other entities they need for future success. Finally, civil society participation in delivery of training provides a concrete example of commitment to partnership. With their involvement, police trainees from the start see civil society in an official capacity, as instructor or as fellow trainees, legitimizing continuing interaction with them in a way that preaching about cooperation in theory cannot. Early civil society participation can also create ongoing relationships with those government offices responsible for curriculum development and training.

In Afghanistan, there are numerous examples of this advantage of civil society participation—and counterexamples when the opportunities were missed. One of the most successful police initiatives was the safety outreach campaign: police were trained to deliver safety briefings on fire, traffic, mines, first aid, floods and earthquakes to schools and communities. Dozens of CSOs contributed to the development of the idea, identifying improvement in the police relationship with children and youth as a priority, and suggesting interactions based on safety and security. Ultimately, the UN contracted a communications consulting firm to develop the materials and curriculum, and to train and mentor the police. (The Ministry of Interior was given several chances to initiate and manage the project, but chose not to do so.) The company made an intensive effort to include civil society and governmental stakeholders: it involved safety and disaster agencies in providing input to the curriculum to align it with their own safety approaches. CSOs such as the Afghan Red Crescent Society even took part in the training of police instructors; some safety agency personnel attended events at schools to observe. Coordination with the Afghan Child Protection Network of NGOS and government agencies ensured that the approach would not put children at risk through association with police. Police and CSOs jointly conducted outreach to education departments—using the CSO contacts— that could authorize police access to schools to deliver the briefings. The consultant involved police and the Ministry in the contacts with CSOs throughout the process, with the result that police experienced positive interactions with a number of key organizations who could partner with them in the future.

The involvement of these other agencies ensured higher quality of content than if the course had been developed by MOI alone. In addition, the process of engaging civil society created several side benefits: it gave CSOs and communities a chance to raise concerns about the approach (e.g. police engagement of schools that could put schools at risk of targeting by insurgents); it generated their own interest in the success of the project; and it encouraged them to explore further contact with police on related issues such as disaster response and preparedness. The training department of the Ministry was so impressed by the products that it asked for the firm’s help in developing additional models, such as on drug awareness. These types of materials, when developed in conjunction with local organizations working in that field, can expose police to another sector of society whose cooperation they desperately need for their own success.

Perhaps the most important factor in the success of the project was that it enabled police to provide a tangible service to communities—not propaganda about cooperation, but a sincere demonstration of what the police can do, with minimal resources, to improve the quality of life of their communities. This was a direct result of the motivations of the actors involved: the organizations driving it were at the core interested not in improving perceptions of police (as perhaps a Ministry would be), but in improving the actual behavior of police.

In a related effort, various sports federations and clubs showed interest in building relationships between police and people, and improving police fitness, teamwork, and anti-drug mentality through sports. In response to a query of whether they would arrange for police teams to play civilian teams, one federation leader looked shocked. “No,” he replied, “The police are in such bad shape that they would always lose, and that would cause more tension!” Instead, they proposed a project in which police and youth from the community would train together, forming a joint team that would play against other local teams in monthly tournaments. This project was extremely popular with police and citizens, creating channels for cooperation on reporting and fighting crime, drugs, and terrorism. Civil society not only had the motivation to initiate the projects, but also managed it in a way that was more participatory than a Ministry-driven project would be: participating athletes were drawn from the community (not just from existing associates of the police), venues were offered not only inside police stations but at sports centers in town, and the federations used their extensive connections with existing teams to encourage them to participate in tournaments. Again, this is an effort the Ministry could have led itself but did not - if it had, might not have achieved the same level of participation that a civil society lead was able to provide.

In terms of using civil society participation in delivery of training as a visible commitment to continued partnership, the UN encouraged the Ministry to invite each of these groups involved in the initial community policing initiatives to present their approaches in the first courses on community policing at the Afghan Police Staff College. The presence of civil society as trainers sent a clear message to police participants that the Ministry and police leadership endorsed interaction with civil society actors. It showed that the Ministry considered them legitimate partners, with the implication that continued engagement with civil society by police in the field was acceptable, an important message in a police system that traditionally is disapproving of engagement with outsiders.

In contrast, the advantages of drawing on civil society skillsets were missed in projects that focused exclusively on ministry ownership. In one example, a civil society group with experience in training civilian ministries on gender mainstreaming proposed to develop a course on anti-harassment techniques for police women, who face high levels of harassment from their colleagues. The course would teach not only self-defense techniques, but also approaches to prevent, stop, and report harassment in a system that is largely indifferent to the problem. The capstone of this innovative project was to train the police women to then deliver the same training to university students, helping them to protect themselves from similar problems on campuses, demonstrating the valuable role that police women can play, and building trust between police and students. Unfortunately, the one international organization that agreed to fund the project imposed the condition that the curriculum would be developed and delivered to police by international and ministry trainers rather than through engagement with the local group. That approach would not only miss the chance to expose the Ministry and police to local approaches to dealing with harassment, but more importantly would lose the opportunity to build relationships between the Ministry and a group committed to combating harassment. Such relationships could contribute in the long term to a flow of expertise between police, civilian agencies, and civil society, building momentum on the issue rather than a one-off intervention by internationals that may produce a good curriculum but no continuing relationships.

3.3.- Social Pressure

A final area where civil society shines is in the critical role of “naming and shaming.” Social pressure can be a powerful tool in police accountability. In the case above of the CSO that provided gender training to police, the CSO kept tabs on their graduates, and if these police did something positive on women’s issues in their district, the CSO made a point of writing them a certificate of appreciation. One police commander framed the certificate and hung it up in the police station—an indicator of how much the police wanted to be recognized for doing the right thing. Schools in Helmand sent similar letters thanking the police for briefing the children on safety. School girls asked to have their picture taken with the police woman who visited the school to brief on safety, and one told her “you look awesome in your uniform and someday I will become a policewoman”. As a police officer explained what to do in case of flood, a boy stood up and told the assembled children and teachers that his family had survived a flood because his brother had attended a previous police briefing. A spontaneous movement to appreciate Afghan security forces sprang up among youth groups after a police officer foiled a suicide attack; the groups paid for billboards thanking police for their heroism and mobilized a Facebook campaign to honor the police. For Afghan police accustomed to widespread public derision, these public examples of appreciation were tremendously moving and created a strong sense of pride in what they were doing.

Unfortunately, donors in Afghanistan missed the opportunity to institutionalize such public displays of appreciation. Afghan CSOs had recommended that the Ministry of Interior hold a community policing awards ceremony in which each CSO participating in community policing activities could identify the most active police officer in its project for an achievement award. The Ministry and CSO would award a prize or certificate jointly, so that the police would receive official endorsement of the CSO honor. Because of ministerial reluctance to involve civil society in leadership of the awards process, donors instead held several events in which community policing awards were presented mostly to high level police officials by the International Community, without input or participation by the communities the police were supposedly serving.

Counterexamples of public shaming (or at least vocal criticism) of police behavior, were a common feature of the Afghan community-police consultations. Somewhat surprisingly, the police mostly took the criticism calmly and promised to do better. At least some of these promises were not empty: follow-up meetings moderated by CSOs reviewed action on the demands from previous meetings and in many cases, police leaders had indeed taken action to discipline or remove problematic officers. Often the most effective pressure was directed towards family members of an abusive police officer, to rein in their kinsman. Another approach was to utilize radio or TV “call in” shows like one that Sabah Media did weekly for traffic police complaints, featuring senior traffic officials who would respond to callers and report any corrective action taken. These types of “naming and shaming” efforts were not systematically documented so distilling good practice for this role of civil society requires further examination.

3.4.- Limits of a Society Driven Approach

It is important, however, to recognize the limits of the civil society contribution to police reform, especially in terms of its constrained scope. Activities to build high level professionalism and technical law enforcement capacity are mostly outside the purview of civil society—that is not its comparative advantage. Most conflict-affected nations are also faced with a more basic task of changing the mindsets of both police and populations, and establishing the basic foundations of trust between them. Small steps towards building that trust can set in motion a virtuous cycle that enables higher-level capacity building: support among the population allows more effective recruiting, which contributes to more effective training, better service delivery and improved retention. All of these lead to increased professionalism of the police, which further increases public trust. The initial process of building a foundation of trust and cooperation is one that civil society can effectively set in motion, which in turn can create conditions for more effective investment in technical capacities. Moreover, programming that focuses on making police technically proficient before instituting processes for accountability is problematic. If not accompanied by progress on accountability and responsiveness, international technical efforts to train and equip police forces may merely produce better predators.

At the same time, civil society may lack access to police, or authority to engage police in activities. Some form of “top cover” or “open door policy” from the side of the ministries that officially encourages or permits police personnel to meet with civil society can facilitate early efforts by civil society to invite police to participate in police-community initiatives. In Afghanistan, the creation of a community policing directorate gave civil society a point of entry to propose activities. Although understaffed and largely un-empowered, the directorate had enough authority to sign introductions to provincial police chiefs, providing some legitimacy to the CSOs attempting to engage them. Later, some provincial community policing teams sponsored by the International Community proved extremely helpful as a gateway for civil society to reach other police and persuade them to participate. These police teams, while small and weak in their ability to influence policy, had the ability to secure participation of police women by arguing the case to their colleagues rather than relying on civil society to do so. The function of these types of gateways is discussed in more detail below in terms of the role that the IC can take in building connections between civil society and state approaches.

Despite its limitations, a civil society approach to community policing can lead to better results than dependency on Ministerial initiatives alone. Participatory police reform translates to stronger support and ownership by a range of advocates who can support a more innovative and sustainable approach. In fact, these principles are already recognized in policies such as the 2013 Secretary General’s report on Security Sector Reform [9] which extends the concept of national ownership from “state-centric” to “whole-of-society” ownership, or the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations Policy on UN Police, which states, “United Nations police shall pay attention at an early stage to those aspects of institution-building that can serve to strengthen the integrity of host State police institutions by enhancing their capacity to be held accountable for the performance of their duties including when they commit human rights violations” [10]. The potential of civil society driven approaches is recognized but—more often than not—neglected, a reality that will be explored in the following section.

4.1.- Mind the Gap

Of these two challenges, arguably the most problematic is the wide gap existing between the development community and the institutions usually involved in traditional, ministry-centric police reform. Community policing falls into the gray area between them, with both sides reluctant to bridge the gap. For example, donors, advisors and implementers who focus on strengthening civil society’s ability to insist on good governance, governmental accountability, and effective service provision largely exclude policing from their mandate. This is a curious phenomenon, considering that police are an important primary point of contact between community members and the government, but often require considerable improvement in terms of delivery of justice and law enforcement services to communities. Part of the problem could be the international community’s practice of defining civil police reform as a part of its broader security sector reform initiatives, rather than as a part of government service reform. In doing so, policing becomes a part of a kinetic military counterinsurgency strategy, with a focus on hard security within a militarized paradigm, which prevents the police from engaging with communities in ways with might build trust. In such militarized contexts, it becomes even more difficult for civil society to approach police as a civil institution, which results in a strict divide between those organizations who focus on community mobilization and civil society initiatives on one side, and those who work on police capacity building on the other. The gap could be directive (for example, USAID has explicit restrictions on training or capacity building for police) or could reflect ethical preferences (humanitarian-oriented organizations that find engagement with security forces uncomfortable or distasteful). The security community has its own constraints, in terms of a limited definition of what constitutes police training and a reluctance to involve actors from outside the security sector. While this paper critiques the execution of the military mandate in this specific case, these issues suggest a more fundamental need to reassess the appropriateness of the selection of the military for police training in future interventions.

An immediate impact of the gap between the security and development communities is the unavailability of funding to support community policing initiatives, especially those involving civil society. The starkest examples come from the Combined Security Transition Command for Afghanistan (CSTCA), the major player on security sector reform, with resources at that time of $1 billion per month to spend on the army and police [12]. From the outset, CSTCA claimed that it did not have authority to fund programs that benefit the community, but only programs that directly benefit the police. The problem here, however, lies in the military understanding of what constituted “direct support to police”. CSTCA interpreted this in its own military context (namely, training to shoot, move, and communicate) rather than in a framework of a police service providing access to justice and safety services. When presented with a proposal for community-police consultations—a core component of community policing initiatives throughout the world—CSTCA procurement officers responded, “Can you leave the community out of it? Then we can fund it” (They later relented slightly, suggesting that their funds could provide tea at meetings, but only for the police participants and not for the community representatives). CSTCA’s lawyers also vetoed a proposal to train the police to deliver briefings to children on fire safety because “fire safety education is not part of the police mission”. CSTCA and the military command interpreted the purpose of safety briefings as an educational service for the public, rather than a core police function. In fact, the military claimed that it could not assist the police to do anything “that benefits the public” since this would invalidate the entire police training mission. With few police experts to advise them otherwise, military lawyers continuously blocked initiatives for engagement between police and people. A year-long struggle to authorize such police outreach activities specifically in CSTCA’s congressional language resulted in allocation of $7 million for community-police engagement pilot projects developed and driven by CSOs. However, that decision was discarded by the next rotation of commanders and lawyers; the projects were cancelled, and those funds reallocated to police salaries.

It is not only within the security sector that funding silos have a negative impact on programs that cut naturally across traditional funding borders. For example, the primary funding vehicle for police reform, the Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan (LOTFA), rejected a project to encourage networking between police domestic violence response units and health care providers to increase mutual referrals on gender-based violence [13]. LOTFA claimed that it could not use funding designated for the Ministry of Interior to train staff from the Ministry of Public Health. The absurdity of these restrictions—imagined or otherwise—did not reduce the severity of their mpact on police programming that required intergovernmental or societal involvement. Repeatedly, essential programming for community policing—by its nature a crosscutting, multi-sectoral program—was blocked by funding structures designed for single ministries or purposes.

The structural problems of the donor community threatened community policing in more subtle ways as well. Availability of funding to support initiatives was key in encouraging Afghan CSOs who were typically focused on social welfare to look past their natural boundaries to take a role in police reform. Such funding was, for the most part, not forthcoming. As the UN began to disseminate results of its community-police engagement pilots and search for ways to integrate them into the mainstream of police reform, it quickly became clear that LOTFA was the only option for sustained, serious funding. Most international actors were reducing their presence and insisted that their contributions take only one channel rather than investing in multiple avenues for police reform. In effect, that meant virtually all contributions were channeled through LOTFA. However, LOTFA faced serious restrictions in supporting civil society-driven initiatives, as it worked under a National Implementation Modality (meaning that MOI must approve any programming and procurement). MOI was suspicious of contracting to entities outside MOI instead of building internal capacity (an understandable and legitimate concern) and was even more reluctant in contracting involved NGOs and civil society, which it viewed as competitors or even usurpers of government prerogatives (a rather less legitimate concern). In some cases, it saw the funding of NGOs as an admission of lack of government capacity to absorb and execute funds (one which the government did not want to make). Therefore, proposals for civil-society driven projects were generally viewed by MOI as non-starters.

LOTFA also faces challenges related to its donor structure, which demanded a comprehensive plan that limited grassroots experimentation and bottom-up approaches. Even LOTFA’s procurement structures were problematic, requiring competitive bids that discouraged CSOs from advancing their own creative ideas for programming—if they did so, their idea could then be sold to the lowest bidder. LOTFA did not have a functional grant modality that would allow CSOs to design and implement their own innovative approaches. Furthermore, integration with the full justice chain and Rule of Law approaches was often blocked due to limitations on participation of justice sector agencies and on transfers of funds to UN agencies. Consequentially, LOTFA was only able to identify a limited number of community policing activities that it could support, which focused on remote strategic interventions rather than people-to-police contact and actual service delivery that could affect quality of life, access to justice, and public trust in police.

Other police reform donors had equivalent difficulty in gearing themselves for a civil society approach. One of the largest sources of expertise on police reform was the European Union Police Mission. The EU used its own seconded police officers to deliver training and had limited options for providing grants or contracts to Afghan CSOs. Some EUPOL officers made strong efforts to coordinate their own mentoring activities with ongoing civil society initiatives, but EUPOL was not a viable source of financial support for civil society police reform projects.

The development-security divide also limited support for community policing through traditional grant mechanisms. Community-police engagement proposals were largely unable to tap into grant programs for community mobilization and rights initiatives. This was due either to explicit donor limitations on engaging the security sector, or to lack of competitiveness of relatively riskier initiatives characterized by little proven experience, lack of a willing governmental partner, and general fear of involvement with the security sector. For example, a DFID-sponsored grant program tried to prioritize community policing, but not a single proposal for police-community engagement was approved, even though some of the same organizations received approval for proposals they submitted on non-police projects. Many grants mechanisms were aimed only at registered NGOs, meaning that other types of civil society (professional associations, sports federations, unions, and research/consulting firms) with good ideas were automatically ineligible to apply.

The funding challenge is not just about making dollars available to local CSOs for initiatives. Funding determines which organizations will work in this field, who will bring expertise to it, who will take the lead in decision making and planning, and who will serve as the advocates with host governments about priorities and approaches. In recent cases, international military personnel took the lead for police reform, prioritizing capacity for kinetic operations over justice service delivery. Police reform needs to include a wider range of actors to represent the full range of roles played by the police, and to draw on the full range of capacity building assistance. For example, the development community has a wide range of participatory, qualitative and quantitative evaluation and quality control mechanisms that the security sector reform institutions have not yet developed. These would be useful to adequately guide and monitor new approaches to engaging communities and police. In one well-intentioned effort, advisors trained police to deliver counter-IED training to schools, but a subsequent review found that the course might unintentionally have taught the children how to make their own pressure plates. Improvements in design processes to take account of the broader impacts and possible unintended consequences of new activities on communities could lead to more effective outcomes.

While it may seem that resolving the constraints on funding for civil-society driven programming requires a simple increase in flexibility on the part of donors to make space for it in their programming guidelines and priorities, this would involve a formidable awareness raising effort: advocacy with hundreds of different organizations to affect their respective agendas and bureaucratic imperatives. An alternative is to work through training programs for international police advisors, exposing advisors to the potential of civil society-driven reform, and providing them tools and resources to harness it. Since there are only a few dedicated training schools or courses to prepare international police advisors, targeting these key courses could be more effective than targeting the large numbers of donors directly [14]. This would allow for a concerted effort to raise awareness with the personnel who can shape and advise programming of their respective donor offices and counterparts. However, these advisors would still have little power to influence changes in underlying organizational constraints. Interested donors or the training programs could consider an initiative to expose the participants of advisor training to the ideas of civil society-driven reform, and then, once they are in-country, to provide these ‘graduates” access to dedicated funding to support civil society-proposed projects to engage police and communities.

One relevant aspect of the ICT4COP project is to develop a training course for advisors on engaging civil society and other actors to strengthen community policing. If this course could be associated with a grants package that the advisor could direct to promising civil society initiatives, it would not only encourage advisors to participate in the course but would give them the resources necessary to bridge the funding gap. Another ICT4COP initiative has been the establishment of a Police Expert Network, where international police advisors, national police, national civil society organizations and academia meet to share experiences and create information platforms which can provide police advisors and national counterparts with resources for use in their specific reform processes [15].

4.2.- Government-Focused Statebuilding

A second factor limiting any embrace of a civil society approach by the international community is the natural preference of international coalitions, embassies, and even the United Nations to deal almost exclusively with state counterparts, especially when “statebuilding” is the stated goal of the mission. There are a number of possible explanations for this preference:

• International actors, like host governments, may shy from a civil society approach because it may imply that the government is not sufficiently committed to a community policing agenda. (Although, alternatively, sending a message to ministries that there are alternatives to relying solely on ministry partners might encourage officials to find new ways to cooperate with civil society).

• The International Community may be averse to community-driven processes because they are less predictable—and controllable—than bilateral interactions with a central government, and therefore carry higher risk of heading in directions that are not consistent with the priorities or values of the donors. In one accountability project, an NGO trained community groups to monitor donor-funded construction projects to ensure compliance with standards [16]. One community discovered that a contractor was building a school with substandard bricks which could be crumbled in the hand. When other interventions failed, the community finally organized a sit-in on the road to block the trucks bringing the bricks until the contractor agreed to use higher quality materials. The NGO proposed to apply the same monitoring process for the construction of police stations, with the goal of building cooperation between communities and the police who would use the stations. Upon hearing about the brick protest, CSTCA contract managers responsible for police station construction vetoed the initiative. Building a capacity for civil resistance is not high on the agenda of most international aid programs, even if it could be a key factor in promoting good governance.

• The International Community tends to focus on a national, state-determined definition and standard of community policing. A frequently articulated concern is that variations in civil society approaches around the country will create fragmentation and confusion in national police planning. This is in direct contradiction to widespread acceptance that local communities in conflict-affected countries may have widely divergent needs and that community policing is an intensely local undertaking. Diversity in community policing is not fragmentation: enabling people to find local solutions allows national structures to choose from a variety of methods that they can then integrate into formal training and procedures, highlighting community policing as being a collection of activities which together improve police-community relations, trust, and accountability, rather than one particular expression. Exacerbating the fear of diversity, some international advisors mistakenly conjoin the question of diversified local approaches to community policing with the wider debate over police models (usually centralized vs. regional police). They see variations in community policing across the nation as endorsement of a regional model, which politicizes the debate on community policing, when it is really separate and distinct from choices on a national police model.

Ultimately, the state-focused argument has some legitimacy: community action may be desirable, but at the end of the day, if it is not integrated into the curriculum, training courses and operational doctrine, it cannot genuinely and sustainably affect the police and their operations. What the international community has not yet fully recognized is that the civil society driven approach can actually strengthen the likelihood of ministerial support for community policing. Options for the International Community to promote this are provided in the subsequent section on statebuilding.

4.3.- Statebuilding through Civil Society

A civil society approach to community policing would seem blocked by the fixation on ministerial capacity building. But the international predisposition towards working with state counterparts has the best of justifications: to succeed, the intervention must produce an improvement in state capacity for good governance and delivery of services. This is even truer for policing than most sectors. Without sufficient buy-in to community policing by the Ministry and central police commands, their control over personnel, training, and operations would rapidly nullify any advances made by civil society with their local police.

The answer to such concerns lies in institutionalizing the linkage between civil society driven approaches and formal state/ministerial capacity building. International actors can assist the “feedback loop” so that civil society initiatives become sustained within the formal police and other government structures. Fortunately, not only is it a natural process to absorb community-driven activities into a Ministry, it could actually be more effective than starting with a governmental approach alone. There are a number of potential transmission mechanisms, which international actors can act to strengthen.

Demonstration Effect: As argued above, a ministry might not have the motivation or interest to launch community policing programs themselves, when its officials do not yet have a “visual” of the activity and how it will benefit the Ministry. But a Ministry often would embrace these activities if it could see them “in person”—when it could see tangible results and gains made by them. Working through organizations that do have the right motivation can create a reality that a Ministry can see, appreciate, and adopt for itself. A good example is the Afghan police safety outreach campaign, developed within civil society structures, which ultimately produced a low effort, high impact initiative that was appreciated by participants and improved the image of police. Photos of students looking up at police with awe and admiration, and to testimonials from commanders about the positive public response, prompted MOI to act swiftly to expand the project. International actors and civil society can reinforce the demonstration effect by engaging strategically with the ministry, inviting key decision makers and strategic communications/training departments to observe the activities, and using media coverage to make MOI aware of the image impact that the programs can have. International advisers to the Ministry can also help the transmission of best practices from the civil society initiatives to formal police operations by encouraging inclusion in curriculum and training activities.

Advocacy: As more communities and police staff are exposed to the programming, new allies emerge who can help advocate with MOI for expansion. Gradually, a consensus develops that the engagement activities should be a standard operating procedure for police. For example, shortly after the Afghan police started safety outreach in Herat, the Provincial Police Chief received calls from principals and teachers for police to visit more schools. In another example, Parliament—an important actor, given its connection both to civil society/communities and its oversight role of police—started to put pressure on MOI to expand civil society programs for women police once it became aware of their results. Convincing MOI to adopt community policing without this support “lobby” is much more difficult than when multiple sectors of society are demanding that change. Additionally, national advocates can press for change over time to sustain reforms, rather than depending on short-term international pressure.

A New Generation of Leaders: As noted above, commanders at the district and provincial level are often more receptive of community policing concepts because they benefit directly and personally from improved relations with their communities. Over time, many of these junior leaders will rise through the ranks, taking that experience with community policing with them, with the ability to promote it on a wider level. Where promotion is linked to their results in the field, there may even be a process of natural selection at work to move the proponents of community policing faster through the ranks. In at least one case in Afghanistan, an officer was promoted on the basis of his work in community policing: his proven ability in managing community interactions made him the prime candidate to handle sensitivities of elections security [17].

Even in the shorter term, police “converts” to community policing can lobby for increased attention to it, or simply institute the institutional changes themselves that will help them consolidate and expand the activities. For example, in the project to strengthen links between police and health care providers, workshop participants were able to make small changes in their own working routines that later spilled over (either through advocacy with leaders or simple adoption of good practices) into the Ministries’ operating procedures. Police staff also identified creative ways to use the techniques introduced by civil society more broadly. For instance, after becoming familiar with briefing schools on safety, one community policing team used the first aid brief as an icebreaker with the taxi unions. Once the union representatives were sufficiently impressed with police concern for their wellbeing, the police announced, “Now we can talk about licensing and registration!”.

This concept of the “new generation of leaders” point and the previous point on advocacy can mutually reinforce one another. A strong grasp of community policing concepts is—to a much greater extent than more technical police skillsets—dependent on individual personalities; both at the implementation level (for example, a policeman who on his first visit to the Boy Scouts jumps in to play along in a game of musical chairs) and at the policy level (a ministry official who risks official censure by encouraging access of CSOs to internal decision making), success of community policing requires the right person in the right job. Still, the right person may not stay in the right job, due to frequent turnover of police and ministry officials—indeed, there may possibly be more frequent turnover of community policing “converts” due to their experimentation with the unfamiliar concepts of community policing. To sustain progress, the new generation of leaders must be nurtured and protected by the advocacy community, and their gains institutionalized.

Receptors: An important factor in the success of civil society initiatives in Afghanistan is whether civil society had a sympathetic point of contact, a “receptor” inside the police force/Ministry. An office that is dedicated to community policing issues can provide a point of entry for civil society and can take the lead in disseminating results and advocating for expansion. As demonstrated with the community policing directorate supported by the UN and provincial community policing teams sponsored by EUPOL in Afghanistan, the reception point can be somewhat weak to start, and may be just enough to provide a point of entry and internal translation for the civil society organizations on the outside. One civil society project for police to mentor boy and girl scouts on safety and rule of law struggled the first year with only eight police participants. With the introduction of the nascent community policing teams and a directorate in the Ministry, police participation grew to hundreds by the following year. The directorate and the teams (only six people each in seven provinces) were not very strong initially, but were able to reach their colleagues and manage the bureaucratic hurdles more effectively than outsiders. Ideally, those receptors would be able to take credit for successes, contributing to their own growth. Due to a capacity building mandate with the Ministry, a key role for international community is to encourage authorities to create these types of reception points. Interestingly, focal points such as community policing teams/directorates may not be doctrinally correct as a long-term solution, because they risk isolating community policing from mainstream operations. However, in the short term they empower civil society initiatives that can then build the wider buy in for longer-term reform.

Finally, these effects are not mutually exclusive: The example of Afghan Police Women Councils combined a number of these approaches. A network of women’s CSOs worked to strengthen police women in Afghanistan with the goal of providing better access to justice for women. They assisted the women police to network with each other, to improve advocacy skills so that they could negotiate effectively with their commanders, and to reach out to communities to develop allies. The first experiments were quite successful, resulting in improvements in facilities and more support for women police, including involvement in assignment decisions and response to workplace harassment. The Ministry, however, reacted defensively to the possibility of police women pushing for their own solutions, afraid that their advocacy would damage the reputation of the Ministry and create competition for centralized gender affairs departments. It ordered the police women to stop interacting with the CSOs and dissolved the new police women councils. Intervention by allies in the international community, CSOs, and Parliament helped the Ministry to understand the tool that the networks provided and resulted in establishment of terms of reference for police women networking that benefited both the Ministry and women. The councils have since been incorporated into the Gender, Children and Human Rights Department, where they have established a hotline for women police to report harassment issues and procedures to review cases. This highlights the role that the international community can play in integrating civil society experiments into sustained ministerial efforts.