As we approach the fifth anniversary of the most infamous act of police violence in the world—the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer—and the subsequent wave of global protests against police abuses—it is worth taking stock of recent efforts to rein in the structural power of the police in the Americas and beyond. A global protest movement emerged in 2020 representing, in many cases, unprecedented challenges by ordinary citizens to the status quo of unchecked police abuses and a historic opportunity to reconfigure the police’s role within the state and relationship to society. But, half a decade later, police forces around the world have largely weathered the storm, re-emerging as formidable political actors and resisting most efforts toward meaningful reforms.
The months-long protests following the killing of George Floyd is undoubtedly the most well-known protest movement against police violence, but it was far from an isolated phenomenon. A cascade of mass social protests against police violence emerged contemporaneously in many parts of the world in 2020-2021. In Belgium, protests erupted following the death of a young man in police custody at the hands of police, and in France, tens of thousands protested against proposed legislation to expand police surveillance authority and criminalize filming police abuses. Nigeria, meanwhile, saw the largest youth protests in its history in response to egregious abuses by its notorious SARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad) police unit. Latin American countries also saw widespread mobilization and outrage over police violence. In Colombia, mass protests erupted after the killing of Javier Ordóñez under the guise of enforcing pandemic restrictions and culminated the following year in an estallido social, a months-long protest movement that left dozens of fatal victims at the hands of police. Rampant police violence was also a defining feature of the state’s response to Chile’s own estallido social in 2019, similarly becoming central to protesters’ grievances. In Peru, waves of political crisis amid the destitution of embattled presidents in 2020 and 2022 led to massive protests that were, as in Chile and Colombia, intensified by deadly police repression against protestors. The subsequent societal indignation led the newly installed president to put together a special commission to recommend police reforms weeks after taking office in November 2020. In Brazil, protests against rising police killings and other abuses in states such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo accelerated the implementation of important institutional measures to curb police killings, including a judicial order to restrain lethal anti-drug operations in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas during the pandemic, and the adoption of body cameras by São Paulo’s Military Police. The Dominican Republic also saw widespread societal outrage following the killing of two young, newly married evangelical pastors by the national police. Though the killing did not result in a mass protest movement, the societal opprobrium led the president to hastily convene a special commission to reform the police in 2021.
These efforts by ordinary citizens and organized civil society around the region and the globe only represented an unprecedented bottom-up challenge to entrenched abusive practices by the state’s coercive institutions. They also yielded some notable efforts toward reining in the use of force by police, in some instances producing meaningful reductions in police killings. Following Colombia’s prolonged estallido social, President Ivan Duque announced a reform process intended to achieve a “permanent transformation” of the National Police. The role of the protest movement in pressuring the president to enact reforms is notable: after a wave of anti-police-violence protests the previous year that yielded ten fatal victims, President Duque responded by visiting a police station and donning a police jacket, intended to convey his unwavering support for the institution amid one of its most serious crises in recent history. But in 2021, after months of protest, Duque’s response changed. Colombia’s police reform effort garnered considerable support from prominent civil society organizations and prestigious universities, which provided technical assistance, and from the political class, as evidenced by the rare continuity of the reform process under Duque’s successor, Gustavo Petro. In Peru and the Dominican Republic, the prospects for reform were similarly promising, with special reform commissions working closely alongside an array of prominent civil society organizations, a partnership that can help sustain societal support for difficult reforms. Brazil, in contrast, did not convene a special commission to consider broad-based police reforms. Yet, limited institutional measures that were ultimately implemented as a result of growing societal pressure following high-profile cases of police violence proved to be highly consequential. In Rio de Janeiro, a preliminary ruling by the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF) in 2020 put meaningful restraints on heavily militarized anti-drug operations in the state’s favelas by the Military Police, reducing not only the number of Military Police operations but also their lethality. Known as the ADPF 635 or “ADPF das Favelas,” the judicial order was estimated to have saved hundreds of lives in 2020. São Paulo’s body-worn cameras initiative—also enacted in 2020 due to mounting public pressure in the face of rising police violence—was also found to substantially reduce civilian deaths at the hands of police: one study found a 57% reduction in the number of police killings and another analysis found a 66.7% reduction in police killings of adolescents.
Despite their initial promise, these reform efforts also suffered from distinct limitations that, in the end, rendered many of these measures highly precarious at best and largely ineffective at worst. The reform commissions convened in various countries highlight this point. Such commissions not only facilitate democratic deliberation about a core area of public policy; they can enable crucial societal input at a moment when a key state institution loses credibility among much of the citizenry. But the lack of decisive action can also lead citizens to move on from the initial scandals and the concerted public pressure for reform to dissipate. As the Peruvian case illustrates, reform commissions—even with strong support from civil society—too often result in stalled reform processes, which then lose salience on the public agenda. After the initial fanfare upon the installation of the special commission in November 2020, the commission’s key recommendations regarding human rights and institutional oversight largely faded from the police’s strategic planning agenda, often with dire consequences. Two years after the commission began its work, the Peruvian National Police responded to protests over the destitution of another president in December 2022 with indiscriminate violence, resulting in the deaths of 49 civilians and one police officer. The record of Colombia’s police reform commission has similarly faced important challenges. Prominent civil society organizations that participated in the police reform working group (Mesa de Trabajo por la Reforma Policial) denounced the reform process as “endogenous and cosmetic” and lacking in structural reform measures. The organizations’ criticisms are indicative of institutional foot-dragging that can lead to a watering down or discarding of structural reform proposals, particularly those that entail external oversight.
The fate of more limited—albeit more consequential—measures adopted in the Brazilian states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are especially instructive about both the potential efficacy of institutional interventions in reducing police violence and the ease with which they can be dismantled in the face of police resistance and shifting political winds. Although police reform is a complicated process that requires long-term commitment to produce sustained results, the judicial order that imposed restrictions on militarized police operations in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas and the adoption of body-worn cameras by MIlitary Police in São Paulo demonstrated unequivocally that concerted oversight of police actions can indeed reduce police violence in the short-term. Yet, despite their effectiveness in saving lives, both measures faced non-compliance and attacks from political leaders, ultimately giving way to spikes in police killings. In Rio de Janeiro, violations of the order resulted in one of the largest police massacres in Brazil, yielding 28 fatal victims in the favela of Jacarezinho in 2021. The state’s governor routinely spoke out against the restrictions, calling their revocation a “birthday present.” In São Paulo, Governor Tarcísio de Freitas’s attacks on body-worn cameras were part of a broader approach to security policy that actively promoted lethal police violence as a solution to crime, leading to an increase in the number of fatal victims from 421 in 2022 to 814 in 2024. The governor then changed course, admitting his “erroneous vision” about body-worn cameras, following renewed social outrage over shocking acts of police violence, including a case in which a police officer threw a man off a bridge. The São Paulo case in particular demonstrates the impact of reforms to constrain police violence, but also underscores their precarity. Rather than being driven by programmatic considerations, the willingness of political leaders and institutions to place meaningful constraints on the police’s power is a function of the pendulum swings of public opinion and shifting political incentives.
But police forces across Latin America did not merely succeed in eschewing reform attempts; they also emerged as stronger political actors, in many instances enhancing their structural power and institutional autonomy. In Brazil, a new Organic Law of the Military Police passed in 2023 with little debate or societal input reinforced the militarization of policing instituted by the military dictatorship and undermined external oversight by subordinating independent Ombudsman Offices to police commanders. The law’s passage was facilitated by the election of a record number of police and military officers to congress in 2022, tripling the size of that body’s “bancada da bala” (bullet caucus). This “policialism” of politics deepened in 2024, with 7,000 retired police officers running in local elections and the historic election of more than 850 to municipal office. The blurring of the lines between policing and politics in Brazil means that the police can not only shape but also directly design the policies that govern policing institutions, ensuring their alignment with police prerogatives and limiting efforts to address one of the highest rates of police killings in the world. Although Brazil saw the most sweeping growth of the police’s structural power, police forces in other countries in the region also enjoyed expansion of their institutional autonomy and coercive authority over the citizenry. In the Dominican Republic, amid a still-ongoing police reform process, a presidential degree granted the National Police expansive new authority in the enforcement of immigration law, with little in the way of oversight. In Perú, despite national and international outrage following the deaths of nearly 50 protesters at the hands of police, the government declared that the instances of police use of firearms against civilians would be judged by the military justice system, rather than civilian judges, a measure that all but guarantees continued impunity.
Decades after the “third wave” of democratization, democratizing police forces remains a pending debt throughout Latin America. A historic wave of mass protests against police violence swept over Latin America and the globe in recent years, demanding the transformation of an institution that too often operates as an authoritarian enclave within otherwise democratic states. In many ways these processes proved to be quintessentially democratic, as elected leaders and state institutions in one country after another responded to citizens’ demands for meaningful changes to put an end to long-running police abuses. But these cases have also illustrated the resilience of police institutions in Latin America (and beyond), who not only continue to impede or revert most reform measures and resist external oversight, but also have gained new authority and cultivated new pathways to political power. When the next cycle of police scandal and demands for reform inevitably emerges, the challenge for advocates, affected communities, and reformist policymakers will be to sustain the initial pro-reform consensus among Latin American societies divided by entrenched inequality and enduring violence and insecurity.