To disarm the pendulum

Theoretical and epistemic redefinitions in the study of the community police of the Province of Santa Fe

Abstract

In 2017, for my degree thesis, we decided to compare two community policing programs in the city of Santa Fe. In 2018, one of the empirical referent, the Santa Fe Community Police was disbanded. This police unit had the largest number of agents throughout the Province and was the specialized segment most legitimized by the citizens. This article proposes to reconstruct the obstacles, challenges and responses that we went through to explain the dissolution of the Community Police. The idea of “pendulation” in security policies is put in tension to slide towards a thought that puts a specific force as an effect of political disputes around the definition of the police and the mechanisms to govern it. Likewise, this way of understanding the problem was produced by positively integrating access and restriction to the field as an analytical input.