Urban Violence and Security Policies in Unequal Cities

Citizen security policies are the set of measures with which governments respond to urban violence: policing, criminal justice, social prevention, design of space and gun control. In the unequal cities of Latin America, which concentrate a disproportionate share of the world's homicides, those policies have swung between the iron fist, which promises quick results through more police and more prison, and prevention, which acts on the causes. Two researchers have studied that dilemma: the anthropologist Teresa Caldeira, author of City of Walls, and the Chilean political scientist Lucía Dammert, a leading reference on citizen security in the region.

Caldeira and Dammert: fear, walls and punitive discourse

Caldeira showed in São Paulo that the social response to crime, walls, private security and gated enclaves, does not reduce violence but redistributes it toward those who cannot pay for protection, and that the discourse of fear legitimises police brutality against the poor. Security thus becomes a market good that deepens segregation. Dammert, in Fear and Crime in Latin America (2012) and in her work for ECLAC and the Inter-American Development Bank, adds a finding: fear of crime grows regardless of real rates, is fed by the media and political discourse, and pushes governments toward punitive policies that pay off at the polls but not on the streets.

The record of the iron fist in Latin America

The iron fist has a well-known record. Mass incarceration in El Salvador, Honduras or Brazil filled prisons without sustainably reducing violence for two decades, and turned prisons into gang academies. Raids and the militarisation of peripheries produce abuses, distrust and extrajudicial killings, as the data on police lethality in Rio de Janeiro document. El Salvador's state of exception since 2022 has cut homicides at the cost of tens of thousands of detentions without guarantees, and its sustainability and its cost in rights remain in dispute. Dammert warns that security without the rule of law is a mirage.

Which security policies have worked

The policies that have worked combine several fronts. Community policing under civilian control, with training and accountability, such as Bogotá's quadrants or Rio's pacification units in their first phase. Focused interventions in the hot spots where most crimes concentrate. Programmes for at-risk youth, with jobs, education and mediation, that interrupt entry into gangs. Control of firearms and alcohol. And social urbanism: transport, schools, libraries and public space in the hardest-hit neighbourhoods, as Medellín did, going from 380 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 1991 to under 20 in the following decade.

Design of space: situational prevention and its limits

The design of space matters, but within limits. Situational prevention, lighting, opening up, giving visibility and use to streets, reduces opportunities for crime and fear; but, as Caldeira warns, when it turns into walls, cameras and the expulsion of undesirables from squares, it reinforces exclusion. The difference lies in whether the intervention opens the space to more people or closes it to a few. Dammert also insists that policies must measure violence against women and in the home, which the statistics of street homicides render invisible.

Both authors conclude that urban violence is a problem of inequality and institutions before it is a problem of policing. The cities that have reduced violence durably did so by bringing the state, in the form of rights, services and justice, to the neighbourhoods it had withdrawn from, and by treating their residents as citizens to protect rather than threats to contain. Everything else, walls, raids or prisons, buys time at a price paid by the same people as always.