Back from the Field - Manuel Moscoso

With the support of the GPD, CLACS, JPAL, and the Political Science Department at Brown, Manuel's primary focus during the summer was twofold. First, he conducted extensive interviews with a variety of stakeholders, including police officers, policymakers, and Colombian researchers. This effort aimed to unpack the strategies employed by the Colombian police in allocating and distributing police stations across rural areas in Colombia. Second, he conducted four surveys, targeting communal members, community leaders, and both rural and urban police officers. This broad of respondents was chosen to understand the consequences of the unequal distribution of police security in Colombia. 

To identify how Colombian police has allocated police stations in rural areas, Manuel is reconstructing the story behind the construction of 75 rural police stations built in South-West Antioquia, West Antioquia, and Magdalena Medio. The goal of the first chapter is to illustrate how central governments face a trade-off when deciding where to allocate police infrastructure in conflict settings such as Colombia. On the one hand, central governments must find a way to prevent armed groups from coopting or threatening local communities. On the other hand, the incumbent central government or the regional government wants to get electoral benefits by targeting their co-partisans local districts or swing districts. Those conditions create a potential dilemma in allocating police security where they do not overlap. 

The subsequent chapter, building upon the foundations laid in the first, explores the consequences of police security in rural areas in Colombia. To explore it, he constructs a framework for comparison between villages with established police stations and those where the police have planned but not yet constructed such facilities. During the summer, with the support of a survey company, he collected 1,856 surveys in 32 municipalities and 64 villages in Colombia. In these regions, he primarily explores the multifaceted role of the police in communal conflict resolution, the exposure of the police to the community, the dynamic between the police and civil society, and the prevailing security and coexistence conditions in rural areas, among others. 

This data collection effort also serves as a vital resource for investigating one potential intervention, that assesses whether providing police officers with information gathered by community monitors can generate accountability pressure, leading to improved public goods provision and increased citizen satisfaction. The theory of change of this potential intervention posits that providing police officers with information from community monitors can shift attitudes and behaviors among non-frontline service providers, such as police officers, by creating accountability pressure and leading to improved public goods provision. This, in turn, can also improve citizen satisfaction by leveraging the complementary roles of state and communal authorities in rural settings. 

During his fieldwork, he explores whether deploying a community monitor through the Juntas de Acción Comunal (Community Action Council) can serve as a formal interlocutor between citizens and the police. The Juntas are communal authorities and are critical to local governance in rural Colombia. The preliminary results illustrate that the community monitor can operate through two potential mechanisms. First, it can directly provide information about police performance at the police station in each village. Second, it can also send this information to the central police station located in an urban area at the municipal level. Both mechanisms intend to mitigate the information asymmetry in different ways. While the first mechanism creates direct pressure from the community at the village level, the second mechanism explores whether a community monitor can create pressure at the municipal level between commanding officers.