Inequality, Fear and Security: An Ethnographic Study of Community Policing in Maputo, Mozambique

Abstract

Políciamento comunitário (community policing) was launched at the beginning of the 2000s in Mozambique as a project to liberalize, democratize and legitimize the national police. The majority of communities in the country do not trust the police to provide safety and security, especially on the outskirts of the city centers. With a history of violence and mob justice by a population that is used to “taking the law into its own hands,” the Mozambican state has failed to provide security for all its citizens. Community policing is an effort to involve citizens in security arrangements and to improve relations between citizens and the state police. This thesis is based on five months of anthropological fieldwork among the residents in various bairros (neighborhoods) of the capital of Mozambique, Maputo. With data from a variety of actors on differing levels of the community policing project, the aim of this research was to determine how community policing is operating in these areas in order to provide perspectives on current community policing in Maputo. As the concept in itself implies, community policing practitioners are actors who are in an intermediary position between the community and the state. An ethnography of such positions and the actors involved provides a perspective of policing from below.