Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus: Speeches, Statistics and Testimonies of the Buenos Aires Context 3031463781, 9783031463785

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Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus Speeches, Statistics and Testimonies of the Buenos Aires Context Federico Luis Abiuso

Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus

Federico Luis Abiuso

Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus Speeches, Statistics and Testimonies of the Buenos Aires Context

Federico Luis Abiuso Faculty of Social Sciences University of Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, Argentina

ISBN 978-3-031-46378-5 ISBN 978-3-031-46379-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46379-2

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

In Memory of Néstor Cohen (1944–2023)

Acknowledgments

I want to thank my dad, Luis, who taught me the significant value of work and effort. To Belén, my sister, for always being there supporting me. To all my extended family: my brother-in-law Lucas, my sister-inlaw Mica and my parent-in-laws Aida and Aníbal. They also gave me the necessary backing to advance in the book. Special thanks to my mom, I hope that wherever she is, the news of this publication reaches her. To all the relatives gone but which I still carry on my shoulders with every step I take. To professors Máximo Sozzo and Néstor Cohen, for their complete support in all these years that we have known each other, for teaching me to research and encouraging me to improve every day in my career. Unfortunately, Néstor passed away this year, before he can see this manuscript in its final version, but whoever reads it will undoubtedly find the legacy of a mentor like him. I especially thank Gustavo González for his advice and suggestions in the bibliographic survey on those productions focused on the links between police and politics.

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Acknowledgments

I want to thank Professor Juan Pegoraro, for teaching me that “society” does not exist, but rather a certain social order, with its differences, inequalities, hierarchies and dominations. To the colleagues and friends with whom I share teaching work teams at the University of Buenos Aires, at the University of Belgrano and in research projects: Gabriela, Silvia, Jessica, Norberto, Gonzalo, Mariana, Guadalupe, Darío, Sergio, Matias, Gisele, Anahí, Ramiro, Manuel and Danila. To my academic and non-academic friends, who, each from their place, gave me their help to advance in the book: Gastón, Matu, Nacho, Mauro, Julio, Juan Martín, Leo, Gonza, Joaquín, Felipe, Ale, Martín, Ulises and a long list that a single book would not reach me to thank you all accordingly. I also want to thank my colleagues and friends from “abroad”, for their kindness, for listening to me and for encouraging me to improve my academic production: Alessandro, Leonidas, Dario, Branda, Giulia and Ana. To the CONICET, for allowing me to carry out the research with financial support, with all the facilities that this implies. To the Palgrave Macmillan team, to Josie Taylor for the first contact, to Abarna Antonyraj, those who evaluated the proposal and to all those involved in managing the editorial process. And, above all, to Tati, my soulmate. My life partner, the inspiration that accompanied this book, from the moment it was a proposal until it became a final manuscript. Without her, all the pages would be blank. Thank you very much for always accompanying me, in good times and even more, in bad times. I know that with your company, I will never walk alone.

Contents

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Introduction: Approach and Contextualization Immigration in Argentina Security Forces in the Buenos Aires Context Argentine Federal Police Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police Buenos Aires City Police Approach: Different Empirical Domains Book Itinerary References

1 1 8 9 11 12 13 15 19

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Researching the Links Between Police, Politics, Immigration and Crime Political Discourses Secondary Quantitative Data Semi-structured Interviews References

23 24 28 30 33

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Contents

Police, Politics, Immigration and Crime: A State of Art Relations Between Police and Politics Links Between Politics, Police and Violence Police and Governmental Rationalities Ways of Conceiving the Relations Between Police and Politics Police Reform Processes Crime, Police and Politics Migrants and Police Practices Immigration and Crime References Political Discourses Around the Immigration-Crime Nexus Introduction “We Need to Know Who Is Who” “We Are Not Talking About Foreigners Who Come to Work, But About Those Who Commit Crimes” “We Have to Be Able to Tell Other Countries That If Someone Has a Criminal Record and Committed Crimes, He Will Not Be Welcome in Argentina” “We Do Not Have a Problem with Immigration, We Have a Problem with Drug Trafficking and Smuggling” Synthesis Other Categories References The Language of the Numbers Introduction Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires Ministry of Justice and Security (Buenos Aires City Government) Ombudsman Office of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires

35 36 36 37 41 48 52 54 67 69 75 76 77 79

81 85 95 95 99 107 108 110 117 119

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Program Against Institutional Violence (Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina) Synthesis References

120 126 133

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Mean Streets. Interactions Between Police and Migrants Introduction Differentiated Treatment: Interpretations References

137 138 140 153

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Violences Introduction Violences Violences, Rule or Exception? Violence and Governments in Power References

155 156 157 169 171 173

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Police Attitudes Towards Migrants Introduction Police Attitudes Towards Migrants During Cambiemos Administration Modifications in the Police Attitudes Between the Previous and the Current Administration Attitudes Towards Migrants and Security Forces References

175 176

The Role of Politics Introduction Narratives About the Nexus Between Police and Politics References

191 192 195 199

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10 Vulnerability in the Face of Police Action Introduction Vulnerability to Police Action How to Overcome Vulnerability? References

177 182 185 188

201 201 202 207 208

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Conclusions Introduction Main Results Final Reflections References

Index

209 209 210 215 216 217

About the Author

Federico Luis Abiuso Ph.D. in Social Sciences. Sociologist and Professor of Sociology (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina). In his CONICET postdoctoral fellowship, he studied the links between politics, police, immigration and crime in the City of Buenos Aires in the period between 2015 and 2019. He is Professor of Social Research Methodology at the University of Buenos Aires and University of Belgrano. He participates in different research projects focused on sociological dimensions about migrations, intersectionality approach, history of the travels of knowledge on the criminal question and the relation between museums and publics of art. He published in specialized journals such as Punishment & Society, URVIO Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios de Seguridad , Delito y Sociedad , Revista Historia y Justicia and International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. He received the Distinction for Scientific-Academic Production 2021 (University of Belgrano), for his article edited in Punishment & Society. Between the months of August and September 2022, he developed a research stay at the Universitá di Bologna, where he was able to consult different police journals and materials of interest from the criminological and

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sociological point of view. He is a member of the Red Latinoamericana de Metodología de las Ciencias Sociales-RedMet, Red Iberoamericana de Investigación en Imaginarios y Representaciones-RIIR and Red Iberoamericana Foucault.

List of Tables

Table 4.1 Table 5.1

Core categories: synthesis Comparative synthesis

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1 Introduction: Approach and Contextualization

Abstract This introductory chapter presents the relations between immigration, crime, police and politics in the City of Buenos Aires between 2015 and 2019 as my object of study and research. In accordance with the international scope of the book, I also present a contextualization (both about immigration in Argentina and around the security forces of Buenos Aires) that will allow the reader to understand better the particularity of the case. This chapter concludes by advancing the proposed itinerary through the different chapters and, at the same time, anticipating some of the main results that I will detail in each of them. Keywords Immigration · Security forces · Buenos Aires · Argentina

Immigration in Argentina Argentina’s history as a nation-state parallels its history as a country of immigration. In this sense, we can mention different migratory flows and dynamics, as well as several laws and decrees to manage and regulate them. Although Argentina became independent from Spanish colonial rule in 1816, discussions about the type of immigration favorable to the development of the country became explicit—from the intellectual © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Abiuso, Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46379-2_1

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elites—only around the Constitution of 1853. Beyond the preferences, and the motivations attributed to each of them, mainly Europeans arrived in the country between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ruling political elites fostered this immigration through the Immigration and Colonization Act of 1876 (also known as Avellaneda Law), a regulatory framework which included, among its objectives, attracting skilled labor for the new productive needs, modifying the composition of the resident population and “populating the desert”.1 The law included two parts, the first dedicated to immigration and the second to colonization. Due to the quantitative weight and intensity of this immigration, as well as the impact it had on the modernization and urban expansion of Argentine society, Gino Germani (1966) defines this dynamic as a mass immigration, whose main protagonists were Italians and Spaniards, and to a lesser extent, Polish, Russians, French and Germans. In another of his texts, Germani (1987) reconstructs, based on census information, an overview of the weight of the foreign population between 1869 and 1947. Thus, in 1869, 210,300 people were of foreign origin, a figure that rises in 1895 to 1,004,500 and in 1914 to 2,358,000, constituting almost a third of the total population of the country. Most of the new arrivals settled in the cities, especially in the City of Buenos Aires, near the port. These migrations were resignified, more recently, as a constitutive part of the country’s identity (Cohen, 2004), associated with the notion of Argentina as a “melting pot” or to the idea that “Argentines descend from ships” (I will return to this point in Chapter 4). However, there are numerous analyzes that described the ways in which these migrations were subjected to processes of criminalization, construction of stereotypes and racial prejudices, produced in the spheres of police journals (Abiuso, 2020; Ruibal, 1993), criminological and/or “experts” discourses (Caimari, 2004; Rodriguez, 2006; Salvatore, 1992, 1996, 2006; Sozzo, 2011). Also, as Eugenia Scarzanella (2015) points out, in the field of

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According to Germani (1987), around 1869 a little more than 70% of the population was rural.

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period popular literature, for example, in En la sangre (1882), by Eugenio Cambaceres. In fact, the Argentine Nation-State itself enacted a series of laws to resolve the “undesired effects” of this immigration and to deal with “ideologies foreign to the national being”, such as anarchism and socialism (García Fanlo, 2010). Through the Residence Law (1902), the National Executive Power could order the expulsion from the country of any foreigner convicted—or prosecuted by foreign courts—for crimes or common crimes, whose conduct compromises national security or disturbs “public order”, without the right to a trial for the accused. In addition to this potential expulsion, the law also included entry criteria into the country for the aforementioned categories of foreigners. The Residence Law was repealed in 1958, under the presidential mandate of Arturo Frondizi. In a complementary way, the Social Defense Law (1910) deepened some articles of the Residence Law, especially, on the prohibition of the entry and admission of different “classes of foreigners” to the country, among them, the anarchists. The law also set penalties for Argentines who transported foreigners defined under these parameters, and prohibited any association or gathering of people whose purpose is the proliferation of anarchist doctrines.2 Unlike the Residence Law, this law was repealed in 1921. Together with the previously mentioned restrictive measures, the events linked to the interwar period, as well as those related to the Wall Street social and economic crisis of 1929, slowed down the growth of external migrations; the migratory balances corresponding to the years 1931–1940 (72,700) and 1941–1946 (33,000) are the lowest in the period. Instead, the flows of internal migrants grew, who moved mainly from other provinces and regions to the City and Province of Buenos Aires. Once retaken the external immigration in 1947, the greatest migratory balances in the period between 1947 and 1954 were of Italians and Spaniards. In terms of the distribution by nationality, around 2

For the process of criminalization and repression of anarchists, see Caimari (2009), Cesano and Muñoz (2010), Galvani (2016), Albornoz and Galeano (2016), Albornoz (2017, 2021), Galeano (2018), among others.

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1954 Italians and Spaniards continued to be the majority, followed by Paraguayans, Polish and Russians. Since the 1960s, the numbers of migrants of European origin have decreased, while those from neighboring countries begin a sustained increase. More specifically, and taking into account the different censuses, in 1991 the number of migrants from nearby and non-nearby countries was equated, in 2001 migrants born in neighboring countries represented 60% of migrants, and in 2010, 69%. According to this latest census, of 1,805,957 foreigners (4.5% of the total population), 1,245,054 are from nearby countries (Monclús Masó & Brandariz García, 2014), such as Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru. In fact, Eduardo Domenech (2011a) locates the starting point of the process of political-state construction of the figure of the “illegal” migrant born in neighboring countries as a “threat” or “social problem” in the 1960s. He refers specifically to the Decree-law entitled “Foreigners: regime of admission, stay and expulsion from the territory of the Republic”, ordered by the administration of José María Guido, in June 1963, that defines the illegality for entry and permanence. The author then points out different legal pieces and institutional developments produced—around the aforementioned construction—in the contexts of the de facto government of Juan Carlos Onganía (Decreelaw “Foreigners—Expulsion of undesirables”, of 1969) and of the last civil-military dictatorship (Law No. 22,439, entitled “General Law on Migration and Immigration Promotion”, or also known as the Videla Law). The Videla Law, which sought to document and register the “undocumented”, who were generally migrants born in neighboring countries, and promote migration that was called, at that time, “qualified” (Novick, 2008), was sanctioned in 1981 within the framework of the civicmilitary dictatorship known as the National Reorganization Process, which ruled from 1976 to 1983. Argentina was de facto governed during this time by a military junta made up of Jorge Rafael Videla, Emilio Eduardo Massera and Orlando Ramón Agosti. With the return to democracy in the presidential elections of 1983 (with the victory of Raúl Alfonsín), the decrees on immigration issues promoted later—under the mandate of President Carlos Menem, who

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governed between 1989 and 1999—recognized immediate precedents in those instrumented in the sixties. In this regard, Domenech highlights a decree issued in 1993, whose explicit political objective consisted of “facing the serious problem caused by the illegal occupation of homes and other crimes that disturb social peace”. In the same sense, he points out the approval of a new Migration Regulation in 1994, one of whose pillars focused on the need to “strengthen those actions and instruments that tend to avoid the existence of illegal situations”. Another of the milestones that he mentions points to the projects to modify the Videla Law that the ruling party promoted (during the last years of the 1990s) in the National Congress of Argentina, described by Domenech (2011a: 59) as tending “to harden the migratory controls and to increase the restrictions, under the argument of controlling illegal immigration”. From a similar line of inquiry, Manuel Andrés Pereira (2016: 186) affirms, “it is very relevant take into account that specific decrees were created in the midst of neoliberalism, where you can see an equivalence relationship between ‘immigration from nearby countries’, ‘illegal’ and ‘crime’”. On a more general level, the 1990s is a context that presented—from various spheres of Argentine society—an association between that immigration and different social problems (a subject to which I will return in Chapter 3 of the book, when highlighting the literature linked to the relationship between immigration and crime). Along with the growth of migrants born in neighboring countries had in the 1990s, since the middle of the decade, Senegalese arrived in Argentina, with specific characteristics and traits (cultural, religious and labor factors) that distinguish them from other migratory flows such as Europeans and from nearby countries (Kleidermacher, 2013). In December 2003, a new migration law was enacted during the presidency of Néstor Kirchner, repealing the Videla Law. According to Anahí González (2019), Law No. 25,871, promulgated by the National Executive Power in 2004 and regimented in 2010, regulates the aspects of entry, stay and expulsion, as well as recognizes and strengthens a series of rights for migrants (health and education rights, for example). In the

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same years, immigration regularization plans were also implemented, the most important being the Patria Grande Program. In fact, Domenech (2011b) points out the displacement of the illegal term by that of irregularity, although this does not remove the centrality that the legal/illegal division has in the State’s views on immigration from neighboring countries. The same author highlights the shift from a rhetoric of exclusion—typical of the 1990s—to a rhetoric of inclusion, founded on the human rights of migrants, regional integration and the integration of foreigners. Despite these aspects and the aforementioned advances in rights, Domenech concludes, immigration continues to be viewed as a social problem, simplified in terms of a problem of migratory irregularity, and in a calculation of costs-benefits (advantages-disadvantages) for the host society.3 On December 10, 2015, Cambiemos won the national elections in Argentina, taking the candidate Mauricio Macri to the presidency for a period of four years. Cambiemos was a political coalition created from an agreement between the parties Civic Coalition ARI, Republican Proposal (PRO, for its initials in Spanish), Radical Civic Union, Conservative People’s Party, Democratic Progressive Party, Faith Party, Union of the Democratic Centre and Public Trust. Unlike the previous governments, between 2003 and 2015, framed within a neo-development program, the administration inaugurated in 2015 resulted in a return to neoliberalism. According to Leandro Bona (2019), we can highlight different features that enable us to characterize the Cambiemos administration. In the first place, the configuration of a new power block, hegemonized by transnational banks, foreign capital and the financial sector. Beyond stability and economic growth, the priority was on the redistribution of income from the subaltern classes to these specific sectors of the ruling classes. Secondly, within the framework of international relations, and unlike the main opposition party (Front for Victory), which claimed a certain priority in the South American continent, Cambiemos connected with the classic liberal discourse of “opening up to the world” by improving relations with the United States. 3

In this sense, it is pertinent to highlight that different authors (Domenech, 2011b; González, 2019; Monclús Masó & Brandariz García, 2014) point out contradictions, paradoxes and critical aspects related to this law and its specific application.

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Thirdly, the author points out the relevance of the profile of officials in the new structure of the government apparatus, defined as CEOcracy or government of CEOs. We may also understand it as a context of political conservatism, understanding by such a panorama of the rise of right-wing policies, where the preference is in the moderation and prudence rather than social change, where the main reference points to cultural attitudes linked to the “family”, “tradition”, “nationality” and “republic”. Likewise, a context of open rejection of “populism”, both its structures and its protagonists. During the Cambiemos administration (years 2015–2019), the implementation of Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017 introduced modifications—unilaterally, by the National Executive Power—in Law No. 25,871. Academics, human rights organizations and NGOs of civil society saw these changes as a setback in the current immigration policy. The decree, which had the endorsement of officials from different areas of government, as well as the support of opposition representatives, was presented as part of a policy to combat “international organized crime” and/or crimes related to “narco-criminality”. The text of the decree explicitly mentions the increase in foreign prisoners in jails and their incidence in those detained for drug offenses, thus making an identification between immigration and crime visible, which I will detail, in greater depth, in Chapter 4. Among the changes that the decree introduced in the current legislation, it can be mentioned the modification and incorporation of new causes of impediment to enter and stay in the country. As well as for the cancelation of the residence, since from the decree the residence of any person who has a conflict with the criminal law can be rejected or canceled, without an explicit consideration of the seriousness of the crime, and even in cases where there is no final court ruling. Another of the changes points to the introduction of a special summary immigration procedure for the detention and deportation of migrants, characterized by the reduction of processing times, both in the administrative procedure and in judicial appeals. Despite these restrictive mechanisms, it is necessary to point out the significant increase experienced by Venezuelan migration. As stated by

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María Dolores Linares (2021), the restrictive shift in migration policy not only did not affect Venezuelan migration, but it has also benefited from a series of public policy and normative instruments developed between the years 2018 and 2019. Likewise, the author cites different figures, taken from the National Directorate for Migration and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees: by 2015, more than 12,000 Venezuelans resided in Argentina, a figure that rose to 130,000 in 2018 and 251,200 at the beginning of the year 2021. This constitutes, without a doubt, a relevant panorama to reflect on—as Linares suggests—about the selectivity regarding immigration policy, and the juxtaposition of restrictive and open positions regarding desirable and undesirable migrants. As well as on the tensions between the general immigration policy (embodied in Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/20174 ) and the selective policy directed towards Venezuelans. Along with the modifications in immigration policy, the Cambiemos administration also implemented changes in security policies, specifically, with the creation of the Buenos Aires City Police in 2016.

Security Forces in the Buenos Aires Context There are different police institutions in Argentina and in the world (as well as other security forces, in general), with their particularities and characteristics that allow them to resemble and differentiate one another. Although in Chapter 3, dedicated to previous inquiries on the subject, I will refer to several of them, the book focuses on the Argentine Federal Police, Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police and Buenos Aires City Police. I present below a historical contextualization of each one of them, seeking, in this way, to internalize and inform the reader about these institutions. For this, I will base myself on a racconto of the Argentine Federal Police (Galvani, 2007), Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police 4 During his presidential term, on March 5, 2021 Alberto Fernández repealed Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017, considering that it includes aspects “irreconcilable with our National Constitution and with the international system for the protection of human rights” (Decree No. 138/2021).

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(Anitua et al. 2010) and Buenos Aires City Police (Maglia & Dikenstein, 2019). Previously, it is noteworthy that the Argentine Federal Police has its own “official” history, written by “police writers” (Galeano, 2009), the longest being the one that begins in 1580 and culminates at the beginning of the second millennium (Rodríguez & Zappietro, 1999). In addition to a renowned publishing company, whose most paradigmatic examples may be the police journals edited between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, such as Revista de Policía.

Argentine Federal Police In her description of the history of Argentine Federal Police, Galvani (2007) points out different stages: Buenos Aires Police, Capital Police and Argentine Federal Police. For the author, during the colonial era, there was no police organization as it appears to us today, but there was a police power represented in different figures (e.g., Mayor of the Holy Brotherhood). Until the creation of the Municipality of Buenos Aires, in 1856, the municipal and police functions were juxtaposed with each other. The 1810 revolution set an inflection point, with the centralization of the police forces and the creation of the State Police in 1821. During the Juan Manuel de Rosas regime (1829–1852), the Buenos Aires Police and the Campaign Police coexisted. A second stage in the history of the Argentine Federal Police relates to the conformation of the Argentine State, and particularly, around the delimitation of physical violence monopoly over a territory. In this context, as Galeano (2017) suggests, the aforementioned ambiguity began to be resolved with the federalization of Buenos Aires in 1880 and the construction of a capital for the Province of Buenos Aires, the city of La Plata. As a result, the Buenos Aires Police (both urban and provincial) was divided into two different institutions: Buenos Aires Provincial Police (which exists to this day) and Capital Police (1880–1943), whose novelty was that it began to receive orders from the National Executive Power through the Interior minister.

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Going back to Galvani’s description, the author highlights the actions of the Capital Police in the administrations of Yrigoyen and Uriburu. In doing so, she points out three topics: its relationship with the government and the use of the police for its defense, the fine line that separates the police structures from illegal behaviors, and the military and repressive conception that marked the behaviors of the force (even when referring to the use of torture). For a later period, she marks, between 1930 and 1945, a strong tendency towards militarization in the police. The Federal Police, separated from the Capital Police, was created in 1943, through Decree No. 17,750, dependent on the Presidency of the Nation. In 1944, it became dependent on the Ministry of the Interior, and in 1945, it became the Argentine Federal Police. This institution depends on the National Executive Power (through the Ministry of Security) and performs security and judicial functions in the territory of the provinces and the capital of the Nation. In the same way that she did it for the Capital Police, Galvani highlights the actions of this security force in different governments, both democratic and those military or de facto. In the same sense, she mentions different legal pieces and regulatory decrees, such as the Organic Law. The author argues that militarization is a recurring characteristic throughout the different stages of the Argentine Federal Police’s history, with the dictatorship of 1976 being the period in which it was most explicitly expressed. Moving into the twenty-first century, Galvani emphasizes the relationship between the police and the construction of “enemies”, not only external, but also internal. In this sense, and in an illustrative way, she mentions the discrediting classification of “illegal immigrants”, an aspect that I will return to in Chapter 3. Although the Argentine Federal Police exercised the functions of local police in the City of Buenos Aires since its creation in 1943, from the end of 2016—with the creation of the City Police, which I will detail below—it acts in that jurisdiction in cases of federal crimes, such as drug trafficking, money laundering, environmental crimes and human trafficking.

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Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police The request for the creation of a police force of the City of Buenos Aires was one of the main campaign promises of Mauricio Macri, as a candidate for Chief of Government of Buenos Aires in the 2007 elections, to combat crime. Although between 2006 and 2007 seven projects were presented, the request for the creation of an autonomous police force increased since, in 2007, the National Congress repealed Article 7 of Law 24,588, which prohibited the Buenos Aires City Government to create any type of institution focused on security. In fact, the presentation and approval of the project for the creation of Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police take place towards the end of that year. This police recognizes a precedent in Buenos Aires Urban Guard, a civil institution (not armed), with functions related to security and that depended politically, functionally and administratively on the Executive Power of the Buenos Aires City Government. The Buenos Aires Urban Guard operated between May 2005 and December 2007. The proposed Law of the Buenos Aires government party (Republican Proposal), Law 2894, presented in April 2008, and sanctioned in October 2008, under the mandate of Macri in his position as Chief of Government of Buenos Aires, established the public security system for the City and incorporated the formation of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police. Despite the fact that the idea of a police force proper to the City of Buenos Aires was already present in 2007 as a project, it was only on February 5, 2010, that it began its deployment and began its activities. In a significant analysis of the political actions that articulated the creation of this security force, Anitua et al. (2010) highlight—from the own visions of the institutional spokespersons—three features of this institution. The weight attributed to technological resources, information management as an essential piece of this police and an alleged application of the so-called community policing model in the design of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police. In this regard, the authors cite officials who point out that the new police force will receive contributions from the “community”, that it will be “community oriented” and

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that it will be a “proximity police force”. In fact, the own motto of the Metropolitan Police was “A police corp integrated to the community”. This security force ceased to exist with the creation of the Buenos Aires City Police, at the end of 2016. From its creation until that year, the security of the City of Buenos Aires was responsibility of the Argentine Federal Police and Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police.

Buenos Aires City Police On January 18, 2016, the transfer agreement between the Nation State and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires was approved, where the latter assumes functions and security powers in all non-federal matters. Until 2016, the security of the City of Buenos Aires corresponded to different police forces: Argentine Federal Police and Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police. Of these, the Argentine Federal Police is the one that had the most weight in the city, both due to the number of police officers and due to their jurisdictional responsibilities (in addition, the Metropolitan Police had only three communal police stations, while the Argentine Federal Police had fifty-four police stations). The agreement implied the gradual and progressive transfer of personnel, competencies, services, material and immaterial goods from the Argentine Federal Police (related to non-federal matters) to the City of Buenos Aires. As well as the transfer of the fifty-four police stations and other police units. As stated by Elea Maglia and Victoria Dikenstein (2019), the coincidence between the administrations of Macri (at the national level) and Horacio Rodriguez Larreta (at the local level, as Chief of Government of Buenos Aires), both belonging to the same political coalition, enabled the creation of this new police force. Thus, on November 17, 2016, the Buenos Aires City Legislature enacted Law No. 5688, creating the Comprehensive Public Security System and, with it, forming the Buenos Aires City Police. This institution depends on the Ministry of Justice and Security of the City, and, at the time of its creation, it united police officers of the ex-Metropolitan Police and the transferred federals (combining, in this way, two forces

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with different traditions, symbols, forms of organization and idiosyncrasies). Both security forces identified under the same black, burgundy and turquoise clothing. Regarding precisely the characterization of the transfer, different officials allude to a complex process, outcome of the merger of two forces with different roots, traditions and that did not share the same hierarchical and specialized positions. In addition, Maglia and Dikenstein point out that the Executive Power “did not ask who wanted to pass” but rather did so arbitrarily. In addition, the authors highlight the tensions, contradictions and even the resistance of the Argentine Federal Police officers to the transfer to the incipient Buenos Aires City Police. In continuity with the previous proposals of the Metropolitan Police, the City Police relied on two bastions or pillars: proximity and technology. Regarding the first, the emphasis is on the continuous police presence in the streets or, in other words, the proximity with the “neighbors”. From the point of view of officials, the place of the police is the street: the police officers must be in the street (I will resume this centrality, in Chapter 6, when addressing the interactions between police and migrants that take place on the streets of Buenos Aires). As for the second pillar or bastion, a key element of the City Police is its “technological profile”. Especially, the use of new inputs and highend technology. By way of illustration, the use of the crime map and its related statistics (this, in turn, is an aspect to which I will return in Chapter 5, dedicated to secondary quantitative data on police arrests). Information management and territorial proximity thus constitute two interrelated faces of the Buenos Aires City Police, at least from the perspective of its promoters.

Approach: Different Empirical Domains This book constitutes an exploration of the relations between police, politics and the immigration-crime nexus in the City of Buenos Aires between 2015 and 2019, in the context of the Cambiemos administration. As such, it is thematically located at the intersection between the

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sociology of the police and the sociology of migration, although it also dialogues—perhaps not so explicitly—with other disciplines and fields of knowledge. In broad terms, it is the product of research carried out within the framework of a postdoctoral fellowship granted by National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET, by its initials in Spanish5 ), directed by professors Máximo Sozzo and Néstor Cohen, with workplace at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Litoral (IHUCSO-LITORAL) and developed between April 2020 and September 2023. The research is also part of continuity with experiences and practices that are part of my formative trajectory, being able to mention both the participation in different UBACyT, PRII and PICT projects, and that carried out in the doctoral thesis. Following Néstor Cohen (2009, 2012), one of the assumptions that guided—as a starting point—such inquiries is that the State plays a fundamental role in the administration of ethnic and cultural diversity, through the articulation of different institutional devices: ensembles of actors, practices and discourses located in a normative context (Sozzo, 1999), such as school, justice and security forces. These are scenarios for the constitution of various modes of social relationship between resident foreign communities and the receiving society. In addition, in the same sense, these are fields of production of definitions and dichotomous classifications about “us” and “them”. For this book, I specifically addressed the relations between police, politics and the immigration-crime nexus through the analysis of three empirical domains: political discourses pronounced by officials around the immigration-crime association, secondary quantitative data regarding police practices of arrest of migrants and semi-structured interviews with migrants belonging to different ethnic-national groups, especially Senegalese and Venezuelan migrants. I will provide details of the specific sources selected, as well as the theoretical-methodological strategy, in the chapter that follows. 5 “Beca Interna Postdoctoral para Temas Estratégicos”. The title of the research project is, in Spanish, “Explorando los vínculos entre inmigración, delito, política y policía en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (2015-2019)”.

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Book Itinerary Each of the chapters of the book is self-conclusive and independent from the rest, giving the reader the freedom to choose which one to read according to their dimension of interest. As mentioned before, the second chapter (Researching the links between police, politics, immigration and crime) is oriented towards the description of the theoretical-methodological strategy selected to address the aforementioned different empirical domains. For each of them, I point out both the characteristics of the techniques and sources used, and the strategies implemented to systemize and analyze the discourses, highlighting, in this sense, the main features and procedures of the Grounded Theory, and common resources for the sociological analysis of interviews, such as segmentation, gridding, case analysis and thematic analysis. Chapter 3 (Police, politics, immigration and crime: A state of art) presents, as its title indicates, a state of the art of the arguments, discussions and debates around the ways of conceiving the relations between immigration, crime, police and politics. In this sense, the book draws attention on nodal points of research works produced from Argentina, as well as from other regions of the world (United Kingdom, Italy, France and United States, among others). One of the merits of this book is to gather background information on different dimensions (police and politics, police and migration, and immigration and crime) in one single place, when the most frequent is to find each of them developed separately. To order the reading, the chapter has subdivisions into three different headings: relations between police and politics, migrants and police practices, and immigration and crime. In the fourth chapter (Political discourses around the immigrationcrime nexus), I address the ways of defining the nexus between immigration and crime in the political discourses implemented during the Cambiemos administration. Regarding the voices expressed on this issue, it is relevant to mention that of Macri himself, as well as it is significant to highlight, among others, Rogelio Frigerio, Patricia Bullrich and Horacio García, who held hierarchical positions in the Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Security and National Directorate for Migration, respectively. Together with the perspective of national and local officials,

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I also incorporated speeches by Miguel Ángel Pichetto, who during the Cambiemos administration was the head of the block of senators of the opposition party Front for Victory but who later on became Macri’s vice president candidate in the 2019 presidential elections. As main results of the research, this chapter presents different categories (or labels, to express it properly), reconstructed through discourse analysis: (i) “We need to know who is who”, (ii) Distinction in the type of immigration that arrives in Argentina, (iii) Stricter controls for entering the country and (iv) Crime and migration. Likewise, to provide those with greater specificity, I expose their different subcategories and properties. The description of “background” and “proximate” causes, among them the centrality of the topic of the identification of “suspects”, the implementation of Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017 and indicators of selective punitiveness, would allow the reader to better understand those ways of conceiving the links between immigration and crime. Considering that in Argentina we lack official statistical information on the arrests made by the police on the migrant population, the fifth chapter (entitled The language of the numbers) presents different approaches to reconstruct a quantitative panorama of police practices within the period studied. Specifically, I base myself on the 2018 and 2019 statistical reports on institutional violence, Institutional violence against Senegalese report and Directorate of Assistance to People Deprived of their Liberty report (period 2015–2020), all of them produced by the Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. Also on the Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2020 and Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2021, both edited by the Ministry of Justice and Security (Buenos Aires City Government), and on the Senegalese community in the City of Buenos Aires: diagnoses for a comprehensive public policy for the period 2018–2020 report, made by the Ombudsman Office of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. This chapter also reviews and synthesizes the annual reports produced by the Program against Institutional Violence (Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina) between 2015 and 2019. By incorporating dimensions of a rigorous and appropriate methodological surveillance, I present a comparative reading of the different sources consulted, identifying similarities and differences in the reconstructed panorama.

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I complement this quantitative component with the qualitative one in the subsequent chapters, through the testimonies produced in the framework of semi-structured interviews with Senegalese and Venezuelan migrants. Each of them is oriented towards a certain theme in particular: interactions between police and migrants, narratives of police violence, police attitudes towards migrants, the nexus between police and politics and the perception of the vulnerability of the migratory community of belonging to police action. Chapter 6 (Mean streets. Interactions between police and migrants), in turn, presents the interactions between police and migrants in the scope of the City of Buenos Aires. In particular, I highlight five interpretations according to which the interviewees describe a different police action depending on whether it is an Argentine or foreign person: ignorance of the “other”, racism and xenophobia, lack of communication, sharing the workplace on the streets with the police (which would give a greater margin for them to “collide” each other) and having an accent that is perceived diverse from the Argentine. By focusing on the spatial dimension, the testimonies empirically support the premise that the police institution contributes to the reproduction and maintenance of a certain social order, but above all, a spatial order that defines both inclusions and exclusions from certain zones of the city. As well as displacements and borders. In the seventh chapter (Violences), I describe in detail episodes of police violence experienced by the people interviewed (or well, by acquaintances of them), by recovering their own voices from the testimonies. Specifically, the chapter presents stories that account for practices of police bias, stigmatization, persecution, robbery and kidnapping of merchandise and raids without a judicial warrant or certificate, at the same time, describes the frequency with which the interviewees perceive this type of practice (if it is a rule or rather, an exception) and the spatio-temporal context where they frame these practices (especially if the change in administration in 2015 and 2019 influenced an increase, or decrease, in narrated cases of violence). By establishing an explicit dialogue with the analysis of political discourses implemented during the Cambiemos administration (developed in Chapter 4), Chapter 8 (entitled Police attitudes towards

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migrants) presents narratives that describe the changes in the attitudes of the police towards different ethnic-national groups. On the one hand, the chapter establishes a relationship between these alleged changes and the Cambiemos administration between 2015 and 2019. In addition, considering the current administration by Alberto Fernández, inaugurated in 2019. On the other hand, the chapter highlights the ways in which these attitudes differ according to the security force in operation: that is to say, Buenos Aires City Police or Argentine Federal Police, both with jurisdiction in the City of Buenos Aires. In Chapter 9 (The role of politics), I address a substantial and controversial issue in the field of the sociology of police: the nexus between police and politics. More particularly, and returning to arguments present in the state of the art (reviewed in the third chapter), I describe the perspectives of the interviewees regarding whether the police can be thought of as autonomous institution (and independent of political will) or as a political instrument, which follows and executes the guidelines erected by politicians from the “top”. In this sense, the domain constituted by the interviews allows us to add an empirical element and enrich the theoretical discussion (and arguments) about the ways of thinking the links between police and politics. The tenth chapter (Vulnerability in the face of police action) presents testimonies that account for self-perceptions about the greater or lesser vulnerability of the migratory group of belonging in the face of police action. In line with what was presented and analyzed in Chapter 7 (dedicated to situations of violence), I detail different factors that influence and impact in the vulnerability of different migratory groups, such as stigmatization, racism, discrimination, language, integration and labor insertion. In so doing, I also recovered opinions tending to overcome those obstacles and think, in this way, of a different type of interaction between migrants and police officers. The book concludes by highlighting, on the one hand, the main results for each of the empirical domains analyzed (political speeches, statistics and semi-structured interviews). On the other, framing their scope within the various attempts to manage and regulate migration flows in an increasingly globalized world. In this sense, the book constitutes an invitation to reflect on the particularities present in the local

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context studied around the relations between police, politics, immigration and crime (and on the differences with other similar jurisdictions), as well as a contribution to produce empirical research from the Global South.

References Abiuso, F. L. (2020). Feos, sucios y malos. Un análisis comparativo de imaginarios estatales pasados y presentes acerca de las relaciones entre inmigración y delincuencia en el ámbito de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires [Tesis doctoral, Universidad de Buenos Aires]. Albornoz, M. (2017). Policías, cónsules y anarquistas: la dimensión transatlántica de la lucha contra el anarquismo en Buenos Aires (1889–1913). Iberoamericana, 17 (64), 57–79. https://doi.org/10.18441/ibam.17.2017. 64.57-79 Albornoz, M. (2021). Cuando el anarquismo causaba sensación. Siglo XXI. Albornoz, M. & Galeano, D. (2016). El momento Beastly: La Policía de Buenos Aires y la expulsión de extranjeros (1896–1904). Astrolabio Nueva Época, (17), 6–41. https://doi.org/10.55441/1668.7515.n17.15761 Anitua, G. I. (2010). La Policía Metropolitana de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires. Ad-Hoc. Bona, L. M. (2019). ¿Neoliberalismo hegemónico? Apuntes sobre el Estado, el bloque de poder y la economía política en la Argentina reciente (2016– 2018). Revista Pilquen, 22(1), 39–54. Caimari, L. (2004). Apenas un delincuente: crimen, castigo y cultura en la Argentina, 1880–1955. Siglo XXI. Caimari, L. (2009). La ciudad y el crimen: delito y vida cotidiana en Buenos Aires, 1880–1940. Sudamericana. Cesano, J. & Muñoz, D. (2010). Inmigración, Anarquismo y Sistema Penal: Los discursos expertos y la prensa. Córdoba y Buenos Aires 1890/1910 (Protesta social, flujos migratorios y criminalización). Alción Editora. Cohen, N. (2004). Las migraciones tradicionales y las migraciones recientes: percepciones diferenciales. In N. Cohen (Ed.), Documentos de Trabajo no. 36. Puertas adentro: la inmigración discriminada, ayer y hoy (pp. 26–32). Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, UBA.

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Cohen, N. (2009). Una interpretación de la desigualdad desde la diversidad étnica. In N. Cohen (Ed.), Representaciones de la diversidad: trabajo, escuela y juventud (pp. 11–29). Ed. Cooperativas. Cohen, N. (2012). Profetizando al diferente. Revista Controversias y Concurrencias Latinoamericanas, 4 (6), 187–205. Decree No. 138/2021 (2021). Decreto N° 70/2017. Derogación. March 5. Buenos Aires, Argentina. http://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/ane xos/345000-349999/347595/norma.htm Domenech, E. (2011a). Crónica de una ‘amenaza’ anunciada. Inmigración e ‘ilegalidad’: visiones de Estado en la Argentina contemporánea. In B. Feldman-Bianco, L. Rivera Sánchez, C. Stefoni & M. Villa (Eds.), La construcción social del sujeto migrante en América Latina: prácticas, representaciones y categorías (pp. 31–77). FLACSO-Ecuador / CLACSO / UAH Domenech, E. (2011b). La “nueva política migratoria” en la Argentina: Las paradojas del Programa “Patria Grande.” In C. Pizarro (Ed.), Migraciones internacionales contemporáneas: Estudios para el debate (pp. 119–141). Ediciones CICCUS. Galeano, D. (2009). El ojo y la pluma. La cultura narrativa de la policía en la ciudad de Buenos Aires. In M. Sozzo (Ed.), Historias de la cuestión criminal en la Argentina (pp. 191–224). Editores del Puerto. Galeano, D. (2017). Entre el orden y la fuerza bruta: Una historia política de la policía de Buenos Aires, 1852–1880. Ler História, 70, 15–36. https://doi. org/10.4000/lerhistoria.2705 Galeano, D. (2018). Delincuentes viajeros. Estafadores, punguistas y policías en el Atlántico sudamericano. Siglo XXI. Galvani, M. (2007). La marca de la gorra. Un análisis de la Policía Federal . Capital Intelectual. Galvani, M. (2016). Cómo se construye un policía. La Federal desde adentro. Siglo XXI. García Fanlo, L. (2010). Genealogía de la argentinidad . Gran Aldea Editores. Germani, G. (1966). Mass immigration and modernization in Argentina. Studies in Comparative International Development, 2(11), 165–182. https:// doi.org/10.1007/BF02800543 Germani, G. (1987). Estructura social de la Argentina. Análisis estadístico. Ediciones Solar. González, A. P. (2019). La mirada perjuiciosa. Los migrantes y sus derechos humanos desde las representaciones sociales del sistema judicial . Eudeba.

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Kleidermacher, G. (2013). Entre cofradías y venta ambulante: Una caracterización de la inmigración senegalesa en Buenos Aires. Cuadernos De Antropología Social, 38, 109–130. Linares, M. D. (2021). Migración venezolana reciente en Argentina: una política migratoria selectiva en el contexto del giro migratorio restrictivo. Migraciones Internacionales, (12), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.33679/rmi.v1i1. 2300 Maglia, E., & Dikenstein, V. (2019). La Policía de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires: Discurso oficial, tensiones y disconformidades en torno a la configuración de una nueva fuerza policial. Trabajo y Sociedad, 32, 231–251. Monclús Masó, M. & Brandariz García, J. Á. (2014). Políticas y prácticas de control migratorio: estudio comparativo del control de los migrantes en el contexto latinoamericano y europeo. Didot. Novick, S. (2008). Migración y políticas en Argentina: tres leyes para un país extenso (1876–2004). In Cuadernos del Pensamiento Crítico Latinoamericano no. 14. Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales. Pereira, M. A. (2016). Delito, seguridad, orden público e ‘inmigración limítrofe’ en Argentina (1976–1995). REMHU, Revista Interdisciplinar Da Mobilidade Humana, 24 (46), 177–191. Rodríguez, A. E., & Zappietro, E. J. (1999). Historia de la Policía Federal Argentina a las puertas del tercer milenio. Génesis y desarrollo desde 1580 hasta la actualidad . Editorial Policial. Rodriguez, J. (2006). Civilizing Argentina. Science, medicine and the modern state. University of North Carolina Press. Ruibal, B. (1993). Ideología del control social Buenos Aires 1880–1920. Centro Editor de América Latina. Salvatore, R. D. (1992). Criminology, prison reform, and the Buenos Aires working class. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23(2), 279–299. Salvatore, R. D. (1996). Penitentiaries, Visions of Class, and Export Economies: Brazil and Argentina Compared. In R. D. Salvatore & C. Aguirre (Eds.), The birth of the penitentiary in Latin America: Essays on criminology, prison reform, and social control, 1830–1940 (pp. 194–223). University of Texas Press. Salvatore, R. D. (2006). Positivist criminology and state formation in modern Argentina, 1890–1940. In P. Becker, & R. Wetzell (Eds.), Criminals and their Scientists. The History of Criminology in International Perspective (pp. 253–279). Cambridge University Press

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Scarzanella, E. (2015). Ni gringos ni indios. Inmigración, criminalidad y racismo en la Argentina, 1890–1940. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes Sozzo, M. (1999). ¿Hacia la Superación de la Táctica de la Sospecha? Notas sobre Prevención del Delito e Institución Policial. In Detenciones, facultades y prácticas policiales en la ciudad de Buenos Aires (pp. 3–41). CELS Sozzo, M. (2011). ‘Los exóticos del crimen’. Inmigración, delito y criminología positivista en la Argentina (1887–1914). Revista Delito y Sociedad , 19 (32), 19–51. https://doi.org/10.14409/dys.v2i32.5647

2 Researching the Links Between Police, Politics, Immigration and Crime

Abstract This chapter details the main features of my methodological approach, a complementary type of multi-method design. Following (Cohen & Gómez Rojas, 2019), it corresponds to the case in which the knowledge produced from the application of one of the methods complements the knowledge produced by the other. More specifically, I highlight the theoretical-methodological strategy I selected to address the different empirical domains of research: political discourses around the immigration-crime association, secondary quantitative data regarding police practices of detention of migrants and semi-structured interviews with migrants belonging to different ethnic-national groups. For each of them, I point out both the characteristics of the techniques and sources used, as well as the decisions and strategies implemented to systemize and analyze the discourses, highlighting, in this sense, the main features of Grounded Theory, and common resources for the sociological analysis of interviews, such as segmentation, gridding, case and thematic analysis. Due to the quarantine regime in response to the pandemic COVID19, I adapted several of the activities involved in my fieldwork, between 2020 and 2021, to a virtual/remote modality, working from home. This scenario raised its challenges, which I also review here. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Abiuso, Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46379-2_2

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Keywords Multi-method design · Political discourses · Grounded Theory · Secondary Data · Methodological surveillance · Semi-structured interviews

Political Discourses During the administration of Cambiemos, which took place in Argentina between 2015 and 2019, we witnessed a discursive proliferation of instances where officials from various areas of government explicitly and publicly referred to an alleged link between immigration and crime. Regarding the voices expressed on this issue, I focused on Mauricio Macri (president in that period of time), as well as the points of view of Rogelio Frigerio, Patricia Bullrich and Horacio García, who held hierarchical positions in the Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Security and National Directorate for Migration, respectively. Together with the perspective of national and local officials, I also incorporated speeches by Miguel Ángel Pichetto, who during Cambiemos was the head of the block of senators of the opposition party Front for Victory, but who later on became Macri’s vice president candidate in the 2019 presidential elections. As part of the selection of the speeches, I prioritized those pronounced publicly, either in press conferences, in official acts or in presentations of measures and policies implemented between 2015 and 2019. I searched for these expressions in the digital versions of the Clarín and La Nación newspapers,1 using certain keywords in the search engine, such as “immigration”, “crime”, “immigration and crime”, “border controls”, “immigration and insecurity”, “detentions”, “security” and “crime statistics”. Specifically, I analyzed twenty-seven news items in Clarín and twenty-six news items edited in La Nación between the years 2015 and 2019. In accordance with my interests and research objectives, I selected those discourses by officials in which I could identify a reference, whether

1 As of September 6, 2023, La Nación is ranked 9th and Clarín ranked 12th among the main websites accessed in Argentina. See: https://www.similarweb.com/es/top-websites/argentina/.

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more or less explicit, to the immigration-crime association, to the statistics from which crime is measured and to the work carried out by the police in the detention of migrants. For its ordering, I systematized the speeches in a grid whose headings included different dimensions (Title, Date, Spokesperson/s, URL and Keywords) that allowed me a first familiarization with this empirical domain. To analyze the political discourses during the Cambiemos administration around the immigration-crime association, I used Grounded Theory, taking into account the activities of conceptualization, classification and categorization of texts involved in this research strategy. I took up both its pioneering development in the 1960s (Glaser & Strauss, 2008) and its more recent elaboration by Strauss and Corbin (1998). In so doing, I relied on the constant comparative method and different types of coding, with computer support of the ATLAS.ti software. Regarding the former, Glaser and Strauss (2008) defined as an approach to the analysis of qualitative data, which leans on the combination of coding and analytic procedures for the generation of theory, from data systematically obtained in social sciences research. Structured in some of its different activities, the constant comparative method involves comparing incidents (articles, interview narratives, documents, etc.) applicable to each category, integrating categories with their properties while delimiting the number of categories. In terms of its various stages, I first compared the information obtained by giving a common label—a conceptual code/category—to a set of incidents (in this case, fragments of data derived from the selected and systematized news items) that share an idea. According to Glaser and Strauss, these categories can be of two kinds: those constructed by the researcher and those abstracted from the language of the research situation, which the authors defined as “labels”. Strauss and Corbin refer to them as in vivo codes: categories taken or derived directly from the language used by the people studied. The next stage focused on the intense analysis carried out around a category in terms of its properties: by properties, I understand, following Strauss and Corbin (1998), general or specific characteristics— or attributes—of a category, the delineation of which defines and gives it

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meaning. At this point in the analysis, the constant comparative method generates not only categories, but also possible relationships between them and their properties. Finally, I pointed to the reduction of the number of categories, that is, to the possibility of explaining and understanding the phenomenon with a minimum set of categories. According to Glaser and Strauss, there are different ways to reduce categories: by discard, by merger or transformation into other categories of a higher conceptual level. Along with the pioneering work of these authors, I also took up the developments of Strauss and Corbin around the different types of coding. Specifically, open coding (the active and systematic process of identification of conceptual categories and their properties in data), axial coding (intense analysis made around categories, in terms of the relationship with their subcategories and properties, as well as with other categories) and selective coding (the process of integrating and refining categories). In this sense, selective coding involves the deliberate and systematic search for core categories, which should appear frequently in the data, and that implies the grouping and integration of other categories around them. In addition, I resumed the term of subcategories, as concepts that pertain to a category, giving it further clarification and specification. More particularly, “basically, subcategories specify a category further by denoting information such as when, where, why, and how a phenomenon is likely to occur” (Strauss & Corbin, 1998: 119). The criterion that guided the construction of categories was theoretical saturation, that is to say, the moment in which additional information (categories, properties and subcategories) does not emerge regarding the analysis of the data. Far from the generation of theory, my use of the procedures provided by Grounded Theory focused on the development of categories, as a possible way to approach the links between immigration and crime. In this sense, the book presents different categories (as well as their subcategories and properties), reconstructed through discourse analysis: (I) “We need to know who is who”, (II) Distinction in the type of immigration that arrives in Argentina, (III) Stricter controls for entering the

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country and (IV) Crime and migration. I will develop them concretely in Chapter 4. In any case, and so that this section is not completely abstract, I present below an example as a preview. In his first press conference of 2017, the President Macri referred to the need to limit the arrival in Argentina of immigrants who have a criminal record in their country of origin: Due to lack of action, we cannot allow crime to continue choosing Argentina as a place to come to commit crimes […] we need to articulate with other countries to know who is who, act preventively and not act after it happened. (La Nación, 2017, January 18)

In a similar sense, Patricia Bullrich, then Minister for Security, pointed out: “a person who has a record in his country cannot enter Argentina. That is why we want to have a database to be able to analyze who is arriving, especially with those countries whose volume of migration is important” (Clarín, 2017, January 17). Likewise, in the official announcement of the implementation of the Advance Passenger Information (API) system, as an initiative obliging airlines to provide accurate information on the criminal records of those travelers who want to enter Argentina, Rogelio Frigerio—who was at that time Interior minister—affirmed: The agreement that we signed with the airlines serves to expedite immigration processing times, but also to have precise information regarding those who have a criminal record and who intend to enter the country […] this country has been forged based on immigration, and we bet on that; but we have to complement it with a very careful policy that did not exist in the past regarding criminal issues. These mechanisms will serve to prevent the entry of criminals. (Ortelli, 2017, January 25)

In an interview with Clarín in 2019, Pichetto stated a similar point of view, by noting, “You have to be prepared and stop this naive and stupid vision that everyone can enter Argentina happily, they are all good. We must have a careful look and control of our borders, who enters and who leaves” (Schmidt, 2019, January 2019).

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As these different expressions share the same idea (the need to identify those who intend to enter Argentina), I included them in the same category (or rather, label or in vivo code), “We need to know who is who”.

Secondary Quantitative Data Carrying out the social research process involves making decisions, both theoretical and methodological, referring to different aspects. The notion of research strategy by Cohen and Gómez Rojas (2003) condenses several of these decisions. Presented as questions, one of them points out: How will the information be obtained? More recently, Cohen and Gómez Rojas (2019) highlight that one of the dimensions of the methodological component of the theoretical and methodological strategy is the source of information, that is, the sources from which gets the information. In this sense, we can mention two types of sources: primary and secondary. In the case of the first, it is about data produced by the researcher himself within the framework of a specific investigation; in other words, when it is necessary to carry out all the stages of the moment of data production. Regarding secondary sources, it implies using data produced in other investigations or surveys, whether they were carried out by third parties, or by the researcher himself for purposes linked to the production of scientific knowledge or as an input for decision-making in different fields (public policies, economic planning, among others). According to Cohen and Gómez Rojas (2019: 256), “when we refer to surveys, we are considering the production of data carried out in the statistical institutes, the business associations, trade unions, non-governmental organizations or other types of public or private institutions or organizations”. As an example (which will be expanded in Chapter 5), in this book I analyze reports produced by the Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Ministry of Justice and Security (Buenos Aires City Government), Ombudsman Office of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina.

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Although the secondary data can be quantitative or qualitative, here I focused on statistics on police detention of migrants within the period 2015–2019, released, depending on the particularity of each institution, in different ways. As illustration, the 2018 and 2019 statistical reports on institutional violence produced by the Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires broadcast the data predominantly in statistical tables, different types of graphs and even other visual resources such as maps. When we work with data produced in other investigations or surveys, we replace the stages of the production—typical of the primary data— by other phases. First, the search for sources. In this sense, the data may exist but it is not accessible, or it may directly be the case that the data regarding what we are looking for is not available. In second place, the evaluation of the sources, which implies knowing the institution producing the data, its trajectory, time of the production of the data, if there were conditions that could affect the process and the methodology used. Third and last, the selection of sources, moment in which we must choose between the different existing possibilities. Considering that in Argentina we lack official statistical information on the arrests made by the police on the migrant population (Monclús Masó & Brandariz García, 2014; Monclús Masó & García, 2012), I selected different sources that would allow me to reconstruct a quantitative panorama within the period studied. Specifically, I base myself on the 2018 and 2019 statistical reports on institutional violence, Institutional violence against Senegalese report, Directorate of Assistance to People Deprived of their Liberty report (period 2015–2020), Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2020, Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2021, Senegalese community in the City of Buenos Aires: diagnoses for a comprehensive public policy for the period 2018–2020 report and also in the annual reports produced by the Program against Institutional Violence (Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina) between 2015 and 2019. Regarding their systematization and analysis, I adopted a rigorous and appropriate methodological surveillance2 that enables me both to 2 I present the details of this methodological surveillance in the specific chapter related to secondary quantitative data (Chapter 5).

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adequate their significance in relation to my research object and to carry out a comparative reading between them, identifying similarities and differences.

Semi-structured Interviews According to Uwe Flick (2012), qualitative research works primarily on two kinds of data: verbal and visual data. From the repertoire of methods available for producing verbal data (interviews, focus groups, library research and biographical methods), I specifically focused on the use of semi-structured interviews. In terms of its definition, we can characterize the interview as a form of special professional conversation carried out between two people, directed and registered by the researcher with the purpose of favoring the production of a continuous discourse and with a certain line of argument on the part of the interviewee, oriented to a specific theme derived from the research objectives (Piovani, 2012). In this sense, its use is convenient when we want to locate our emphasis on the perspective of the actors, and when we seek to inquire into the visions that the interviewees have regarding certain topics. In this particular case, mainly on the interactions between police and migrants and on perceptions about the police institution and its ties to the world of politics. Given the breadth of the “interview” label—encompasses different varieties and styles—different authors advanced in a classification. Scribano (2008) differentiates the types of interviews into NonDirective, Semi-Directive and Non-Directive according to the degree of orientation of the interviewer. Piovani (2012), in turn, presents two criteria to classify the interviews: the degree of spontaneity of the verbal interaction (which he divides into low, medium and high) and the type of contact between interviewer and interviewee (personal or faceto-face, telephone and virtual). According to the author, the degree of spontaneity of the verbal interaction gives rise to structured forms (low degree), semi-structured (medium degree) and unstructured interviews (high degree).

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Relying on such classifications, I did semi-structured or SemiDirective interviews, in the sense that I made them with an interview guide, whose function was precisely to orient the conversational flow towards the topics considered relevant from the perspective of the research objectives and questions. It is for this reason that the guide requires an active and central participation by the interviewer. As Cohen and Gómez Rojas (2019) point out, qualitative research uses semi-structured registry instruments. Unlike the questionnaire (quantitative research instrument par excellence), the interview registry instrument (also called an interview guide or guidelines guide) has a lesser degree of structure, is more flexible (e.g., not all questions must be done respecting the same order) and is open to further intervention by the researcher, either to cross-examine or to delve into a particular topic. It consists of a set of guidelines, both general and in-depth, that order the testimonies obtained in the interview situation. In addition, its flexibility makes it easily adaptable to the specificity presented by each interviewee. The registry instrument that I used included, in particular, different blocks or general guidelines, derived from my research objectives and interests: Biographical trajectory, Security forces and Police. Each of these major guidelines included, specifically, various in-depth guidelines. As is usual practice when working with this technique, for the closing I asked the interviewee if he wanted to add something to his narrative. I incorporated into the registry instrument a biographical dimension, considering that they are data that should inform about the impacts of the passage of time in the biographies (Meccia, 2019). In this case, both sequences of facts and life experiences that allude to a particular moment or episode: the transition (whether long or short) from the country of origin upon arrival in Buenos Aires. Also taking into account that these experiences and facts can be relevant data when thinking about the interactions between migrants and police officers and their perceptions about the police institution. From 2020 until the time of writing this book, I interviewed migrants belonging to different ethnic-national groups, especially Senegalese and Venezuelan migrants, due to the greater visibility in the streets of the former and the increase experienced by Venezuelan migration between 2015 and 2019. Regarding the profile, I adopted the following criteria to

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select the interviewees: (a) be migrants residing in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, (b) who interacted with the police (either the Argentine Federal Police or the Buenos Aires City Police3 ) or (c) they know someone close to them who experienced such interaction. Regarding sampling strategies, I used both snowball (that is, that the person interviewed recommended or suggested someone to interview later), as well as informal approaches enabled by personal contacts. Due to the quarantine regime in response to the pandemic COVID19, I adapted the conduct of interviews, carried out between 2020 and 2021, to a virtual/remote modality. This scenario raised the following challenges. Firstly, not all of the selected interviewees had access to some kind of platform to conduct the interview via video call. Secondly, in those cases that did have access, there were technical difficulties, in terms of audio, to carry out the interviews, either due to computer problems, or due to ambient noise in the case of the interviewees who chose to have the interview in public or in a bar. Thirdly, unlike the face-to-face or personal interview, I did not have an intimate environment in the interview situation, which is necessary to generate an environment of trust between interviewer and interviewee. There were interruptions and moments when the interviewee was in dialogue with whoever was at home at that time. In fourth and last place, it was difficult to maintain a constant exchange of glances between the interviewee and the interviewer, as well as to have a broad record of the non-verbal in the interview situation, considering that this complements the verbal aspect of the story. Whether in its face-to-face or virtual modality, I obtained significant testimonies on a variety of themes (interactions between police and migrants, narratives of police violence, the nexus between police and politics, among others), which will be analyzed in detail in Chapters 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 of the book. I recorded all the interviews with the consent of the interviewees. In the case of those that I made by video call, I chose to record

3

For a brief historical characterization of both, see Chapter 1.

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simultaneously with two devices (the computer itself and the voice recorder of my cell phone), to make sure I had the file to work on later. Once transcribed, I used common strategies, procedures and resources for the sociological analysis of interviews in qualitative research, as Cohen and Seid (2019) refer to them, such as segmentation, gridding, case analysis and thematic analysis. Given the need to prepare and organize the material for its analysis, the preparation of a grid is a fundamental resource for organizing the registered information, because it allows segmenting the textual fragments of the interviews according to one or several criteria. One of these criteria is segmentation by thematic axis. Concretely, I separated, for each interview, the fragments corresponding to each major axis of analysis. I defined these thematic axes of the grid from the blocks and guidelines of my registry instrument, considering both the general guidelines and the in-depth guidelines of the interview guide. Regarding the gridding, it technically consists of “copying and pasting” the interview fragments in the corresponding intersections of cases and thematic axes: the rows correspond to the different cases/interviewees and the columns to the thematic axes. The preparation of a grid is also an opportunity to become familiar with the material produced, by reading and rereading the testimonies until knowing them in detail. As Cohen and Seid (2019) point out, the proposed ordering of the testimonies in the grid constitutes the first analytical task and is a decision that commits and delimits the analysis. Regarding precisely that phase in the research process, I analyzed the interviews from a double comparison of the textual fragments. A thematic analysis, by comparing through the thematic axes (vertical reading of the grid), and a case analysis, by comparing between axes inside each case (horizontal reading of the grid).

References Clarín. (2017, January 17). Macri, a favor de más controles migratorios: “Necesitamos saber quién es quién”. Clarín. https://www.clarin.com/politica/ macri-favor-controles-migratorios-necesitamos-saber_0_r1BqbniUx.html

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Cohen, N., & Gómez Rojas, G. (2003). Triangulando en torno al problema de investigación, los objetivos y el marco conceptual. In G. Gómez Rojas & S. Lago Martínez (Eds.), En torno a las metodologías: abordajes cualitativos y cuantitativos (pp. 113–127). Editorial Proa XXI. Cohen, N., & Gómez Rojas, G. (2019). Metodología de la Investigación, ¿para qué? La producción de los datos y los diseños. Teseo. Cohen, N., & Seid, G. (2019). Producción y análisis de datos cualitativos. In N. Cohen & G. Gómez Rojas (Eds.), Metodología de la Investigación, ¿para qué? La producción de los datos y los diseños (pp. 203–227). Teseo. Flick, U. (2012). Introducción a la investigación cualitativa. Morata. Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (2008). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Aldine. La Nación. (2017, January 18). Seguridad: impulsará la Casa Rosada un nuevo Código Penal juvenil. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/ seguridad-impulsara-la-casa-rosada-un-nuevo-codigo-penal-juvenil-nid197 6693/ Meccia, E. (2019). Introducción. Una ventana al mundo. Investigar biografías y sociedad. In E. Meccia (Ed.), Biografías y sociedad: Métodos y perspectivas (pp. 25–62). Ediciones UNL/Eudeba. Monclús Masó, M., & Brandariz García, J. Á. (2014). Políticas y prácticas de control migratorio: estudio comparativo del control de los migrantes en el contexto latinoamericano y europeo. Ed. Didot. Monclús Masó, M., & García, M. B. (2012). El impacto de las migraciones en la criminalidad en la Argentina: mitos y realidades. In Cuadernos Migratorios N°2 El impacto de las migraciones en Argentina (pp. 323–365). OIM. Ortelli, I. (2017, January 25). Control migratorio: las aerolíneas deben anticipar datos de los pasajeros. Clarín. https://www.clarin.com/politica/con trol-migratorio-aerolineas-deben-anticipar-datos-pasajeros_0_B19K_hUDx. html Piovani, J. I. (2012). La entrevista en profundidad. In A. Marradi, N. Archenti, & J. I. Piovani (Eds.), Metodología de las ciencias sociales (2nd ed., pp. 191–201). Cengage. Schmidt, W. (2019, January 8). Michel Pichetto: “En la Ciudad de Buenos Aires destruyeron a la Federal y entregaron la calle”. Clarín. https://www. clarin.com/politica/miguel-pichetto-ciudad-buenos-aires-destruido-federalentregado-calle_0_5Cwq_IGiZ.html Scribano, A. (2008). El proceso de investigación social cualitativo. Prometeo. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Sage.

3 Police, Politics, Immigration and Crime: A State of Art

Abstract This chapter presents a subjective and personal overview of the literature produced on the links between immigration, crime, police and politics. Considering the international audience of the book, it draws attention on nodal points of research works produced from Argentina, as well as from other regions of the world (United Kingdom, Italy, France and United States, among others). One of the merits of this book is to gather background information on different dimensions (police and politics, police and migration, and immigration and crime) in one single place, when the most frequent is to find each of them developed separately. To order the reading, the chapter has subdivisions into three different headings: Relations between police and politics, Migrants and police practices and Immigration and crime. According to these sections, the plot thread will thus be the identification of different thematic cores or nodes. Keywords Police · Politics · Violence · Crime · Immigration · Police practices

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Abiuso, Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46379-2_3

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Relations Between Police and Politics The relations between police and politics was a topic addressed from different perspectives, approaches and regions, which prioritized different dimensions of this object of study. I present below a selection of works, which I understand as unavoidable productions to approach the subject.

Links Between Politics, Police and Violence The point of departure of the proposed itinerary is the work carried out by Verónica Aimar, Gustavo González, Augusto Montero and Máximo Sozzo on police, violence and politics in the Province of Santa Fe, Argentina (Aimar et al., 2005). From the analysis of news items produced in provincial newspapers, the authors present quantitative data about the phenomenon of police violence, corresponding to the period between the years 1998 and 2002. They point out, among other indicators, the number of victims, the type of act of violence, the spaces of the uses of police violence and different features that allow characterizing both the victims and the actors of police violence. One of the key themes that they mention, in line with my research interests, points to the relationship between police and politics. To express it more specifically, they ask if it is possible that the political decisions and actions, projected and/or developed in the Province of Santa Fe, regarding police institution, have an impact on the magnitudes and forms or modalities of use of police violence. Based on the analysis of the empirical data, the authors conclude that, in the period studied, political decisions and actions regarding the police institution gave rise to political and cultural climates—characterized either by “reformist” or by “counter-reformist” discourses and attitudes—that operated, respectively, as a condition of possibility of uses of police violence, thus impacting in the volume and intensity of their exercise. In this sense, the exploration carried out provides a perspective to think about the relationship between the world of politics and the police

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institution (in this particular case, in a research on police violence in the Province of Santa Fe). In addition, it provides, in turn, an additional and general element about how we conceptualize such a relationship, which can also inspire other encounters with the empirical moment different from the one worked on by the authors, namely: that the link between politics and police is not of the order of the causes but of the conditions of possibility.

Police and Governmental Rationalities In this section, it is pertinent to refer to the genealogical incursion carried out by Sozzo (2008) about the relationships between governmental rationalities, political programs and the police institution. Inspired by the Foucauldian approach to the history of the present, the author intends to illustrate certain links between the birth of the modern police (and its metamorphoses) and the construction of governmental rationalities. To express it in a more disaggregated way, Sozzo highlights, in the first place, the relationship between the reason of state and science of police, in a context—associated with the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries—where the objects of the “old” police have a significant feature of extension and indefiniteness. Then, he presents the links between the modern police and other governmental rationalities (liberalism and authoritarianism), outlining, in this regard, the main characteristics, limitations and ambiguities of each of them. Also taking up their points of contact and intersection. Lastly, he refers to the academic and political discourses on police and democracy, which accompany initiatives of police “reform” that try to free the modern police from its tie with those elements linked to authoritarianism as a governmental rationality. For the author, the idea of democratic police open the game to two different rationalities, at least partially: academic and political discourses that advocate for “a return to liberalism” and those that appeal to the models of “community policing” and “problem oriented policing”. Of the set of these aspects, I am mainly interested in focusing particularly on the way in which a governmental rationality influences or

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impacts the form that policing adopts in a certain time and space. In the case of authoritarianism, Sozzo (2008: 261) highlights: In the case of the Argentine police –and perhaps something similar could have happened in certain Latin American police forces– we think that it would be possible to observe two fundamental ways of penetration of ‘authoritarian governmentality’ in the configuration of policing –and especially in the use of police force–. On the one hand, the militarization and the gestation of a grammar of the ‘political enemy’ and, on the other, the ‘criminology of the other’ and the gestation of a grammar of the ‘biological enemy’.

Regarding the first of these ways, the author points out different historical milestones, mainly dated towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, referring to the process of “modeling” police practice according to the regulations, organization, culture and military practice. Likewise, Sozzo also highlights the structural connection between the militarization of the police institution and the focus of policing on the “political enemy”, a feature that—in his opinion—accompanies the history of the Argentine police since the nineteenth century.1 As for the second, he mentions the diffusion of a “criminology of the other” in police culture—a discourse that classifies the criminal, invoking images and rhetoric that paint him as a different being, with little resemblance to “us”—founded on the influence of positivist criminology in Argentina since the last decade of the nineteenth century onwards. By pointing out the presence of this criminological discourse in that historical stage and within a specific police force (Capital Police), Sozzo invites us to question ourselves about the ways in which the “criminology of the other” persists in those practices that are more recent in time. In this regard, I consider it pertinent to take into account the weight that 1

Moreover, Sozzo (2016) emphasizes the militarization of police institutions, regulations, organizations, cultures and practices, not only in Argentina but also in other South American countries, as a legacy of dictatorial regimes.

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certain governmental rationalities may have on the representations about the “others” that, produced within the sphere of the police institution, can guide their practices of detention. Also inspired by the genealogical method, and especially by the genealogy of the concept of police developed by Michel Foucault in Sécurité, Territoire, Population (1977–1978), Javier Lancestremere (2010) links the creation of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police with the reason of state of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, art of governing whose rationality has the State as scope of application. From this interpretative grid, he highlights that the police are the precondition for the government of the city; this perspective would allow, then, to resize the birth and role of the Metropolitan Police in the political project of the City Government. In turn, the author points out some of the main characteristics of this institution, such as the use of technological resources and information management, already indicated in the Chapter 1 of this book. In doing so, he returns to the above-mentioned Foucauldian genealogy; concretely, he takes up the relations between the reason of state and the centrality attributed to the use of statistics. Within the framework of that Foucault’s seminar, Pasquale Pasquino (1991) presents the population as the object of police administration and describes the relationship between science of police and government of population. He contrasts two ideas of the police, one from the nineteenth century (linked to the maintenance of order) and another from the eighteenth century or even earlier, concerned with the development or promotion of happiness or the public good. Although the author acknowledges, based on different documents published between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a diversity of tasks and fields for police intervention and administration, he nevertheless conceives the science of police as a great effort of formation of the “good order of a population”. Science (or rather, body of knowledge) whose banner is a state of prosperity based on information and happiness (two central tasks of the police, according to Georg Obrecht, in 1608). In this sense, he accounts for the power exercised by government, through police, over the population, by different means; both knowledge

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and regulatory practices that Pasquino identifies under the general rubric of police. In addition, the author emphasizes the ways in which the health— or the medicalization process—connects with other practices of police in the regulation of the population, considering the health of the population as a value and new object of analysis and intervention. The police, as it was understood and institutionalized in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is the starting point of the historical and philosophical approach of Hélène L’Heuillet (2010). From Louis XIV’s edict of 1667 that gave rise to the lieutenancy of Paris to the developments of the scientific police and detective novels in the twentieth century, passing through the surveillance plan drawn up in France by Guillauté in 1749, the author analyzes the knowledge of the police and the relationships it establishes with different fields. Among them, she provides key elements of its connections with the order-disorder binomial, the city, violence, inspection, identification and with the instance of suspicion; core relationships, in short, to reflect on police discourses and practices, both in the past and in the present. In accordance with my research interests, L’Heuillet proposes to understand the place of the police in politics. To do this, she adopts a genealogical approach that synthesizes as follows, in another of her texts: The genealogy of the police should allow us to answer simple questions: why has the police become a major force in politics when apparently it is only intended for the management of society? Why, among the different possible models of maintaining order, has the police prevailed? (L’Heuillet, 2011: 225)

By defining the police as auxiliary to the political authority, the author presents her own perspective on the ways of thinking the links between police and politics, topic that I will address, in particular, in the next section.

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Ways of Conceiving the Relations Between Police and Politics The construction of a theoretical framework to read and research the links between police and politics constitutes another subject addressed by different authors. Dominique Monjardet (2010) points out that there are three dimensions present in every police system: institution (an instrument of a political authority that gives orders), organization (a production tool characterized by specialization of tasks and procedures and hierarchical structure) and profession (a group—the police officers—defined by their own interests and culture). For the author, there are not necessarily convergences between these dimensions; rather, they can face each other as different and competing logics of action, giving rise to conflicts and tensions. Although Monjardet adopts, as a starting point, Ergon Bittner’s metaphor according to which the police is a hammer, he immediately points out that the complexity of the police instrument is of a different nature. In this sense, he argues that there is no profession without a quantum of autonomy, and that: No police is reduced in practice to the strict realization of the intention of those who institute it and have authority over it, to pure instrumentality. There is always a distance, more or less great, more or less controlled, but never zero. The discovery of this distance, as well as the clarification of the mechanisms that maintain it, is the first task of an empirical sociography of police institutions. (Monjardet, 2010: 23)

Among the conflicts identified, the author highlights a structural tension between instrumentality (expressed by the political authority) and the specific social instruments, profession and organization that always distort it by applying it. In an analogous direction, he describes the extreme poles of the interrelationship between the above-mentioned three dimensions: mediation (the political authority knows the networks and channels that cross their orientations) and black box (there is no identifiable evolution between input and output).

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When addressing the relations between police and politics, Monjardet refers to politicization: the tendency, in any apparatus defined as instrumental, therefore framed by objectives and means defined outside of it (in this case, the police institution), to try to recapture the determination of the objectives and means. In addition, he describes that all police policy is the result of a compromise between three competing principles of action: maintenance of order (priority of power), fight against crime (interest of the profession) and public security (object of social demand). In the French case, only the first two participate in the decision process, thus excluding social demand. In fact, the order-police duality is a common and recurring topic among different authors. Mark Neocleous (2010) highlights that the police system has been central to the fabrication of order. More recently, Ana Aliverti (2021) takes up Neocleous’s definition of order to present one of the pillars of her work about the relationship between policing, borders and order in the United Kingdom: the task of maintaining order under contemporary conditions. In the classic research on police patrol work in a large Canadian municipal police force, Richard Ericson (1991) affirms that the everyday actions of the police are aimed at reproducing the existing order (the status quo, precisely), not exempt from processes of conflict, negotiation and subjection. Benjamin Bowling, Robert Reiner and James Sheptycki (2019) point out that order maintenance is the core of the police mandate, and that the specific role of the police in the maintenance of order—their distinctive role in the political order—is as specialists in coercion. By linking police and politics together, Hélène L’Heuillet (2010) highlights that maintenance of order is more than a function of the police, and it is an idea of politics. In addition, if there is a purpose of the police, it is order. Didier Fassin (2016) argues that, more than the maintenance of public order, what police patrols and identity control ensure is the reproduction of social order; it is a way of reminding everyone of their place, and above all, their place in relation to the State (I will analyze those practices in detail in Chapter 6, based on testimonials from interviewees). Giulia Fabini (2022) points out that other authors observed that the police divide the population into categories for maintaining order. Whether the reference

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is to maintenance, fabrication or reproduction, the police-order nexus is a theme shared by many authors. For its part, Jean-Paul Brodeur (2011) points out that there are two apparently opposite theses about the nature of the relations between the police apparatus and state power. The insularity thesis (the police apparatus is conceived as an autonomous instance that acts according to its own interest) and the instrumentality thesis, according to which the police would be an instrument that mechanically responds to the orders of the State. By highlighting the limits and obstacles of each of them, Brodeur (2011: 38) emphasizes, “the notions of insularity and instrumentality are inadequate to think about the relations between the police and the political authority”. Instead, he presents his own perspective of thinking of the mandates given to the police as a “grey cheque”, understanding as such: The signature and the amounts agreed are, on the one hand, imprecise enough to provide the issuing minister with the ulterior motive of a plausible denial of what was actually authorized; however, they are legible enough to guarantee the policeman who receives this cheque a margin of maneuver which, in turn, he will be able to plausibly affirm that it was explicitly granted to him […] It is written in general terms and cashed in particular operations. This asymmetry protects both the issuer and the receiver. (Brodeur, 2011: 47–48)

L’Heuillet (2010) takes up Brodeur’s metaphor of the “grey cheque”, as a fundamental contribution to comprehend the police as an auxiliary of politics. For the author, it is convenient to overcome the false antinomy between instrumentality and autonomy: the police is an autonomous instrument. More specifically, she points out that the formula “in the name of the law” expresses the modality of the relationship between the instrumentality and the autonomy of the police. It is an autonomous institution insofar as it exercises a function of authority, and insofar as acting in the name of the law it acts in its name. It is an instrument, insofar as its authority derives from the law, which provides coverage.

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The author synthesizes both aspects in the conclusion of her book Basse politique, haute police: une approche historique et philosophique de la police. Firstly, she points out that the police is something very different from a simple instrument of government, since it fulfills a function that requires initiative and responsibilities. Secondly, she highlights that it is as an auxiliary of the political authority that the police institution has a margin of autonomy. From a different latitude, Bowling et al. (2019) present another perspective or different point of view to think about the links between police and politics. At a first instance, the authors assert that policing is inherently and inescapably a political activity. This is where it is necessary to introduce the distinction between police and policing. While the first alludes to a particular kind of institution, the second implies a set of processes with specific functions aimed at social control (not exclusively carried out by the police, but also by other institutions). Then, Bowling, Reiner and Sheptycki affirm that politics is integral to the practice of policing and to the institution of the police. In the same place, they propose their way of defining the police, as well as the relationship between policing and governance: The police have developed in modern societies as the specialist organization charged with the maintenance of order. Policing is the sharp edge of governance, the point at which law –as an abstract system of rules– becomes the concrete physical experience of being ruled. (Bowling et al., 2019: xiii)

After presenting these concepts and ideas, the authors point out that for more than two centuries, different countries went through political battles over the nature and breadth of the policing task, and that some historical moments can be defined as periods of consensus (post-war of British policing), while other eras as conflict-ridden (such as 1960s United States and 1980s Britain). This constitutes a significant interpretative grid to reflect on the vicissitudes between policing and politics in different geographical jurisdictions. Another aspect of the links between police and politics points to the tension between a politics of policing that is predominantly local,

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and where—in many places—police governance structures are locally focused, and a globalized world, where police adopt concerns about national and international security. Bowling et al. also refer to the political neutrality of the police service, by highlighting that most police officers maintain that policing and politics do not mix and that the police are not involved in partisan politics. In fact, police officers engage politically on matters such as police resources and priorities, and always have done so. Nevertheless, the authors introduce a relevant argument about the relationship between politics and politicization: “Policing may be inescapably political, but it need not be politicized, that is, the centre of overt political controversy about its manner, tactics, or mode of operation and organization” (Bowling et al., 2019: 16). It would be interesting to compare this idea of politicization with that expressed by Monjardet, to which I referred above. The relationship between policing and different political or government regimes (democracy, authoritarianism and totalitarianism) constitutes another of the dimensions addressed by the authors regarding the links between police and politics, while comparing the main features of each of them. One of the key ideas of Bowling et al. refers to the field of police accountability, both pointing out the tensions and special problems inherent in this process in democratic societies, and the legal, civil and technological instruments used to achieve it. Like Brodeur, Fassin (2016) also highlights that there are two opposite readings to present, in a general way, the link between police and politics. For some, the relationship is instrumental and forces of order would be the “armed wing of the State”. For others, those are conceived as a “State within the State”, establishing thus a form of insularity. Unlike Monjardet, who did not necessarily see convergences between the three dimensions of the police system (institution, organization and profession), but rather tensions and conflicts, Fassin identifies—in the particular case of the anti-crime brigade (BAC) that was the subject of the ethnography carried out by the author in Paris—the existence of a circularity between insularity and instrumentality. More specifically, he points out a convergence between the expectations of the forces of order and the political objectives assigned to them.

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From Argentina, Marcelo Sain (2010) takes up the metaphor of Monjardet’s “hammer” to point out an instrumental vision of the police institution. Although he immediately recognizes that, in Argentina, the police have been simultaneously a hammer and a blacksmith; there is a generalization, since he does not mention a specific institution. In addition, the author alludes to political misrule and delegation to police leaderships, a thesis that we also find in his book El Leviatán azul. In this sense, Sain (2015) argues that the relationship between the police and government authorities is a historically problematic issue, traversed by the permanent counterpoint between political subordination and the relative institutional autonomy that the police hold against political power. Whether due to police resistance, government incompetence or a lack of political will, the author highlights that, on numerous occasions, this counterpoint leads to a situation of political autonomy for police institutions, from which they can deploy self-sustaining forms of conducting their political-institutional practices. To express it in other terms, we are witnessing a scenario in which the political leadership delegates to the police agencies the monopoly of the management and administration of matters and issues related to security. Illustrating this conceptual framework, Sain argues that the government of public security in Argentina was historically in charge of the police institution, which has given rise to instances of police selfgovernment and an extended process of policialization of the public security.2 Along with this, the political misrule in the same matter— by various government authorities and officials, among whom we can highlight those responsible for the conduct of police institutions—is another of the central features that shape what the author identifies as the traditional model of police institution. Nicolás Dallorso (2012) revisits the perspective proposed by Sain to account for the ways of conceiving the relationship between political power and police institutions. For the author, there are at least 2

By government of public security, Sain (2015: 70) includes “the set of institutional structures and processes that, in fact, are dedicated to the formulation, implementation and evaluation of public security policies and strategies, as well as to the direction and administration of the institutional system through which these are carried out”.

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two hypotheses that interpret such a relationship, present in various local situations in Latin America. One of them emphasizes the political dependence of the police forces with respect to the established powers; the other interpretive key, on the contrary, emphasizes the separation between the police sphere and the sphere of public power. To illustrate the first hypothesis, Dallorso presents fragments taken from texts by Frühling, Marteau and Ganon, where these authors introduce the idea that the police would operate as appendages (or rather, instruments) of the political authorities. In order to account for the second, for his part, he precisely incorporates an extract from Sain’s book, Seguridad, democracia y reforma del sistema policial en la Argentina (2002), where the author reiterates the above-mentioned conception of the lack of political direction on public security issues, which would imply self-government of the police forces. Although Dallorso acknowledges that the discrepancy between the two hypotheses may be due to particularities in the socio-cultural contexts (whether national and/or provincial) of study, his proposal is not limited to presenting them as contrasting perspectives on the same phenomenon. In this regard, he affirms—based on Foucault’s developments on governmentality—that political leadership by public authorities and a process of police autonomy are not necessarily incompatible with each other. In this sense, the author highlights the autonomization of the security forces as a specific way of their political government, which would make it possible to problematize those statements that affirm that autonomization is the product of political misrule.3 Furthermore, the very separation between political power and security forces, presented as if they were monolithic spheres, isolated or distanced from one another, is proposed by the author as a product of a determined political practice. To conclude this section, Esteban Rodríguez Alzueta (2014) alludes, inspired by one of Sain’s central theses, to the contiguous process of corporatization and autonomization of police agencies with respect to political power. This double process implies that the police (or rather, 3

Mariana Galvani (2016) holds a similar point of view, pointing out that the lack of political leadership of the security forces also constitutes a policy.

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the leaderships) share or negotiate with the government the legitimate monopoly of violence. Moreover, it develops its own objectives, based on the interests, trajectories and rituals that guide its practices. Along with the premise of political misrule, Rodríguez Alzueta defines the police as a dejudicialized institution, disconnected from justice, oblivious to any comptroller and adverse to external audits. In addition, he points to its politicization, understanding it as “an agency that has the ‘political waist’ sufficient to set limits to any government” (Rodríguez Alzueta, 2014: 177), to pressure—or rather, respond—to the political leadership through crime control. In order to deepen the relations between police and politics, the author introduces the “entorne”,4 knowledge transmitted from generation to generation and that circulates from one layer to another. Rodríguez Alzueta also relativizes the thesis of the self-government of the police institution, specifically when referring to the governmentization of the police agency, one of the constitutive features (along with militarization and politicization) of the Argentine polices. In this regard, he point out: “We are dealing with an agency at the service of the government on duty more than that of the community. An institution that was created to watch the back of the government” (Rodríguez Alzueta, 2014: 201). Inspired by Alessandro Baratta, he affirms that “The police” is the government police, guardian of a social order promoted by him.

Police Reform Processes The analysis of the scope, obstacles and resistance of different police reform initiatives constitutes other possible direction to address the relations between police and politics. Such is the case of those productions focused on the Provincial Directorate of Internal Affairs (Sozzo, 2002; Sozzo et al., 2000), created towards the end of 1997 in the Province of Santa Fe and conceptualized as an instance of internal and external control of policing. 4

In the words of Rodríguez Alzueta (2014: 187): “We will call ‘entorne’ the ability of police chiefs to surround the officials on duty. After so much political rotation, the policemen learned to adapt to the fluctuating political situations and institutional ups and downs”.

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Due to its nature, the Provincial Directorate of Internal Affairs functions as a field of interaction between political control and internal control, since it has meant an external intervention to the police institution, by the political power, in matters that were claimed as belonging to the powers of various agents within the police organization. (Sozzo et al., 2000: 147)

Beyond the description of the specific aspects of this initiative, it is pertinent to highlight the idea, supported by the authors, that reflections on the control mechanisms of policing should be part of a global reconsideration of government strategies of the police institution. Drawing a line of continuity, while providing a broader temporal spectrum, Gustavo González (2007) inquires into the articulation between political actors, reformist projects, the police institution and the broader cultural and political context prevailing in the Province of Santa Fe. More specifically, the author identifies four different moments or periods in terms of police politics: 1983–1994, 1995–1999, 1999–2003 and 2003– 2007. For each of them, he presents the different reformist interventions deployed and/or projected on the police institution, highlighting their impacts, the resistance they encountered from political, police and other equally relevant actors, as well as the conditions of possibility that enabled or that they obstructed (focused on a “counter-reformist” imprint) the implementation of certain initiatives. An additional aspect that is worth noting is that González (2007: 162) not only places police reform processes in the political arena, but also in the political-electoral dispute, where “politicians need to legitimize their position in terms of votes”, which is why it is significant to show effective results, in terms of “solutions to the security problem”, of the police policy carried out. Without moving geographically from Santa Fe, another unavoidable reference on the subject is the work of González, Montero and Sozzo (2010) on police officers’ representations around police reform initiatives. Like González (2007), the authors reconstruct, in the first place, the ups and downs of police politics in the provincial context, acknowledging—between 1995 and 2007—a swinging movement between a timidly reformist policy and an openly counter-reformist one.

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Next, they present the main results of an empirical inquiry, nourished by quantitative and qualitative methodological techniques (survey and in-depth interviews, respectively), on the representations of police officers regarding police reform processes. Among the results, I am interested in focusing on two of them, especially due to their relationship with the topic of the link between police and politics. In this regard, the authors highlight that the police officers see the police reform initiatives that took place in the Province of Santa Fe as something that comes from “outside” and “from above”, from “politics” and the “government”. Another aspect to point out refers to “police participation” in police reform initiatives. Although a significant sector of those police officers perceives that such participation occurs frequently, they stress, however, that it is limited to a very circumscribed group of police officers, the “chiefs” or the “top”, who interact and exchange with “politics”. It is in the same line that González, Montero and Sozzo highlight that, in many cases, in the vision of the police officers interviewed, they emphasize the “dependence” of the bosses or the “top” with respect to politics. This type of interaction and exchange allows them to protect certain privileges, whether they are “legal” or “illegal”. From another geographical region (City of Buenos Aires), Elea Maglia and Violeta Dikenstein (2019) give an account of different dimensions of the creation of the Buenos Aires City Police in 2016, which brought together—at that time—officers from the ex-Metropolitan Police and Argentine Federal Police. Among the dimensions, they analyze the bureaucratic and affective problems experienced by those police officers transferred from the Argentine Federal Police, as well as those who remained in the federal sphere. In addition, the authors address the “official” perspective or point of view of the decision makers, functionaries of the Executive Power of the City, about the creation and definition of Buenos Aires City Police. More particularly, they describe and detail the motivations that would explain the creation of such a security force, the complexities involved in the merger of two forces with different traditions, antagonistic characterizations between a “good” and a “bad” policeman, and perceptions about the delimitation of its tasks and functions, as well as the role that this

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new force should assume, anchored in the pillars of the street proximity with the “neighbors” and in a markedly technological profile (as it was indicated in Chapter 1, I will delve into both topics in future chapters of the book). Similarly, in his analysis of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police, Gabriel Anitua (2010) presents speeches by different City Government officials (Mauricio Macri, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta and Guillermo Montenegro) about the creation, main features (appeal to the “community” and use of “new technologies”) and the objectives of that security force. For its part, Osvaldo Barreneche and Diego Galeano (2008) provide a greater historical depth to the discussion about police reforms in Argentina. Specifically, they describe four axes: the links between the police and the political regime, the relations between the police and criminal justice, the incorporations of technological innovations for police work and innovations in the recruitment, instruction and training mechanisms of police officers. According to its affinity with the topics exposed up to here, it is significant to resume the first one. In this direction, the authors point out, in the first place, a set of discussions, vicissitudes and tensions around the centralization of police functions at the time of the colonial councils. Next, they highlight the creation of the General Police Department in 1821; and in a second cycle of reforms, the sanction of a General Police Regulation (1868) at the initiative of the management of Enrique O’Gorman. In this context, Barreneche and Galeano point out that the problems that the Buenos Aires police institution was going through were due to its confused dependence on political power, a picture that would begin to change with the federalization of the City of Buenos Aires in 1880 and the subsequent division between Capital Police and Buenos Aires Provincial Police. Thirdly, they detail some of the reforms linked to the police headquarters of O’Gorman, Marcos Paz and Ramón Falcón, developed between the mid-nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, tending to increase the number of salaried officials dependent on the Police Department, regulate the services and create a hierarchical system that would regulate the career within the institution.

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For the 1930s, the authors refer to a scenario in which, in accordance with social changes, the state agencies on duty found themselves in need of carrying out the reorganizations of the police forces; reformist initiative that they consider had a limited scope, only attributable to the police headquarters. In any case, contributing to the discussion on the ways of thinking about the relations between police and politics, they point out that the Capital Police and that of many provinces adopted as their own the work—incentivized by the conservative regime—of persecution and imprisonment of militants and sympathizers of political groups opposed to the government. Finally, Barreneche and Galeano point to the changes that have occurred since the mid-1940s, highlighting, among others, the organization of the Federal Security Council and the creation of the Argentine Federal Police in 1943.

Crime, Police and Politics For the specific case of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police, Marcelo Sain (2004) analyzes the relations of collusion between the world of politics, the police and crime, understanding that they constitute three instances closely linked to each other. Regarding the first two of them, Sain (2004: 22) refers to the link between police and politics as follows: “The Buenos Aires Provincial Police is nothing more than a reflection of local political life. It is, rather, a work of the political dynamics developed during the last decades at the provincial level”. Expressed in a disaggregated manner, the author highlights that the police system of the Buenos Aires Province has a high degree of politicization, observable in the fluid relations between certain sectors of the police institution and Duhaldist Peronism. This politicization implies, on the one hand, the political manipulation of those actors to settle bids with opposition sectors, party internals or electoral contests, through the generation of overflow situations or security crises. Such politicization involves, on the other hand, the protection and concealment of police chiefs and cadres that articulated and supported

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certain criminal networks through which they collected numerous illegal funds. In other words, the relations between certain police sectors and crime have political endorsement, either due to the participation of certain referents in these illicit bonds, or due to the omission of producing the necessary changes to dismantle those criminal networks. Taking the notion of “grey zone” as its axis, proposed by Javier Auyero, Rodríguez Alzueta (2014), revisits that systematic relationship between the police, politics and crime. In this sense, he adds a fourth element, the role that the “judicial family” adopts in this interweaving: “The police regulate criminal circuits and finance politics; in exchange, the local leadership, but also prosecutors and judges, provide protection and guarantee impunity. It is an alternative collection system protected by lack of control and state anomie” (Rodríguez Alzueta, 2014: 186). In terms of a greater degree of detail of the collection system used by the police, the author mentions, following Sain, various modalities and forms of professional crime: among them, drug trafficking, arms sales, theft of cash trucks, assault on banks, kidnappings and human trafficking. By orienting in the same direction, he highlights the destination of those amounts collected, pointing out, in this regard, the existing overlap between the world of the police, party politics (clientelism or “punterismo”) and crime; fields that, although they have their own actors and their relationships, rules of the game, practices and specific logics, are interrelated. In addition, it is from that conceptual tool—and, at the same time, concrete social space—of the “grey zone”, from those interstices between what is legal and what is illegal, between the blurred limits between the police and crime, between law and the state of exception, the place from where Rodríguez Alzueta delves into the analysis of police practices. Moreover, in this sense, the scenario from which he provides features to think, in particular, about the interactions between police officers and migrants, an aspect that I will detail in the second heading of this chapter. More recently in time, Javier Auyero and Katherine Sobering (2021) describe, based on a polyphony of voices expressed in different sources, the direct and indirect links of clandestine connections between drug traffickers and state and/or provincial security forces agents, and the

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occurrences of interpersonal violence in vulnerable neighborhoods in different regions of Argentina. In an explicit dialogue with Sain, the authors make observations about the argument of the existence of a police-criminal pact. By illustrating situations that lead to tensions and conflicts, they highlight, firstly, that both police self-government and police involvement in criminal activities do not occur without complications. Secondly, they highlight that police action should not be reduced to collusion with drug traffickers or other criminal groups, since police work in Argentina involves different aspects and senses, illegal behavior being only one of them. Thirdly, they affirm that a key tendency to understand the collusion dynamics studied is the growth and militarization of the Gendarmerie at the expense of the Argentine Federal Police and the Buenos Aires Provincial Police. Fourthly and last, they state that in Argentina there is significant variation in the ways in which each province governs its own police forces and in which these forces regulate the illicit drug markets.

Migrants and Police Practices As in the case of the relations between police and politics, researchers from different regions of the world investigated the interactions between police officers and migrants. In this regard, Alpa Parmar (2020) adopts Operation Nexus, a joint initiative—introduced in 2012—between the police and immigration enforcement implemented across the United Kingdom, as an object of study. More specifically, the author addresses central questions: how contact with the criminal justice system can fundamentally recast the relationship between (non)citizens and the state? What happens when criminal justice agents perform immigration duties? How racialized citizens’ relationship with and perceptions of the state are fundamentally altered by interactions with the police? Presented as a product of a research carried out between 2015 and 2018, based on a multi-method approach (fostered by ethnographic observation, interviews with officials and immigrants, and custody data records), Parmar analyzes some of the impacts or consequences of Operation Nexus.

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Among them, she highlights the discretionary application and use of the “high harm” label, aimed at identifying certain individuals, and points out, in this sense, that Nexus must be read in the socio-historical context of the stereotyping of Black and Asian men as being more suspected of crimes and moral panics. In an interrelated way, another of the consequences of Operation Nexus is that it legitimizes and contributes to racial profiling. In the author’s own words, “black and minority ethnic groups’ contact with the police, particularly when police functions and directed to enforce migration control, operate to organize racial knowledge in new ways” (Parmar, 2020: 36). One of the empirical observables of this process is the association between types of crime and nationality—racial origin (reconstructed from police custody data briefings). In this regard, an important aspect is the genealogy that the author traces between these classifications and the colonial legacy, by identifying continuities between the types of crime, nationality (and therefore, race) and historical constructions of criminality. Parmar (2019) also analyzes the relationship between technology, police culture and immigration control. Supported by the same research as the aforementioned article, she addresses the implications of technology in policing through the lens of race; or to put it in terms of a fundamental question, how is technology capable of animating race in police custody spaces? In this sense, the author highlights that the race continues to operate according to the demarcation of who belongs and who does not (selecting thus between citizens and non-citizens), and also that databases and other personal information, as technologies, enable race to mediate and influence the identification and expulsion of unwanted, criminalized and racialized populations (without an explicit reference to race and taking on the appearance of “neutral” and “objective” data). Also framed in United Kingdom, Ana Aliverti (2021) reconstructs the perspectives, practices and moral dilemmas of the work of police and immigration officers oriented to policing “within” the borders. As part of a fieldwork undertook between 2017 and 2019 (which included

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carrying out observations and in-depth interviews with police and immigration officers), the author addresses, among other topics, the legacies of Operation Nexus in policing towards the foreign offenders. For Aliverti, far from being linked to institutional structures, such activity is carried out following a “Do It Yourself ” model, an expression which refers to a constant improvisation and informal experimentation, based on personal motivations, with different tools and tactics, and in a broader framework of British police initiatives (in collaboration with Immigration Enforcement) to identify and, at the same time, fix individual identities, making readable people and, above all, their various mobility flows. By delving into the dynamics, technologies and knowledge aimed at policing migration, the author highlights the fact that race occupies a significant place. Moreover, she points out that, in migration-oriented policing, selection and racial profiling do not constitute a deviation or an aberration, but rather a constitutive part without which its exercise is futile. Similarly to Parmar, Aliverti refers in this sense to the space occupied by national taxonomies, racial categories and to the persistence of colonial legacies in contemporary policing against certain groups of foreigners. Aliverti also analyzes the relationship between place, belonging and order. To express it in more detail, she describes the ways in which police and immigration officers build a certain social and territorial order, based on the distinction between criteria of belonging, which gives meaning to the work that they carry out on a daily basis and makes legible the different audiences with which they interact. It is important to note that these criteria are not based solely on a spatial dimension, but also on a temporal one (outlining, thus, a coexistence between the “here and now” and the “outside and in the past” narratives). For the French case, Michel Wieviorka (2009) points out the exercise of discrimination in a variety of areas of social life, including the operation of the police. When referring to the police control of young people according to their physical appearance, he highlights that the discrimination is in the fact that there are certain categories of people who are controlled and not in the control itself.

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Also from France, in his ethnography in the Parisian suburbs, Fassin (2016) addresses the modalities of police intervention in those popular neighborhoods with strong racial segregation. Among other topics, he analyzes the interactions of the police with their different audiences (in general, with young people who are of immigrant origin or are part of minorities), highlighting—with a high degree of detail—different episodes of violence, racism and discriminatory practices. Giulia Fabini (2022) points out that, in Italy, immigration control is demanded of the police at each of its stages. In addition, the control of the internal borders is the duty mainly of the State Police (and to a lesser extent, of others polices such as carabineer and local police5 ). The author identifies two problematic elements in the analysis of police control of borders and migrations. On the one hand, the fact that the management of the migrant population is only required of the police opens the possibility of abuses that could remain unknown. On the other hand, the discretionary power of the police is achieved through selective and opaque mechanisms, sometimes linked to the nationalities of the interested parties, but also to processes of attribution of social danger, regardless of nationality. Among other theoretical and historical aspects of the literature on the sociology of police and borders criminologies, Fabini also addresses the processes of subjectivation of irregular migrants in a medium-large city located in a region of northern Italy as a study case; or to express it in other terms, the process of negotiation of the border or the process of production of the subjects during the interaction between migrants and police. Focused on a specific local context, the author thus presents the results of an empirical inquiry that included interviews, ethnographic observation and archival research. When referring to urban control, she places the emphasis on informal practices, as well as on the instances of application and non-application of the law (apply the law towards the “trafficker” and not applying the law towards the “irregular migrant”).

5 For a historicization of Italy’s police forces, where the authors also address their practices in various operational settings (including immigration control), see Fabini and Sbraccia (2021).

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In addition, Fabini refers to control without expulsion, noting that most of the interaction between the police and irregular migrants does not translate into a legal action, thus enabling an opaque or invisible control, by not resorting to the law. Regarding the performance of borders and the process of production of subjectivity, a significant element is that this process is not in a unique direction; rather, migrants also participate in it. In this sense, the author also alludes to the resistance of migrants, based on the rules of the game, emotions, irony and visibility in the public space. From the United States, Amada Armenta (2017) studies the connections between police, prisons and the immigration enforcement system. Based on fieldwork carried out in Nashville, Tennessee between 2009 and 2013, one of the recurring ideas is about the role of local law enforcement agencies in immigration enforcement. In broader terms, the author explains how the convergence of local policies, state laws, institutional policies, and law enforcement practices criminalizes “unauthorized” (or “illegal”) immigrants and deposits them into an expanding federal deportation system. To do this, she uses a qualitative methodology, which includes observations and in-depth interviews, and complements the obtained data with the consultation of newspaper articles, public records, state and county documents, among others sources. The author acknowledges that the police play a crucial role in the potential deportation of “unauthorized immigrants”, through the institutional efforts to be proactive. For example, Armenta (2017: 3) highlights that “police traffic stops played a critical role in channeling Mexican and Central American immigrants into the jail”. Like the research mentioned up to here, she emphasizes the weight of local particularities and also points out the existing variations within the same country. Moving from the North to the South, María Daniela Lara and Tamara Santos Alvins (2016) carry out an exploratory study from a mixed methodological perspective (both qualitative and quantitative) on the detention of foreigners for crimes, simple crimes and misdemeanors in Chile, at both the national and regional levels (in Northern Chile; and more specifically, in Arica y Parinacota, Tarapacá and Antofagasta), between 2006 and 2012.

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Concretely, the authors analyze the statistics reports provided by Carabiniers of Chile and Investigations Police of Chile (PDI, for its acronym in Spanish), in terms of volumes of detention of foreigners, nationalities and different categories of crime. Regarding the Carabiniers figures, the largest number of apprehensions corresponds to street sellers without municipal permission, while Investigations Police data places greater focus on drug trafficking crimes. When presenting these overview, Lara and Santos Alvins describe different kinds of arrests such as identity checks and immigration documentation controls, associations between geographic areas and types of crimes and some particularities of the studied regions (borders and authorized crossings, demographic conditions—above all, greater foreign population—and historical and cultural peculiarities). They also address, based on semi-structured interviews, the perceptions of Criminal Justice operators regarding police selection and detention, highlighting aspects related to administrative powers in criminal matters (discretionary and invasive investigations), the geographical and the cultural factor. Despite the diversity of the regions under study, a common element of the literature reviewed up to here points to the imbrication of legaladministrative and penal spaces. Or to express it in other words, that shared element alludes to the crimmigration process, understood as the increased merger of crime control and immigration control (van der Woude et al., 2017). For the case of Argentina, Rodríguez Alzueta (2014) highlights the spatial interventions aimed at regulating circulation between the “barbarian zones” and the “civilized zones”. For the author, this constitutes a micro-penalty of incivilities that enables the police to exercise territorial control that segregates certain groups of people (marginalized, immigrants or marginal youth), referred to as risk-producing or dangerous groups. In the same direction, he points out that one of the ways in which the police regulate “barbarian zones” is when they retain, that is, when they prevent groups of people from leaving or moving away from their territory. He adds that, in order to manage, contain and retain certain groups of people (among them, young people, immigrants, the poor and

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the marginalized), the police need a state of exception: an anomic space, or non-law, that it enables police violence freed from any legal formality or garb. Delving into the field of police work, Rodríguez Alzueta underlines the importance of arrests for identity check, conceived as one of the police practices that defines and composes identities.6 For the author, such arrests—which empowers the police to delay people to verify their identity and know their background—constitutes a discretionary, regular and selective practice. In terms of the above-mentioned spatial control, the police do not detain to meet a person but to assign him a territory. In addition, the police implement their arrests for identity check to shape a negative identity: in tune with my research interests, Rodríguez Alzueta points out that, through these arrests, Bolivian, Peruvian or Paraguayan immigrants become the object of police attention, and more specifically, they are forced to constantly certify an identity that is modeled through police practices. Previously, Sozzo (1999) referred to different characters (men, young people, poor and migrants) as objects of interventions within the framework of the “tactic of suspicion”. Or, to express it in other terms, as a consequence of a process of social and institutional construction of the social images of suspicion, applied to both individuals and populations.7 In this regard, it is significant to add that, following Rodríguez Alzueta, a certain social consensus plays a central role in the generation of those stereotypes or prejudices that guide police detention practices, an aspect that we can synthesize in the premise according to which there is no cop nose without a social nose. In line with this last idea, Galvani (2016: 111–112) affirms that “we reject the postulates that suggest some kind of police autonomy regarding 6

Tiscornia et al. (2004) describe different uses of arrests for identity check and particularly, highlight the use of such police power in the inspections and controls carried out on foreigners. 7 On the role played by the category and rhetoric of “suspicion” in the conformation of a police version of those events that are classified as criminal and as legitimization a posteriori of a police intervention, see Eilbaum (2004). Linking both aforementioned topics, the author points out that the category of “suspicion” is common to all police action that does not require a court order that authorizes it, such as the particular case of arrests for identity check. On the same topic, José Daniel Cesano (2022) recently highlighted the link between suspicion and discretion in police work aimed at contraventions.

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the definition of who their ‘enemies’ are: these are state and socially delimited. Raised the demarcation that is, the police will act on those others”. Hence, then, the importance of studying the different classifications of the “undesirable others” that come into play in the field of police interventions. Another unavoidable reference about the interactions between police and migrants is the research embodied in Territorios de control policial: gestión de ilegalismos en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, book edited by María Victoria Pita and María Inés Pacecca in 2017. By way of introduction, the authors highlight that one of the transversal themes refers to the forms assumed by police power in the City of Buenos Aires, understood as a power that seeks to govern and manage social groups, and that it does so by managing—from a differential distribution of legality and violence—those types of behaviors that can be defined as illegalisms. In particular, the research focuses on the analysis of the modalities of police control aimed at different social groups (among them, vendors, artisans, musicians, stallholders, prostitutes), who are engaged, in terms of their work activity, to the street sale. And this to account of the ways in which the Argentine Federal Police and the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police manage, administer and seek to regulate the activities that these sectors carry out. For the authors, these forms of management create spaces that operate as social and moral territories of police control, areas that foster an expansion of the police state. Contrary to the spatial management that Rodríguez Alzueta referred to, those territories delimit a social space demarcated by a mixture of legal, illegal and illicit practices, which define, rather than zones of non-law, zones submerged in a particular police right (Pita, 2012). When mentioning a wide repertoire of empirical domains and narrative genres within the field strategies, the authors emphasize that the theme of the book points to a mapping of the forms of exercise of police management in the City of Buenos Aires. In this direction, María Victoria Pita (2017) focuses on the case of Senegalese street sellers. In particular, she presents in detail the complaint made in 2009, by a specific group of Senegalese in the Misdemeanor Justice of the City of

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Buenos Aires, regarding a series of practices—labeled as abusive and violent—carried out by the Argentine Federal Police. The relevance of this case relies on different dimensions. In the first place, it makes it possible to show that such territories are spaces that are not only differentiated by the type of informal activity involved, but that they are also segregated within each activity based on the social groups that comprise it. In this sense, it provides information on the origin of the groups involved in police control (specifically, street vendors of Senegalese origin). Second, the case presentation includes close-up testimony recounting the ways in which police officers mistreat and harass sellers, under article 83 of the Urban Coexistence Code. Third, it allows observing “in action” the functional articulation between the police and Misdemeanor Justice, in particular, the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Fourthly and lastly, although without denying the xenophobic and racist components, the author emphasizes that the denounced situation results from a failed negotiation in the administration of that territory—which manifests itself in a racialized way—and which is aggravated by different features of the population subject to control and surveillance (due to their precarious legal status, language difficulties or their country of origin) or because they do not respond as expected to the coercion imposed to occupy and carry out their work activities in that territory, either resisting or contesting an alleged police right. In this sense, Pita points out that it is necessary to analyze the logic of the interactions and the ways of negotiation within each of the administered groups. Along with these elements, it is also necessary to mention the description provided about the leading role attributed to the police (and to put it more appropriately, to police selectivity) in the prevention of contraventions. At the same time, the historical racconto on the regulatory modifications related to Police Edicts, their repeal and the enactment of the Urban Coexistence Code or Offense Code in 1998, which implied the creation of new types of misdemeanors and the judicialization of the procedure in that subject. In fact, by linking it to the aforementioned topic, for the author, the Code began to shift the power to detain people towards the figure of arrest for identity check.

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In the same book, Pacecca et al. (2017) present a series of judicial and police interventions that occurred in the year 2014, aimed at repressing and sanctioning street sale, which had a unique impact on Senegalese “manteros”.8 On the one hand, they review a raid carried out at dawn on January 28, 2014, by numerous agents of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police, in a pension located in the Balvanera neighborhood, requested by the Complex Investigations Coordination Unit of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the City of Buenos Aires. Although Pacecca et al. (2017: 205–206) affirm that all those who resided in the raided home were treated violently and abusively by police personnel, they nevertheless highlight that people of Senegalese origin were particularly attacked: Their not very fluent Spanish made it difficult for them to understand what was happening and respond to police orders adequately, which increased the mistreatment by uniformed officers. Added to this, when the Senegalese citizens refused to sign the search certificate because they did not understand what was recorded there, the police officers forced them to do so by threatening them with their weapons, and then did not give them a copy of what was signed.

On the other hand, the authors allude to the operation carried out jointly by personnel from the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police and the Public Space Use Inspection Directorate, in the Balvanera neighborhood, the day after the event described above. They point out that the police officers seized merchandise, and furthermore, that in several cases they failed to draw up the records of the withheld assets or omitted to detail part of them. In addition to those police and judicial interventions, the authors also describe the lines of action deployed by the victims, namely: manifestations in public space, notes in the media and contacts with different civil society organizations. In parallel, they filed legal actions against the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police and other officials of the City Government. 8 Following the authors, it is a term that designates those people who sell on the street, arranging their merchandise on cloth or “mantas” in precarious conditions.

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From other coordinates, Gisele Kleidermacher (2019) describes the relationships between police officers and Senegalese street sellers in the commercial space of the Avellaneda area, in the Flores neighborhood of the City of Buenos Aires. In general terms, she points out that those sellers interact with a diversity of actors, establishing horizontal relationships with other street vendors with whom they share the space, as well as vertical ones—in many cases conflicting, she adds—with the owners of the stores and with the forces of security. Using a research methodology rooted in strong qualitative components, Kleidermacher reconstructs in detail some scenes of the interaction between Senegalese street sellers and the police that take place in the Avellaneda space. In this regard, she presents testimonies from Senegalese migrants that allow us to account for different perspectives on such interactions, namely: the one according to which the actions carried out by the police are described as discriminatory by not allowing them to sell in the street, the perception of this actor as a threat—not only to their source of subsistence, and that of their families (by sending remittances to Senegal), but also to their physical integrity—and the vision of police action as an outrage against their rights. Likewise, the author includes stories that describe the theft of merchandise carried out by the police (and therefore, also about the need to adapt the products offered to be able to move quickly in case the security forces arrive), or that sellers should leave part of their profits as informal arrangements. Kleidermacher’s review about the regulatory frameworks that regulate the daily life of the actors who are concentrated in Avellaneda deserves special attention, in this case, with particular emphasis on the Senegalese collective. Especially, because it invites us to problematize the intersections between immigration policy and the actions of the security forces. In this direction, the author highlights that the implementation of Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017 (during the presidential term of Mauricio Macri) increased the vulnerability of Senegalese origin population, by incorporating different aspects that deepened preexisting problems in terms of migratory irregularity and the impossibility of obtaining residency.

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In fact, for Kleidermacher (2019: 111), the year 2017 constitutes a point of inflection, in line with those changes that occurred from and in the sphere of state politics: It is observed then that, although street vending is regulated by the Contravention Code of the City of Buenos Aires, as of 2017 there was a change in the modality of action of the police in Avellaneda, especially against the population of Senegalese origin, coinciding with the enactment of Decree No. 70/2017 […] Starting in 2017, more violent interactions began to be generated, especially with the outing of Public Space inspectors, who dress in civilian clothes and kidnap the merchandise of the Senegalese sellers without identifying themselves or explaining what happened.

Despite the greater police control, the more violent and visible actions of the operations, the author highlights that street vendors continue to develop their activities in the Avellaneda space, following a dynamic understood as “the game of cat and mouse”. Far from remaining in a passive attitude, they develop a series of resistance strategies (among others, circulating, developing internal communication codes, carrying out community sociability practices, grouping with other vendors from various countries of origin and with street seller organizations). Furthermore, these strategies are not specific to the City of Buenos Aires, as illustrated by the case of New York City. Recently, Ramiro Pérez Ripossio (2021) describes violence by the security forces directed towards the South American transvestite/trans migrant population residing in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area. Based on fieldwork carried out between 2017 and 2019, and nourished by qualitative research methods, the author presents different categories of analysis (also their properties and dimensions), among which I highlight “type of police violence” and “police actions of control”. Regarding the first, it alludes to physical, verbal and sexual assaults experienced by migrants during the exercise of prostitution/sex work. In a more disaggregated way, this category includes insults, beatings using police equipment, having sexual relations under pressure and requesting sexual favors in exchange for avoiding arrests.

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As for the second, it points to the mistreatment of the security forces under different modalities, to temporary detentions, to “displace” them from the space where they carry out prostitution/sex work in different neighborhoods of the City of Buenos Aires, to arbitrary and vexatious requisitions and to draw up contraventional acts. It should be noted that, in the elucidation of each of the categories, subcategories, properties and dimensions, the author gives special prominence to the voice of South American migrants (specifically, of Peruvian, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Brazilian and Paraguayan nationality), placing their testimonials in the spotlight. In addition to describing this violence, Pérez Ripossio also gives an account on criminalization processes experienced by migrants in their migratory projects, especially in terms of that representation that associates them with the sale of narcotics (and more particularly, with the figure of the “narcotravesti”). In line with other inquiries, he presents legal and regulatory devices that allow the South American transvestite/ trans population to be criminalized: specifically, the National Narcotics Law (Law No. 23,737) and the above-mentioned Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017, presented as part of a policy to combat “drug crime”, thus contributing to an identification between immigration and crime. Recovering these perspectives from the intersectionality approach, the author concludes that, in the violence and criminalization processes experienced by the South American transvestite/trans migrant population, migration status and gender identity are conjugated and overlapping aspects. As a common thread of the aforementioned works, the management/ government of migrations or street administration (due to markings, patrols, arrests) constitutes a way of regulating public space, something to which I will return later in the book when presenting testimonies of migrants interviewed.

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Immigration and Crime To conclude the chapter, I highlight authors who have pointed out the presence, in Argentine political and media discourses, of an association between immigration (especially from neighboring countries and Peru) and different social problems, including crime. In that direction, Néstor Cohen (2005: 143) affirms that, throughout the 1990s, “officials from the national government, security forces, the trade union sphere and other public spheres appealed to the qualifier ‘illegal’ when they referred to foreigners residing in our country”, highlighting such a condition as a cause of lack of work, presence of cholera and insecurity. Similarly, Sergio Caggiano (2005) highlights that in the same decade, it became common to hear discriminatory expressions towards Bolivian migrants (as well as from other neighboring countries) by high-ranked officials and representatives of local institutions. The author identifies three moments in which discriminatory acts and manifestations intensified: the detection and rise of cholera cases, the growth of the unemployment rate due to “illegal immigration”, and the interconnected discourse on “urban insecurity” and the “foreignization of crime” in Buenos Aires. In her analysis of the Argentine Federal Police, Mariana Galvani refers to the construction of immigrants as the cause of social problems, such as unemployment and crime. In this sense, the label of “illegal immigrants” as a way of designating people from Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay operated, during the 10 years of Carlos Menem’s administration, as a discrediting classification (Galvani, 2007). For its part, Eduardo Domenech and María José Magliano (2008) reflect on the discourses and policies of exclusion/inclusion developed by the Argentine State regarding immigration, which have historically been configured through two perspectives: one that conceives immigration as a “contribution”, and another that, on the contrary, associates it with a “problem” or “threat”. In line with the authors mentioned up to here, Domenech and Magliano point out that—for the 1990s—high-ranked public officials attributed unemployment, cholera and insecurity to Latin American immigrants.

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Along with the significance attributed to political discourses, in another text, Domenech (2011a) also emphasizes the role of the media in building a negative image of these migrants, by privileging and broadcasting news related to illegality, crime or competition with the local population for jobs. In a similar sense, Marta Monclús Masó and Bernarda García (2012) refer to the presence of rhetorical figures such as “invasion”, “wave”, “flood”, “threat”, “dangerousness”, “illegals” and “undocumented”. Although exempt from an explicit reference to the immigration-crime nexus, Cohen’s (2014) approach to the constituent nuclei of the perception on the external migrant is a fundamental conceptual pillar to describe the dynamics of interaction between natives and migrants. And more particularly, a tool that contributes to the understanding of those discourses erected to classify “us” and “them”. Due to their thematic affinity, I am interested in highlighting that nucleus that characterizes them as carriers of illegality and in their profile as transgressors. From a similar line of inquiry, Domenech (2011b) explored the interplay between a rhetoric of exclusion (typical of the 1990s) and a rhetoric of inclusion (related to migration Law No. 25,871) in public discourse on immigration. As an illustration of the first, we can highlight the speeches of officials of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires Government (including Mauricio Macri himself ) about the problems of “uncontrolled immigration”, as Brenda Canelo (2015) reconstructs them for the case of Parque Indoamericano, which echo and resonate in the speeches that I will analyze in Chapter 4 of the book. For a brief mention of other regions, Armenta (2017) describes that the growth of the Latino population has been accompanied by an intense anti-immigrant rhetoric that often focuses on immigrants’ presumed criminality (illustrating, at this point, that during his presidential campaign, Donald Trump referred to Mexican immigrants in the United States as “rapists”, “criminals”, and “bad hombres”). As a common trait between Europe and the United States, Alessandro De Giorgi (2016) highlights that the equation between immigration and crime became quickly a leitmotif in mass-mediated representations about the “problem” of immigration. Valeria Ferraris (2021) analyses the relationship between media, criminality and immigration in Italy, pointing

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out the presence of immigration (and its various related aspects) in the thematic agenda of different newspapers.

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Parmar, A. (2019). Policing migration and racial technologies. The British Journal of Criminology, 59 (4), 938–957. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azz006 Parmar, A. (2020). Arresting (non)citizenship: The policing migration nexus of nationality, race and criminalization. Theoretical Criminology, 24 (1), 28–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619850800 Pasquino, P. (1991). Theatrum politicum: The genealogy of capital—Police and the state of prosperity. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality (pp. 105–118). The University of Chicago Press. Pérez Ripossio, R. (2021). Criminalización y violencias hacia la población migrante travesti/trans sudamericana residente en el Área Metropolitana de Buenos Aires. Revista Delito y Sociedad, 30 (52), e0043. https://doi.org/10. 14409/dys.2021.52.e0043 Pita, M. V. (2012). Mitologías porteñas en torno al poder policial. Policía, contravenciones y gestión de ilegalismos en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Revista La Biblioteca, 12, 182–209. Pita, M. V. (2017). Poder de policía y administración de grupos sociales. El caso de los vendedores ambulantes senegaleses en la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires. In M. V. Pita & M. I. Pacecca (Eds.), Territorios de control policial: gestión de ilegalismos en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (pp. 147–188). Editorial de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras - Universidad de Buenos Aires. Pita, M. V., & Pacecca, M. I. (2017). Introducción. In M. V. Pita & M. I. Pacecca (Eds.), Territorios de control policial: gestión de ilegalismos en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (pp. 43–56). Editorial de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras - Universidad de Buenos Aires. Rodríguez Alzueta, E. (2014). Temor y control. La gestión de la inseguridad como forma de gobierno. Futuro Anterior Ediciones. Sain, M. (2004). Política, policía y delito. La red bonaerense. Capital Intelectual. Sain, M. (2010). La policía en las ciencias sociales. Ensayo sobre los obstáculos epistemológicos para el estudio de la institución policial en el campo de las ciencias sociales. In M. Sirimarco (Comp.), Estudiar la policía. La mirada de las ciencias sociales sobre la institución policial (pp. 27–56). Teseo. Sain, M. (2015). El Leviatán azul. Policía y política en la argentina. Siglo XXI. Sozzo, M. (1999). ¿Hacia la Superación de la Táctica de la Sospecha? Notas sobre Prevención del Delito e Institución Policial. In Detenciones, facultades y prácticas policiales en la ciudad de Buenos Aires (pp. 3–41). CELS. Sozzo, M. (2002). Usos de la violencia y construcción de la actividad policial en la Argentina. In S. Gayol & G. Kessler (Comps.), Violencias, delitos y justicias en la Argentina (pp. 225–259). Manantial.

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4 Political Discourses Around the Immigration-Crime Nexus

Abstract In this chapter, I address the ways of defining the nexus between immigration and crime in the political discourses implemented during the Cambiemos administration. Regarding the voices expressed on this issue, it is relevant to mention that of Macri himself, as well as it is significant to highlight, among others, Rogelio Frigerio, Patricia Bullrich and Horacio García, who held hierarchical positions in the Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Security and National Directorate for Migration, respectively. Together with the perspective of national and local officials, I also incorporated speeches by Miguel Ángel Pichetto, who during the Cambiemos administration was the head of the block of senators of the opposition party Front for Victory but who later on became Macri’s vice president candidate in the 2019 presidential elections. As main results, this chapter presents different categories, reconstructed through Grounded Theory discourse analysis: (i) “We need to know who is who”, (ii) Distinction in the type of immigration that arrives in Argentina, (iii) Stricter controls for entering the country and (iv) Crime and migration. Likewise, to provide those with greater specificity, I expose their different subcategories and properties.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Abiuso, Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46379-2_4

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Keywords Political discourses · Cambiemos administration · Grounded Theory · Immigration · Crime · Selective punitiveness

Introduction On December 10, 2015, the political coalition Cambiemos won the national elections in Argentina, taking the candidate Mauricio Macri to the presidency for a period of four years. During this administration, characterized by a return to neoliberalism, and by a context of political conservatism (see Chapter 1), we witnessed a discursive proliferation of instances where officials from various areas of government explicitly and publicly referred to an alleged link between immigration and crime. Such speeches legitimized and supported changes implemented in the immigration policy, being the implementation of the Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017 (in January 2017, unilaterally by the National Executive Power) the most significant point of this process.1 Against this background, in this chapter I address the ways of defining the nexus between immigration and crime in the political discourses implemented during the Cambiemos administration. As I mentioned in Chapter 2 (where I present my methodological approach), I used Grounded Theory research strategy to analyze these discourses, taking up both its pioneering development in the 1960s (Glaser & Strauss, 2008) and its more recent elaboration by Strauss and Corbin (1998) around the different types of coding (open, axial and selective). In this sense, and as main results, the book presents different categories (as well as their subcategories and properties), reconstructed through discourse analysis: (i) “We need to know who is who”, (ii) Distinction in the type of immigration that arrives in Argentina, (iii) Stricter controls for entering the country and (iv) Crime and migration.2 Regarding the voices expressed on this issue, it is relevant to mention that of Macri himself, as well as it is significant to highlight, among 1 During his presidential term, on March 5, 2021, Alberto Fernández repealed Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017, considering that it includes aspects “irreconcilable with our National Constitution and with the international system for the protection of human rights” (Decree No. 138/2021: paragraph 5). 2 I presented a preliminary categorization in Abiuso (2023).

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others, Rogelio Frigerio, Patricia Bullrich and Horacio García, who held hierarchical positions in the Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Security and National Directorate for Migration, respectively. Together with the perspective of national and local officials, I also incorporated speeches by Miguel Ángel Pichetto, who during the Cambiemos administration was the head of the block of senators of the opposition party Front for Victory but who later on became Macri’s vice president candidate in the 2019 presidential elections.

“We Need to Know Who Is Who” In his first press conference of 2017, the President Macri made a fiery defense of the government project that aims to limit the arrival in Argentina of immigrants who have criminal records in their country of origin. In this direction, he mentioned: Due to lack of action, we cannot allow crime to continue choosing Argentina as a place to come to commit crimes. We need to articulate with the other countries to know who is who. We cannot act after it happened. The first thing we have to do is act preventively. (Clarín, 2017, January 17)

In a similar sense, Patricia Bullrich, then Minister for Security, pointed out: “a person who has a record in his country cannot enter Argentina. That is why we want to have a database to be able to analyze who is arriving, especially with those countries whose volume of migration is important” (Clarín, 2017, January 17). Likewise, in the official announcement of the implementation of the Advanced Passenger Information (API) system, as an initiative obliging airlines to provide accurate information on the criminal records of those travelers who want to enter Argentina, Rogelio Frigerio—who was at that time Interior minister—affirmed that “it serves to expedite immigration processing times but also to have precise information regarding those who have a criminal record and who intend to enter our country” (La Nación, 2017, January 25). Frigerio also participated in

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the announcement of the measure that foreigners who want to settle in Argentina must present a certificate that shows that they had no criminal record in the last ten years (in February 2019), within which Horacio García—of the National Directorate for Migration—highlighted: “The objective is that all people who come to Argentina do not have previous convictions that are hidden by the legislation of each country. Argentina offers the truth to the world and we want reciprocity” (Dapelo, 2019, February 28). In an interview with Clarín in 2019, Miguel Ángel Pichetto stated a similar point of view, by noting, “You have to be prepared and stop this naive and stupid vision that everyone can enter Argentina happily, they are all good. We must have a careful look and control of our borders, who enters and who leaves” (Schmidt, 2019, January 2019). As these different expressions share the same idea (the need to identify those who intend to enter Argentina), I included them in the same label (or in vivo code), “We need to know who is who”. In order to give it a greater specification and outline a more limited meaning, I highlight the following properties or attributes. In the first place, the effort to “act preventively” and avoid, consequently, “that crime continues to choose Argentina as a place to come to commit crimes” (La Nación, 2017, January 18). Secondly, the imperative to identify the “suspects”, multi-secular from the police and even state perspective (García Ferrari, 2010). Both Alpa Parmar (2019) and Ana Aliverti (2021) describe—in the case of the United Kingdom—different technologies aimed at identifying individuals and fixing identities, where national taxonomies, racial categories and colonial legacies play a crucial role. Regarding the discourses analyzed, it is worth noting the implementation of the Advanced Passenger Information (API) system as a mechanism that will serve, in the words of Frigerio, “to prevent the entry of criminals” (Ortelli, 2017, January 25). Third and last, another of the properties of the label points to the effort to establish exchanges and cooperation between countries to have information and a database to be able to know and analyze “who is arriving”. In this sense, Frigerio mentioned the agreement to obtain the

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Interpol database, “which also allows all border posts in Argentina to have information on the background of all those who enter our country” (Clarín, 2017, January 25). Along with the importance attributed to the identification of those who intend to enter the country, in the analyzed speeches I found that there are differences between those who will be welcome and those who will not, entering the field, no longer of identification, but of selection.

“We Are Not Talking About Foreigners Who Come to Work, But About Those Who Commit Crimes” Another of the resulting categories is Distinction in the type of immigration that arrives in Argentina, whose name is inspired by my doctoral thesis regarding the analysis of police and “experts” journals from past and recent times. I built this category from expressions that framed changes in migration policy (the presentation of the API system and the preparation and eventual implementation of Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017) and that pointed to specific events (episodes of violence in front of Congress in the framework of the discussion of the budget, different points of view on the need to quickly expel the foreigner who offends and around Macri’s adherence to the “Pichetto doctrine” of tightening immigration controls). Expressed in terms of the features that define and better specify the category, its properties point, in the first place—and in a general or abstract way—to a contrast between a type of immigration favorable to the development of the country and another that comes to “break the pact of coexistence”, using Pichetto’s words (La Nación, 2018, November 8). Or from Garcia’s point of view, “we are broad, but restrictive with those who break the trust pact” (La Nación, 2019, March 2). Secondly, some statements by Cambiemos officials highlight the history of Argentina as a country of immigration. More specifically, and taking up a characteristic often attributed to “traditional migrations”,

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that of having forged the country (Cohen, 2004), they establish a counterpoint between those who came to forge the country and those who come, in the present day, to commit crimes. By way of illustration, Diego Santilli, from the Ministry of Justice and Security of the City of Buenos Aires, affirmed “Argentina is a country of immigrants, a country that welcomed millions of people to forge a future, but those who come to commit crimes are not welcome” (La Nación, 2019, March 2). In a similar way, Macri stated, “we want people who come with the vocation to work, like our grandparents when they came to this country, and to protect ourselves against others who have other types of intentions that complicate our existence for all of us” (Lara, 2018, November 1). Although without an explicit reference to those who come to commit crimes, Bullrich stressed that “those who want to come to Argentina have to make a contribution, to return to the founding line of our country” (Jastreblansky, 2018, November 4). A third property of the category, with more limited and specific features, points to the distinction between those who come to study or work and those who come to commit crimes. In this sense, Luis Petri—Second Vice President of the Chamber of Deputies of the Argentine Nation between 2017 and 2018—stressed that “we are not talking about foreigners who come to work but about those who commit crimes” (Ortelli, 2018a, October 27), referring to the need to speed up the expulsion procedures. Also regarding that distinction, in an interview with the newspaper Clarín Pichetto highlighted: “‘poor little immigrants’. Yes, poor people who come to work, brother! And not those who come to commit crimes” (Ortelli, 2018b, October 27). Garcia, for his part, pointed out that “we are going to have very restrictive schemes with criminals and very open for those who come to work and study” (Ibáñez, 2017, January 31). Likewise, within the framework of measures tending to tighten immigration controls, Bullrich differentiated those who come to work from those who have criminal records: “We are studying the issue so that people who want to work enter Argentina but not those with a criminal record and we already know the behavior they had in their countries of origin” (Bravo, 2016, November 13). On other occasions, I was able to identify an opposition expressed in terms of good men and criminals. Or, in an analogous way, between

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“people of good will” and “criminals”, when pointing out that “what the President wants is to go towards a path in which people of good will can enter and stay and not criminals” (Bravo, 2016, November 13). In Frigerio’s words, “what happens is that sometimes we go too far and the country ends up accepting men of good will and not so good, criminals” (Ámbito, 2017, January 26). Fifth and last, I included among the properties of this category broader issues, not specifically associated with the alleged criminal action but with “conflicts” or “unhealthy interests”. For example, Gerardo Morales, Governor of Jujuy, highlighted that “we are a generous country and we have to continue being so, but we also have to be careful. It can’t be that people come here to make conflicts and nothing else” (La Nación, 2018, October 31). Similarly, in an interview with La Nación newspaper, García pointed out the importance of “putting a stop to those who come to the country with unhealthy interests” (Rosemberg, 2018, November 2). Various measures tending to toughen and promote changes in immigration and border controls sought to settle what type of immigration the newcomer belongs to; those expressions that accompanied them were the empirical basis of the category that follows in the itinerary of this chapter.

“We Have to Be Able to Tell Other Countries That If Someone Has a Criminal Record and Committed Crimes, He Will Not Be Welcome in Argentina” The category called Stricter controls for entering the country includes those expressions that made explicit mention of the requirements implemented against who should be prohibited from entering Argentine soil.3 In this sense, I refer to two subcategories that give clarity and specificity to the category. 3 Which also groups another of the categories built through open coding (Improving border controls), due to the existing thematic affinity between the discourses surveyed and analyzed for this purpose.

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In a first instance, taking into account discourses from officials of the host society around “unwelcome guests” (or “undesirable others”), especially considering what Aliverti et al. (2021) point out about the subjective dimension of criminal question: the construction of otherness from discourse, notions and ideas associated with presumed threats and dangers. In the speech that accompanied the implementation of the API system, Frigerio emphasized that the immigration policy promoted by the Cambiemos administration seeks to “prevent criminals from entering Argentina” (Ámbito, 2017, January 26). On another occasion, within the framework of the measure according to which foreign citizens who want to settle in Argentina must present a certificate that shows that they had no criminal record in the last ten years, Interior and Migration officials pointed out that “the step is in line with the decision to close the doors to organized crime and criminals from anywhere in the world” (Rosemberg, 2019, March 1). In an interrelated way, since it is common to find its equivalence with respect to the figure of the criminal, other “unwelcome guests” would be those with a criminal record. Macri headed in that direction by highlighting “we have to be able to tell other countries that if someone has a criminal record and committed crimes, he will not be welcome in Argentina” (La Nación, 2017, January 18), expression coined in the first press conference of the year 2017, and which gives the title to this section. It is also significant to mention that it is possible to describe the existence of a linear association between having a criminal record and producing violence and insecurity in the host country. In this regard, in an interview with Patricia Bullrich for La Nación, and particularly on immigration policy, she stated that “control is being proposed so that the person who comes to live in Argentina does not have a criminal record so that this does not generate violence and insecurity in the country” (La Nación, 2019, June 13). Third and last, unwelcome “others” are those migrants who are not “regularized”. When presenting a plan for immigration control measures, which will be based on an application for public agents’ cell phones that will detect foreigners without the required documentation, García highlighted: “We fight against immigration irregularities, not against irregular

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immigrants. It is necessary launder them as a condition for them to access the services and rights granted by the country” (Obarrio, 2018, August 19). In a similar sense, within the framework of an agreement between the National Directorate for Migration and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires Government, Santilli specified: We in the city of Buenos Aires seek the regularization of foreigners. Not being under that condition implies that you are not subject to the immigration regulations of our country. And that means that the vast majority of people who come to our country to settle can do so within the legal parameters. Those who are not, those who come to harm, kill, steal or are not regularized cannot be in our country and that is the joint work that we began to do with the National Directorate for Migration. (La Nación, 2019, January 15).

The other subcategory points, in turn, to mechanisms or technologies of stricter immigration border controls. More specifically, it is possible to refer to instances of technological control, human control and around entry, permanence and the possible expulsion from the country of people who arrived in Argentina. Regarding the first, I highlight those initiatives aimed at modifying border posts (particularly in Paso de los Libres, La Quiaca, Aguas Blancas, Salvador Mazza and Puerto Iguazú, among others) and applying adequate technologies for this purpose. By way of illustration, in statements made to the press within the framework of a drug kidnapping operation that came from Paraguay, Bullrich stated: At the borders, we are better; we have a long way to go. We are going to implement a technology system that allows us more controls, we are going to reinforce with more gendarmes, we have a few more prefects, and we are in the middle of making a decision to purchase the appropriate technology. (La Nación, 2016, June 29)

Similarly, in an interview with La Nación, García highlighted the following about technological changes at border crossings:

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We are worried and busy. We work with technology: advanced passenger information at airports, more sensitive information provided by companies, information agreements (with other countries and provinces), which are very important. Next year we will have the same technology (biometric systems) at border crossings and at airports. Everyone should know that Argentina is entered through authorized border crossings. (Rosemberg, 2018, November 2)

The instances of human control are linked, on the one hand, to the given press (with photos included and as an indicator that “something is being done”) to inspections carried out on bus passengers from neighboring countries, with the participation of different federal security forces, officials from the National Directorate for Migration and Federal Administration of Public Income (AFIP, by its acronym in Spanish) personnel.4 On the other hand, Claudio Avruj, Secretary of Human Rights of the Nation, expressed the restrictive mechanisms against migratory flows in terms of subtle control strategies, such as “control with human face” policies, according to the terminology proposed by Eduardo Domenech (2013): It is nothing more than respect for the rule of law. It is not about persecuting migrants. The nationality of the offender is not part of the debate. Control, security and human rights should not be exclusive concepts. It is necessary to link them to guarantee the integrity of all. Controlling the entry and residence of immigrants is also part of human rights. (Clarín, 2017, January 27)

A third property that makes it possible to characterize and define the category of Stricter controls for entering the country is related to the imposition of conditions entry, permanence and the possible expulsion from the country to those foreigners who have committed crimes. In this regard, within the framework of the implementation of migratory controls, Frigerio highlighted that “what we are doing with these 4

As an example of this kind of event, see La Nación (2017, January 27).

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measures is preventing criminals from entering Argentina and speeding up the procedures so that we can quickly expel those who have already entered” (El Tribuno, 2017, January 26). Although he is not part of Cambiemos, it is important to include also the point of view of Sergio Massa (reference of the opposition alliance, Frente Renovador), since he gave his support to the migration policy promoted by the Macri administration. In fact, he presented such support by stating that “in Argentina, criminals must be prohibited from entering, and foreigners who commit crimes must be expelled” (Clarín, 2017, January 29). These two points constitute, as I will show in the following section, substantive aspects of Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017.

“We Do Not Have a Problem with Immigration, We Have a Problem with Drug Trafficking and Smuggling” Several discourses that framed the enactment of Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017, and to a lesser extent, linked to other initiatives such as the creation of the National Boundary Commission5 and the aforementioned API system (both from 2017), as well as interviews published in La Nación and Clarín with Pichetto and Bullrich, were significant inputs for the construction of the Crime and migration category. Different researchers belonging to the scientific-academic field have referred, among other aspects, to the ways in which the Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017 contributed to the process of criminalization of migrations (Abiuso et al., 2021; Canelo et al., 2018; Galoppo, 2017; Monclús Masó, 2017; Penchaszadeh & García, 2018;

5 From its own text, its creation is highlighted as necessary to “increase border integration, facilitate the transit of people, expedite international trade and prevent complex transnational crimes such as drug trafficking, human trafficking and smuggling” (Decree No. 68/2017: paragraph 4).

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Tedesco et al., 2019; Zayat, 2017).6 From the voice of its supporters, including different officials of the Cambiemos administration and also opposition representatives (such as Pichetto and Massa), the decree was presented as part of a policy to combat “international organized crime” and/or crimes related to “narco-criminality”, as can be observed in its own text: That the need to work incessantly on perfecting the immigration regulatory order acquires special importance in the face of current phenomena such as globalization, the internationalization of tourism and the growth of international organized crime. (Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/ 2017: paragraph 9) That in the face of recent acts of public and well-known organized crime, the State-Nation has faced severe difficulties in carrying out expulsion orders issued against persons of foreign nationality, as a consequence of a complex recursive procedure that, in some cases, can reach SEVEN (7) years of processing. (Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017: paragraph 16) On the other hand, in relation to crimes related to narco-criminality, it is observed that THIRTY-THREE PERCENT (33%) of the people in custody of the FEDERAL PENITENTIARY SERVICE are foreigners. (Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017: paragraph 19)

In Crime, Punishment and Migration, Dario Melossi (2015) argued that the processes of the criminalization of migrants depend to a large extent on the situation they find in the countries where they are received; hence, the centrality of the host society and the ways in which it represents the “others”. In this sense, the immigration-crime nexus can be specified in more detail by referring—in terms of a subcategory of Crime and migration—to the different criminal modalities attributed, from the corpus of political discourses analyzed, to “immigrants linked to crimes”. 6 It is significant to mention that changes in immigration policy passed through a government’s decree, and not through a law of congress, which may suggest the authoritarian and undemocratic character of the measure. This constitutes, without a doubt, one of the most discussed points of the decree.

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Among them, drug trafficking occupies an almost stellar role, even to the point that the set of initiatives aimed at intensifying immigration controls at the borders was conceived as “a comprehensive strategy to fight drug trafficking” (Dinatale, 2016, October 17; see also La Nación, 2016, June 29). Regarding this centrality, in an interview with the newspaper El Tribuno, Bullrich highlighted that “our problem with the border is not the people, we do not have a problem with immigration, we have a problem with drug trafficking and with smuggling” (La Nación, 2017, January 29). And about the “express deportation” that the Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017 enabled, she stated: It is very important to fight a crime like drug trafficking. And in that reality, we have to find all the ways to avoid it. In the crime of ‘narcocriminality’, all avenues are important. The way of quickly expelling foreigners who enter and who commit crimes in drug-related offenses is the same as quickly putting Argentines in jail who do so. (La Nación, 2017, January 29)

By delving even deeper, it is possible to identify different properties of the drug trafficking subcategory: its geolocation in the “villas”, the associated nationalities and the drawing up of risk profiles. Regarding the first, some of the expressions analyzed spatially located the immigration-crime nexus in the so-called “villas”,7 whether they are situated in the suburbs or on the peripheries of the City of Buenos Aires. Concretely, Pichetto highlighted more than once an alleged link between misery and crime (and specifically, drug trafficking), as I illustrate in the following excerpts: There is a structure linked to Peruvian criminal organizations that come out of the peripheral ‘villas’ of the City of Buenos Aires and the province. Peruvian crime is oppressive in Argentina in the scheme of ‘motochorros’, armed robberies and drugs linked to cocaine. And the control of the ‘villas’ they have… (Schmidt, 2019, January 8) 7 Understood as urban agglomerations of precarious housing located on lands that are not originally owned by their occupants.

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There is an aberrational image of a country that none of us here want to have. In a ‘villa’ here, the 11-14, the other day there were two queues […] A queue managed Paraguayan drug trafficking... so as not to classify it as nationalities because later they get angry with me... A certain nationality that is linked to marijuana. And [the other queue] by boys from outside the country, who have also come to this very generous country, sold cocaine. There were two queues. All this was taken by a drone, and then the Gendarmerie entered. The truth is that everything should be dynamited, that everything flies into the air. (La Nación, 2019, October 3)

As can be seen, there is a link between drug trafficking and certain nationalities, as Pichetto pointed out the association between the sale of Marijuana-Paraguayans and the sale of Cocaine-Peruvians. In an analogous way, within the framework of the government’s project to limit entry into the country and to expel foreigners who have committed serious crimes, Bullrich highlighted that “Peruvian and Paraguayan citizens come here and end up killing each other for drug control” (La Nación, 2017, January 24). Even though on a smaller scale, some discourses also associated drug trafficking with citizens of the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, migrations flows that have increased in Argentina in recent years. The criminal figure of drug trafficking was also present in speeches focused on specific measures, such as the implementation of the Advance Passenger Information system. In this regard, García pointed out that it would contribute to security, since by having various data on each passenger, it would be possible to “cross the information and draw up risk profiles, which have to do with crimes such as drug trafficking and human trafficking” (Ortelli, 2017, January 25). As I mentioned in Chapter 3, the ways of considering the links between immigration and social problems (including crime) recognize, in Argentine political and media discourses, different antecedents since the 1990s. In this case, the key role of drug trafficking cannot be understood outside of a context marked by more punitive criminal policies. And that due to the centrality attributed to offenses of the National Narcotics Law (Law 23,737), Hernán Olaeta (2020) calls selective punitiveness.

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In this sense, in their research of punitiveness based on the registry of state agencies, Ciafardini and Olaeta (2020: 21) highlight that, in the administration that began in 2015, the penal system begins to become more punitive—both from the discursive, as in the penal system indices—at the same time that they point to 2016 as “a year in which criminal policy had an important punitive turn”. This argument is illustrated from the analysis of various legislative initiatives, as well as indicators of the criminal justice system. Regarding the former, the authors mention Law 27,735 (which modifies Law 24,660 on Criminal Execution) and other regulatory initiatives, both promoted in the judicial sphere and in the executive branch. Likewise, Ciafardini and Olaeta provide a racconto on the modifications to the Narcotics Law, stating that it should not be analyzed except as a whole with the so-called defederalization law (26.052). Finally, they highlight some provisions that could be related to a greater detection of criminal situations by the agencies in charge of their prosecution: the declaration of the public security emergency in January 2016 (through Decree No. 228/2016,8 and its extension by means of the Decree No. 50/2017, for a period of 365 additional days) and the permission to apply the figure of repentance for crimes associated with Law 23,737. Concerning the penal system indicators, Ciafardini and Olaeta analyze the links between convictions, incarceration rates and punitiveness; understanding by this last term, based on the definition provided by Máximo Sozzo (2016, 2017), the level of pain or suffering produced by the penal system. By way of main conclusions, the authors point out that a sustained rise in convictions can be observed from 2014, which is maintained until the end of the period under analysis (that is, 2016). This increase includes three different aspects, according to Ciafardini and Olaeta. In the first place, the Buenos Aires Province is the jurisdiction that presents a higher volume of convictions than the rest of the provinces. Secondly, that in the years in which the highest number of convictions was produced in all jurisdictions (2014 and 2015), there was also the highest number 8 In line with the text of Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017, it is significant to highlight that one of the ways to define there the “complex and organized crime” is from those crimes of production, trafficking and commercialization of narcotics provided in Law 23,737.

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of sentences for life imprisonment (an element that is conceived as an indicator of the penal system severity). Finally, and in line with the aforementioned centrality attributed to drug trafficking, the authors highlight a slight increase in the number of convictions for offenses of the Narcotics Law since 2010, which will accelerate exponentially and significantly in 2015 and 2016. In fact, Ciafardini and Olaeta (2020: 52–53) make this central role explicit in the following way: It is important to highlight that during the last two years of the period that we are analyzing here, the criminal policy established by Mauricio Macri’s administration focused fundamentally, and explicitly, on what has been called the ‘war against drug trafficking’. Thus, they have placed drug trafficking within the group of threats to national security.

The authors identify the same trend in rising incarceration rates, particularly linked to crimes related to the Narcotics Law. Expressed in a disaggregated manner, mentions of offenses of Law 23,737 grew by 50% between 2012 and 2016, which raises and warns of a historical novelty, namely: that those persons deprived of their liberty accused of crimes related to the Narcotics Law exceed for the first time to those charged with intentional homicide. These topics were taken up by Olaeta (2020) in his analysis of punitiveness during the 2007–2018 period, using different penal system indicators as an empirical domain: crime rates registered by the police and security forces, convictions handed down by criminal courts and incarceration in penitentiary units. Focused on describing the possible impact of the Cambiemos administration on the penal system, the author gives an account of the increase in the total rate of registered crimes and points out that, within the set of typologies, those linked to Law 23,737 grew by 131% between 2007 and 2018—an increase that becomes even more evident in 2017 and 2018. Regarding the conviction rates, Olaeta points to an increase of 21% between 2007 and 2017. As the registered crimes, there are significant differences taking into account the different criminal figures imputed: 72% increase in the rate of convictions for crimes against people, an 8% decrease in convictions for crimes against property and, with respect to

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violations of the Narcotics Law, a sharp rise in conviction rates, reaching 143% throughout the entire period analyzed (an increase that, coinciding with what was mentioned for crime rates, had its main impulse in the years 2016 and 2017). The imprisonment rate, in turn, increased by 60% between the years 2007 and 2018, highlighting the most notable leap in the years 2017 and 2018, showing, even more, an exponential increase in the particular case of offense of Law 23,737. By bringing together in the same article the data obtained from different official sources of criminal statistics, Olaeta (2020: 18) concludes the following about selective punitiveness: In summary, it is clearly observed that the records of crimes did not grow notably, but those linked to the drug law did; that criminal justice has notably increased its punitiveness (measured in number of sentences and in amounts), particularly in relation to drug crimes whose sentences have tripled; and, finally, that the incarceration rate has skyrocketed to levels never seen before, driven in large part by the exponential increase in people detained for offence of Law 23,737. This leads us to the question of whether we are in the presence of a particularly selective punitiveness […] it is a question of inquiring about the selectivity within the selective system.

Returning to the road map through political discourses, another subcategory of Crime and migration points to criminal activities that are defined using broad and unspecific labels, such as “international crime”, “international organized crime”, “organized crime” and “transnational crimes”. On other occasions, and more concretely, I was able to identify brief references to other crimes—attempted robbery and armed robbery—and the allusion to “motochorros”9 of different nationalities, especially linked

9 A “motochorro” is a criminal who makes use of a motorcycle to commit a robbery; it is a neologism created from the words “chorro” (thief ) and “moto” (motorcycle).

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to those practices carried out (among others, by the police) to facilitate expulsions from the country.10 To illustrate those chronicles, I mention the case of Jair Stevens Jurado, a Colombian whose deportation involved a dispute between different officials and the Justice of the City of Buenos Aires, expressed (in a few characters) on Twitter. In this sense, Macri posted: The case of the Judge who once again released ‘motochorros’ with a criminal record and a ban on entering the country is outrageous. The Security Forces are doing their job on the street, but with Justice like this, there are no police that can reach it. (Carelli Lynch, 2019, January 31)

On the same case, Horacio Rodriguez Larreta—Chief of Government of Buenos Aires since 2015—pronounced the following on his Twitter profile: “Our Police are giving a thorough fight against the ‘motochorros’. The Judge’s decision to release them does not help in this battle. Like all ‘porteños’,11 I am very indignant because it is essential that Justice accompany us” (Carelli Lynch, 2019, January 31). Regarding the detention practice itself, the news item highlighted that after snatching a cell phone in the Caballito neighborhood, the Colombian fled at full speed on his motorcycle, but after a chase he was detained by agents of the Buenos Aires City Police and placed under disposition of Justice. Another of the journalistic notes focused on similar events, but from the case of a Uruguayan “motochorro”. Marcelo D’Alessandro, City Security Secretary, summed it up as follows: The ‘motochorro’ of Uruguayan nationality had a long history of armed robbery; the City Police arrested him and put him at the disposal of Justice. They gave him house arrest until the National Directorate for Migration did the paperwork to send him to his country. (La Nación,

10

Although it has its own bias in terms of the selection of information communicated by each newspaper, consulting these news items may constitute a partial approximation to the plane of those detention practices. With a view to describing an assessment of the potential contributions and, at the same time, limitations of this kind of approach, see Sozzo (2002). 11 The word “porteños” designates the inhabitants of the City of Buenos Aires.

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2019, March 2; for further details of this case, see also La Nación, 2019, February 2)

In line with this state action, it is relevant to highlight that as we chronologically approach the end of the Cambiemos administration, there is a predominance of news focused on possible expulsions of migrants from different regions of the world. These were occasionally accompanied by testimonies from officials, who, like Santilli, pointed to the data that recorded the increase in deportations between 2015 and 2018 as “an important step against crime” (La Nación, 2019, March 2). In fact, the analyzed political discourses mentioned—with some frequency—percentages related to the prison population to support and confirm the presumed association between immigration and criminality. In this sense, I move to Statistics, the last subcategory of Crime and migration. First of all, I identified the increase in the number of people of foreign nationality in the custody of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Argentina as a way of giving support from political rhetoric to the links between immigration and crime. More particularly, the percentages pointed to offenses of the Narcotics Law, or expressing it another way, with those crimes related to “narco-criminality”; it is stated, in this regard, that 33% of the people in custody of the Federal Penitentiary Service are foreigners. Within this type of statement, the text of Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017 itself resonates, where we also read: The foreign population detained in dependencies of the FEDERAL PENITENTIARY SERVICE for violation of Law No. 23,737 is highly represented among the detainees, taking into account that, according to the last national census, the participation of the foreign population as a percentage of the total population is FOUR POINT FIVE PERCENT (4.5%). (Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017: paragraph 19)

From the set of political discourses analyzed, spokespersons for the Ministry of Security emphasized that “of the 3,172 prisoners for conflicts with the Narcotics Law, 1,069 [are] of foreign nationality, that is to say that with respect to this crime the proportion is ‘1 to 3’” (Ibáñez, 2017,

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February 1). Bullrich, who was serving at that time as Minister for Security, referred to the “alarm” situation that aroused the statistical panorama as follows: “The increase in crime in the hands of foreigners is important, reaching 20% of the people who are detained, convicted or prosecuted” (Chequeado, 2019, January 10). It is relevant to highlight, at this point, that those figures were not presented free of tensions or free of discrepancies; even among officials and those who shared a more or less similar opinion, there was no consensus regarding the quantification of the incidence of migration in crime. Even within the corpus of systematized news itself, those statistics were denied based on the reference to data provided by the National System of Statistics on the Execution of Penalties (see, for example: Amaya, 2018, February 27). From the scientific-academic field, in turn, Marta Monclús Masó (2017: 3) synthesized the same aspect, stating: If we look at the evolution of the data on foreigners detained in all the prisons in our country, we can conclude that there has been no increase in the percentage of migrants in prison, since it has remained at 6% since 2005. We can affirm the same regarding foreign prisoners in federal jails, which constitute 21% of those detained for a decade.

On other occasions, the speeches analyzed did not refer explicitly to any figure, but rather presented the statistical scenery in a more abstract way, when mentioning the “increasing crime rates shown by the statistics” (La Nación, 2017, January 31). In a more concrete way, and geographically shifting the gaze outside the City of Buenos Aires, Federico Massoni (government minister of Chubut Province) affirmed that “we find that a high percentage of the crimes that are being committed in Chubut are carried out by foreigners from Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Peru, who are joined by Dominicans and Venezuelans related to drug trafficking crimes” (Costa, 2019a, February 6). The use of official crime statistics as professional knowledge called to corroborate the presumed causal link between immigration and crime is not a new element. On the contrary, we are thus faced with the persistence of a certain attribution: different authors (among others,

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Daniel, 2011; Olaeta, 2018; Sozzo, 2011) addressed the ways in which criminologists, police officers and political actors used such statistics towards the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Synthesis To summarize the content presented up to here, I present below the core categories, with their respective subcategories and properties (Table 4.1).

Other Categories Along with the categories already presented, other aspects had a lower level of reiteration throughout the period and discourses analyzed. In this regard, I highlight two labels (or in vivo codes), “Criminal adjustment” and “Imported crime”. Regarding the first, it includes some expressions where Pichetto attributed social problems, specifically related to poverty and security, to immigration from other countries (mainly from neighboring countries and Peru). I illustrate this point of view through the following excerpts: Every year 200,000 poor people from neighboring countries enter us. Those countries adjust poverty by sending people to Argentina, including criminals. What do we do? We are piling them up in the ‘villas’ of City of Buenos Aires and Buenos Aires’ conurbation. (Reymundo Roberts, 2018, July 8) We have to stop being stupid. The problem is that we always function as a social adjustment for Bolivia and a criminal adjustment for Peru. Peru solved its security problem and transferred the entire drug trafficking scheme to the main ‘villas’ in Argentina, which are taken over by Peruvians. (Lara, 2018, November 1)

Regarding the other label (“Imported Crime”), it points to the effort to prevent the entry of criminals into Argentine territory, and more particularly, into the provincial territory of Chubut: “We Chubutans cannot

Subcategories –

Categories

“We need to know who is who”

Table 4.1 Core categories: synthesis – The effort to “act preventively” – The imperative to identify the “suspects” – The effort to establish exchanges and cooperation between countries to have information and a database to be able to know and analyze “who is arriving”

Properties

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Subcategories –

Discourses from officials of the host society around “unwelcome guests”

Categories

Distinction in the type of immigration that arrives in Argentina

Stricter controls for entering the country

(continued)

– Contrast between a type of immigration favorable to the development of the country and another that comes to “break the pact of coexistence” – History of Argentina as a country of immigration – Distinction between those who come to study or work and those who come to commit crimes – Opposition expressed in terms of good men and criminals (or between “people of good will” and “criminals”) – Broader issues, not specifically associated with the alleged criminal action but with “conflicts” or “unhealthy interests” – Criminals / organized crime – Those with a criminal record – Migrants who are not “regularized”

Properties

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Crime and migration

Categories

Table 4.1 (continued)

Statistics

–

“Motochorros”

Broad and unspecific labels

Drug trafficking

– Technological control – Human control – Entry, permanence and the possible expulsion from the country of people who arrived in Argentina – Geolocation in the “villas” – Associated nationalities – Drawing up of risk profiles – “International crime” – “International organized crime” – “Organized crime” – “Transnational crimes” – Associated nationalities – Police detention practices – Increase in the number of people of foreign nationality in the custody of the Federal Penitentiary Service – Statistical scenery presented in a more abstract way (without explicit references to percentages)

Mechanisms or technologies of stricter immigration border controls

Different criminal activities

Properties

Subcategories

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allow imported crime or any type of crime in our territory” (Costa, 2019b, February 6). Beyond the fact that, in this way, we shift our gaze away from the City of Buenos Aires as a field of study, I consider it significant to resume this way of referring to the phenomenon, especially in terms of thinking about the persistence and ruptures in the ways in which were (and currently) conceptualized the links between immigration and crime. In this regard, and as an example of this long-term perspective, “Imported crime” was the title of an article published in 1914 in Revista de Policía. In line with that comparative point of view, during his presidential term Alberto Fernández repealed Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017, considering that it includes aspects “irreconcilable with our National Constitution and with the international system for the protection of human rights” (Decree No. 138/2021: paragraph 6), which perhaps anticipates a change of position in migration policy with respect to the perspective of the administration that preceded it, an element that is on the horizon to be studied and deepened in future research.

References Abiuso, F. L. (2023). Construction of otherness: Links between immigration and crime during the Cambiemos administration (Argentina, 2015–2019). International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 12(2), 59–71. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.2887 Abiuso, F. L., Kleidermacher, G., & Lanzetta, D. (2021). ¿Qué hacemos con los migrantes? Representaciones de alumnos de escuelas medias de villa lugano y discursos políticos sobre la migración limítrofe. Buenos Aires 2016–2018. Cadernos de Campo: Revista de Ciências Sociais, 30, 69–97. https://doi.org/ 10.47284/2359-2419.2021.30.6997 Aliverti, A. (2021). Policing the borders within. Oxford University Press. Aliverti, A., Carvalho, H., Chamberlen, A., & Sozzo, M. (2021). Decolonizing the criminal question. Punishment & Society, 23(3), 297–316. https://doi. org/10.1177/14624745211020585

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Amaya, S. (2018, February 27). La lupa sobre los inmigrantes: ¿qué impacto real tienen sobre la Argentina? La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/pol itica/la-lupa-sobre-los-inmigrantes-que-impacto-real-tienen-sobre-la-argent ina-nid2112620/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIq9vN24zB_wIVaadMCh3vOQ9V EAAYASAAEgJrqvD_BwE Ámbito (2017, January 26). Buscamos evitar que ingresen delincuentes y expulsar a los que ya ingresaron. Ámbito. https://www.ambito.com/pol itica/buscamos-evitar-que-ingresen-delincuentes-y-expulsar-los-que-ya-ing resaron-n3970723 Bravo, M. (2016, November 13). El Gobierno prepara un decreto para endurecer los controles migratorios. Clarín. https://www.clarin.com/pol itica/gobierno-decreto-endurecer-controles-migratorios_0_BJxZYQH-e. html Canelo, B., Gavazzo, N., & Nejamkis, L. (2018). Nuevas (viejas) políticas migratorias en la Argentina del cambio. Si Somos Americanos, 18(1), 150–182. https://doi.org/10.4067/S0719-09482018000100150 Carelli Lynch, G. (2019, January 31). Macri se involucró en el caso del motochorro y criticó con dureza a la jueza. Clarín. https://www.clarin.com/pol itica/macri-metio-polemica-critico-dureza-jueza_0_FrWm2w7aK.html Chequeado. (2019, January 10). Bullrich: “El delito en manos de extranjeros, llega al 20% de las personas que están detenidas”. Primera Plana de Pergamino. http://www.primeraplana.com.ar/bullrich-el-delito-en-manosde-extranjeros-llega-al-20-de-las-personas-que-estan-detenidas/ Ciafardini, M., & Olaeta, H. (2020). Punitivismo en Argentina. Un abordaje del sistema penal (2000–2016). Sb editorial. Clarín. (2017, January 17). Macri, a favor de más controles migratorios: “Necesi-tamos saber quién es quién”. Clarín. https://www.clarin.com/pol itica/macri-favor-controles-migratorios-necesitamos-saber_0_r1BqbniUx. html Clarín. (2017, January 25). Arrancan los nuevos controles migratorios para evitar el ingreso al país de personas con antecedentes. Clarín. https://www. clarin.com/politica/arrancan-nuevos-controles-migratorios-evitar-ingresopais-personas-antecedentes_0_BJr1bo8wl.html Clarín. (2017, January 27). Mejor control no es xenofobia. Clarín. https:// www.clarin.com/opinion/mejor-control-xenofobia_0_HJyJ2VSvl.html Clarín. (2017, January 29). Sergio Massa: “Los delincuentes deben tener vedado el ingreso al país y los que delinquen deben ser expulsados”. Clarín. https://www.clarin.com/politica/sergio-massa-delincuentes-deben-tener-ved ado-ingreso-paisdelinquen-%20deben-expulsados_0_HyqSJ13vl.html

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Cohen, N. (2004). Las migraciones tradicionales y las migraciones recientes: percepciones diferenciales. In N. Cohen (Comp.), Documentos de Trabajo no. 36. Puertas adentro: la inmigración discriminada, ayer y hoy (pp. 26–32). Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani. Costa, J. M. (2019a, February 6). “Queremos que el extranjero que delinca no pueda acercarse a Chubut”, dijo el ministro de Gobierno. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/queremos-extranjero-delincano-pueda-acercarse-chubut-nid2217985/ Costa, J. M. (2019b, February 6). El gobernador de Chubut firmó un polémico decreto para expulsar a extranjeros con antecedentes. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/el-gobernador-chubut-firmopolemico-decreto-expulsar-nid2217925/ Daniel, C. (2011). Medir la moral pública. La cuantificación policial del delito en Buenos Aires, 1880–1910. Estatística e Sociedade, 1, 149–165. Dapelo, S. (2019, February 28). Los extranjeros tendrán que certificar 10 años sin antecedentes penales. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/ los-extranjeros-tendran-que-certificar-10-anos-sin-antecedentes-penales-nid 2224176/ Decree No. 50/2017. (2017, January 19). Prórroga. Decreto N°228/2016 . Buenos Aires, Argentina. http://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/ane xos/270000-274999/270997/norma.htm Decree No. 68/2017. (2017, January 25). Comisión Nacional de Fronteras. Creación. Buenos Aires, Argentina. http://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegIn ternet/anexos/270000-274999/271198/norma.htm Decree No. 138/2021. (2021, March 5). Decreto N° 70/2017. Derogación. Buenos Aires, Argentina. http://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/ane xos/345000-349999/347595/norma.htm Decree No. 228/2016. (2016, January 21). Declárese la Emergencia de Seguridad Pública. Buenos Aires, Argentina. http://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInter net/anexos/255000-259999/258047/norma.htm Dinatale, M. (2016, October 17). Refuerzan la lucha contra el delito en las fronteras con apoyo de las FF.AA. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/ politica/refuerzan-la-lucha-contra-el-delito-en-las-fronteras-con-apoyo-delas-ffaa-nid1947743/ Domenech, E. (2013). “Las migraciones son como el agua”: Hacia la instauración de políticas de “control con rostro humano”. La gobernabilidad migratoria en la Argentina. Polis, 12(35), 119–142. https://doi.org/10. 4067/S0718-65682013000200006

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El Tribuno. (2017, January 26). Frigero: “Queremos evitar que ingresen delincuentes y acelerar los trámites para expulsarlos”. El Tribuno. https:// www.eltribuno.com/jujuy/nota/2017-1-26-11-35-0-frigero-queremos-evi tar-que-ingresen-delincuentes-y-acelerar-los-tramites-para-expulsarlos Galoppo, L. (2017). Necesidad y urgencia en la protección de los derechos de las personas migrantes El amparo presentado por organizaciones de la sociedad civil ante el DNU 70/2017. Revista Temas De Antropología y Migración, 9, 143–153. García Ferrari, M. (2010). Ladrones conocidos / sospechosos reservados. Identificación policial en Buenos Aires, 1880–1905. Prometeo. Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (2008). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Aldine. Ibáñez, P. (2017, January 31). Preparan más medidas para el control de los inmigrantes. Clarín. https://www.pressreader.com/argentina/clarin/201 70131/281590945290483 Ibáñez, P. (2017, February 1). Fronteras: el Gobierno analiza crear una policía migratoria. Clarín. https://www.clarin.com/politica/fronteras-gobierno-ana liza-crear-policia-migratoria_0_SJhy2_Rve.html Jastreblansky, M. (2018, November 4). Patricia Bullrich: “Nuestra política de seguridad y de inmigración es previa a Bolsonaro”. La Nación. https://www. lanacion.com.ar/politica/patricia-bullrich-nuestra-politica-de-seguridad-yde-inmigracion-es-nid2188296/ La Nación. (2016, June 29). Patricia Bullrich dijo que habrá más control de fronteras. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/seguridad/patricia-bul lrich-dijo-que-habra-mas-control-de-fronteras-nid1913506/ La Nación. (2017, January 18). Seguridad: impulsará la Casa Rosada un nuevo Código Penal Juvenil. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/ seguridad-impulsara-la-casa-rosada-un-nuevo-codigo-penal-juvenil-nid197 6693/ La Nación. (2017, January 24). Patricia Bullrich: “Acá vienen ciudadanos peruanos y paraguayos y se terminan matando por el control de la droga”. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/patricia-bullrich-aca-vie nen-ciudadanos-peruanos-y-paraguayos-y-se-terminan-matando-por-el-con trol-de-la-droga-nid1978531/ La Nación. (2017, January 25). El Gobierno presentó medidas de seguridad para el ingreso y egreso de pasajeros en los aeropuertos. La Nación. https:// www.lanacion.com.ar/seguridad/el-gobierno-presento-medidas-de-seguri dad-para-el-ingreso-y-egreso-de-pasajeros-en-los-aeropuertos-nid1979058/

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La Nación. (2017, January 27). En fotos: el operativo sorpresa en la terminal de micros de Liniers. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/seguridad/enfotos-el-operativo-sorpresa-en-la-terminal-de-micros-de-liniers-nid1979629/ La Nación. (2017, January 29). Patricia Bullrich descartó de plano la construcción de un muro con Bolivia. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/pol itica/patricia-bullrich-descarto-de-plano-la-construccion-de-un-muro-conbolivia-nid1980013/ La Nación. (2017, January 31). Tenemos bastante con nuestros delincuentes. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/tenemos-bastante-con-nue stros-delincuentes-nid1980390/ La Nación. (2018, October 31). Dos referentes de Cambiemos se suman a Pichetto y piden debatir la política migratoria. La Nación. https://www.lan acion.com.ar/politica/dos-referentes-cambiemos-se-suman-pichetto-pidennid2187089/ La Nación. (2018, November 8). Miguel Pichetto: “No tengo una mirada xenofóbica, pero debería haber reciprocidad con los vecinos, si no somos el país más tonto del continente”. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/ politica/miguel-pichetto-no-tengo-mirada-xenofobica-pero-nid2189845/ La Nación. (2019, January 15). Expulsarían del país a extranjeros que cometan delitos en la ciudad. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/sociedad/ expulsarian-del-pais-a-extranjeros-que-cometan-delitos-en-la-ciudad-nid221 0901/ La Nación. (2019, February 2). Arrestan al motochorro uruguayo que había generado la indignación del Gobierno. La Nación. https://www.lanacion. com.ar/seguridad/detuvieron-al-motochorro-uruguayo-habia-sido-liberadonid2216854/ La Nación. (2019, March 2). Deportan a extranjeros con causas penales. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/seguridad/deportan-a-extranjeros-concausas-penales-nid2224941/ La Nación. (2019, June 13). Patricia Bullrich: “No le estamos pidiendo a Pichetto que traiga votos”. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/ ln-patrica-bullrich-exclusiva-terapia-noticias-nid2257863/ La Nación. (2019, October 3). Miguel Pichetto, sobre la venta de droga en las villas: “Habría que dinamitar todo, que todo vuele por el aire”. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/miguel-pichetto-venta-drogavillas-habria-dinamitar-nid2293853/ Lara, R. (2018, November 1). Mauricio Macri se sumó al reclamo de Miguel Pichetto: “Tenemos que debatir el manejo de lo migratorio”.

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Clarín. https://www.clarin.com/politica/mauricio-macri-sumo-reclamo-mig uel-pichetto-debatir-manejomigratorio_0_bky6Gc1Rh.html Melossi, D. (2015). Crime, punishment and migration. Sage. Monclús Masó, M. (2017). La reforma de la Ley de migraciones mediante Decreto de Necesidad y Urgencia: un retroceso en la política de derechos humanos. Revista Argentina De Teoría Jurídica, 18, 1–14. Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017. (2017). Modificación. Ley N° 25.871. January 27. Buenos Aires, Argentina. http://servicios.infoleg.gob. ar/infolegInternet/anexos/270000-274999/271245/norma.htm Obarrio, M. (2018, August 19). Macri lanza un plan para reforzar el control de los inmigrantes. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/macrilanza-plan-reforzar-control-inmigrantes-nid2163790/ Olaeta, H. (2018). La construcción científica de la delincuencia. El surgimiento de las estadísticas criminales en la Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Olaeta, H. (2020). ¿Punitivismo selectivo? Algunos apuntes sobre las estadísticas oficiales en materia criminal en Argentina. Años 2007–2018. Revista Nueva Crítica Penal, 2(3), 1–19. Ortelli, I. (2017, January 25). Control migratorio: las aerolíneas deben anticipar datos de los pasajeros. Clarín. https://www.clarin.com/politica/con trol-migratorio-aerolineas-deben-anticipar-datos-pasajeros_0_B19K_hUDx. html Ortelli, I. (2018a, October 27). El Gobierno y un sector del peronismo negocian para endurecer la ley migratoria. Clarín. https://www.clarin.com/ politica/gobierno-sector-peronismo-negocian-endurecer-ley-migratoria_0_ C_rDZHTqB.html Ortelli, I. (2018b, October 27). Pichetto: “No se puede ser más el país idiota del continente”. Clarín. https://www.clarin.com/politica/pichettopuede-pais-idiota-continente_0_EL8oDaeIl.html Parmar, A. (2019). Policing migration and racial technologies. The British Journal of Criminology, 59 (4), 938–957. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azz006 Penchaszadeh, A. P., & García, L. (2018). Política migratoria y seguridad en Argentina hoy: ¿el paradigma de derechos humanos en jaque? URVIO: Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios de Seguridad, 23, 91–109. https://doi. org/10.17141/urvio.23.2018.3554 Reymundo Roberts, C. (2018, July 8). Inmigración. El debate prohibido en un país de fronteras abiertas. La Nación. https://www.pressreader.com/arg entina/la-nacion/20180708/281530816781147

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Rosemberg, J. (2018, November 2). Horacio García: “La Argentina es el país más hospitalario de todo el continente”. La Nación. https://www.lanacion. com.ar/politica/horacio-garcia-la-argentina-es-el-pais-mas-hospitalario-detodo-el-continente-nid2187744/ Rosemberg, J. (2019, March 1). Las nuevas exigencias para extranjeros regirán desde marzo. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/las-nuevasexigencias-para-extranjeros-regiran-desde-marzo-nid2224568/ Schmidt, W. (2019, January 8). Michel Pichetto: “En la Ciudad de Buenos Aires destruyeron a la Federal y entregaron la calle”. Clarín. https://www. clarin.com/politica/miguel-pichetto-ciudad-buenos-aires-destruido-federalentregado-calle_0_5Cwq_IGiZ.html Sozzo, M. (2002). Usos de la violencia y construcción de la actividad policial en la Argentina. In S. Gayol & G. Kessler (Comps.), Violencias, delitos y justicias en la Argentina (pp. 225–259). Manantial. Sozzo, M. (2011). ‘Los exóticos del crimen’. Inmigración, delito y criminología positivista en la Argentina (1887–1914). Revista Delito y Sociedad, 19 (32), 19–51. https://doi.org/10.14409/dys.v2i32.5647 Sozzo, M. (2016). Postneoliberalismo y política penal en Argentina (2003/ 2014). In M. Sozzo (Comp.), Postneoliberalismo y penalidad en América del Sur (pp. 189–283). CLACSO. Sozzo, M. (2017). La inflación punitiva: Un análisis comparativo de las mutaciones del derecho penal en América Latina (1990–2015). FLACSO/Café de las Ciudades. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Sage. Tedesco, J. C., Kleidermacher, G., & Grazziotin Noschang, P. (2019). Un análisis de los cambios en las legislaciones migratorias en Brasil y Argentina: Implicaciones para la población de origen senegalés. Revista Brasileira De História & Ciencias Sociales, 11(22), 302–330. Zayat, D. (2017). Y para (algunos de) los hombres del mundo que quieran habitar el suelo argentino: El retroceso en la política migratoria. Ab: Revista de abogacía, 1(1), 63–70.

5 The Language of the Numbers

Abstract Considering that in Argentina we lack official statistical information on the arrests made by the police on the migrant population, this chapter presents different approaches to reconstruct a quantitative panorama of police practices within the Cambiemos administration period. Specifically, I base myself on the 2018 and 2019 statistical reports on institutional violence, Institutional violence against Senegalese report and Directorate of Assistance to People Deprived of their Liberty report (period 2015–2020), all of them produced by the Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. Also on the Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2020 and Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2021, both edited by the Ministry of Justice and Security (Buenos Aires City Government), and on the Senegalese community in the City of Buenos Aires: diagnoses for a comprehensive public policy for the period 2018– 2020 report, made by the Ombudsman Office of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. This chapter also reviews and synthesizes the annual reports produced by the Program against Institutional Violence (Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina) between 2015 and 2019. By

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incorporating dimensions of a rigorous and appropriate methodological surveillance, I present a comparative reading of the different sources consulted, identifying similarities and differences in the reconstructed panorama. Keywords Secondary data · Arrests · Migrant population · Methodological surveillance · Institutional violence · Statistics

Introduction There are different official crime statistics in Argentina. Máximo Sozzo (2003, 2008) distinguishes them in police statistics and judicial statistics, according to the state institutions that produce them. By official crime statistics, the author understands those quantified information on behaviors actually produced in social life, presumably criminal, generated in the processes of definition and registration by state institutions within the framework of the criminal question governance activities. In this sense, these institutions “officialize” possibly criminal behavior by defining and recording it. In turn, Laura Glanc and Fernanda Page Poma (2019) describe the organizations and agencies that produced open data on public security in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires between 2011 and 2016. Regarding those organizations, the authors highlight government agencies of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (Public Prosecutor’s Office, Ministry of Justice and Security, General Directorate of Statistics and Censuses and Legislature Security Commission), government agencies at the national level (Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, Ministry of Security, Council of Magistracy of the Nation, Supreme Court of Argentina and Public Prosecutor’s Office) and NGOs (both local and national). As a diagnosis and conclusions, Glanc and Page Poma mention that the data and statistics on violence and crime compiled by state agencies are not easily accessible. That, in addition, the data was not updated and that they found inconsistencies between agencies when measuring the same phenomenon (for example, regarding the number of homicides between 2014 and 2015). Moreover, that the available reports and data

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do not always specify what each variable or dimension measures, and that, on many occasions, the publications analyzed by the authors do not account for the information production circuit. More recently, Hernán Olaeta (2021) points out the National System of Criminal Statistics—created in the year 2000, through the sanction of Law 25,266—which includes three specific programs: National Criminal Information System, National System of Judicial Statistics and National System of Statistics on the Execution of Penalties (SNIC, SNEJ and SNEEP, by their acronym in Spanish, respectively). Regarding the first, it represents police statistics, and is based on police and security forces from all over the country, who send forms on registered crimes in police stations and other detachments. As for the National System of Judicial Statistics, consists of information about structure and functioning of criminal justice, being the primary sources of this system the Judiciary, Public Ministries and Ombudsmen throughout the country. The third, for its part, represents the country’s penitentiary statistics and was created in 2002. The construction data process is based on two questionnaires—one about the Penitentiary Unit and another about the population deprived of liberty—that are sent annually per establishment. In addition, Olaeta (2015, 2018) describes different historical milestones regarding the context of construction of official crime statistics, and their links with certain types of knowledge; for example, within the framework of diffusion of positivist criminology discourses in Argentina towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. From another geographical jurisdiction, and by way of illustration, Valeria Ferraris (2021) highlights that in Italy, there are five official crime statistics: the statistics of criminality and those of crime, the statistics of criminal proceedings, those on convicted defendants and the prison statistics. Although there are different data for consultation, in Argentina we lack official statistical information on the arrests made by the police on the migrant population (Monclús Masó & Brandariz García, 2014; Monclús Masó & García, 2012). In this sense, I selected different sources that would allow me to reconstruct a quantitative panorama within

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Cambiemos administration period (that is, between the years 2015 and 2019), in which officials from various areas of government explicitly and publicly referred to an alleged link between immigration and crime, as I showed in Chapter 4. More concretely, I base myself on the 2018 and 2019 statistical reports on institutional violence, Institutional violence against Senegalese report and Directorate of Assistance to People Deprived of their Liberty report (period 2015–2020), all of them produced by the Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. Also on the Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2020 and Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2021, both edited by the Ministry of Justice and Security (Buenos Aires City Government), and on the Senegalese community in the City of Buenos Aires: diagnoses for a comprehensive public policy for the period 2018– 2020 report, made by the Ombudsman Office of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. This chapter also reviews and synthesizes the annual reports produced by the Program against Institutional Violence (Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina) between 2015 and 2019. According to Néstor Cohen and Gabriela Gómez Rojas (2019), when dealing with data or surveys produced for other purposes, the emphasis is placed on carrying out an adequate and rigorous methodological surveillance regarding them: Who produced the data? How did they produce it? When was it produced? Are they publicly accessible? What time series do they include? By incorporating such dimensions, I present a comparative reading of the different sources consulted, identifying similarities and differences in the reconstructed panorama.

Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires In this section, I highlight the 2018 and 2019 statistical reports on institutional violence, Institutional violence against Senegalese report and Directorate of Assistance to People Deprived of their Liberty report (period 2015–2020), all of them produced by the Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires.

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Regarding the first, the report indicates that there were 623 situations of institutional violence between March 1 and December 31, 2018. In conceptual terms, institutional violence is understood as: Any illegal practice applied by agents belonging to any organization, entity or public institution that is harmful for the freedom, integrity, dignity and life of people, which are practices that violate human rights that due to their seriousness, extension and massiveness affect the validity of the democratic state in law. (Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, 2018a: 3)

Specifically, the cases were recorded by different ways, mainly through interviews developed by different units of the Public Ministry of Defense, such as Directorate of Assistance to People Deprived of their Liberty (DAPPL, for its acronym in Spanish) and intervening Ombudsmen. In more disaggregated terms, the people who stated that they had suffered episodes of institutional violence were, at the same time, accused of criminal offenses or contraventions: 527 cases (criminal offenses), 95 cases (contraventions), 10 cases (both crimes and conventions) and 11 cases (neither one nor the other). Regarding the penal figures used, the most frequent were attack and resistance against authority (80.65%), damages (17.27%), injuries (8.51%) and trademark law (5.50%). From the report’s perspective, the higher number suggests that “police respond to this type of crimes with disproportionate violence, or that, at the same time, these are the figures used to arbitrarily detain subjects identified by the police previously” (Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, 2018a: 7). Infractions of trademark law point, in turn, to a high rate of under-registration (given that it is a crime that is processed by the Federal Justice, the accused victim of institutional violence has to approach to the Program against Institutional Violence office to make the denunciation, which doesn’t always happen), and also this figure of 5.50% can mean a new way of criminalizing street vendors.

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As for the main charges for contraventions, the report presented the following data: use of public space (77.90%1 ), public safety (7.37%) and physical integrity (5.27%). Regarding the characteristics of the people affected by institutional violence, 76% of the cases are of Argentine nationality; among those not born in the country, the majority was people of African origin (14%). Of the non-Argentine victims of institutional violence, 57.53% (84 of 146 cases) are of Senegalese nationality, a disproportion that indicates that those were especially affected by institutional violence. To a lesser extent, people born in Peru (20.55%) and Paraguay (4.79%). The average age was 30 years, while the median was 29 and the mode was 23. Out of the cases registered, the people affected were male (86.2%), women (11.24%) and trans people (2.57%). In terms of occupation, 89.88% had informal work (the majority being “street vendors”, at 24.51%), 8.51% were people in street situation and 5.68% were not economically active (students, children or retirees). Another relevant aspect presented in the statistical report is the information on the security forces involved in cases of institutional violence. In this regard, a large majority (93.25%) corresponded to the different police stations and special divisions of the Buenos Aires City Police, and, to a much lesser extent, to Argentine National Gendarmerie (3.91%), Argentine Federal Police (1.6%) and Argentine Naval Prefecture (1.24%). Precisely, one of the features of that security force is its alleged technological profile (to which I referred in other chapters of the book), supported for example by the use of crime maps. The report also relies on these types of resources, by presenting a map referring to the centers of institutional violence, which were near the River Plate stadium due to a soccer match, in Plaza Miserere’s surroundings and in the area of Avellaneda and Nazca, where there was a very violent persecution against street vendors, especially against the Senegalese. Moving forward to the 2019 statistical report, it shows that there were 1210 situations of institutional violence registered between January 1 Within these cases, and in line with what was mentioned above, Article 86 was charged in the largest number of cases (60 cases), which typifies the profitable activities without authorization on public space (which is usually attributed to street selling).

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and December 2019.2 As in the report corresponding to 2018, the main entry channel of cases was the Directorate of Assistance to People Deprived of their Liberty. And, unlike that one, the 2019 report specifies the definition of institutional violence more by grouping different types into three categories: physical violence, procedural irregularities and psychological violence. Most of the registered cases occurred in the context of a police arrest and subsequent criminal or contraventional charges; and almost all of the cases implied the assignment of an official defender. In terms of the most frequent charged crimes, the institutional violence cases were divided into attack and resistance against authority (68.22%), Narcotics Law offenses (25.88%3 ) and injuries (16.65%). Regarding contraventions, the highest percentages were use of public and private space (57.89%), physical integrity (21.93%) and public safety (9.65%). In a more detailed way, the report pointed to recent additions that penalize informal activities (such as “trapitos”4 and “limpiavidrios”5 ), to figures of harassment, mistreatment and their aggravated figures and to the supply and demand of sex in public, the latter enabling us to observe the difference in the application of institutional violence on the trans population. As for the country of origin, 73.55% of the affected people are from Argentina, 19.01% from Latin America and 4.30% from Africa. It is striking that percentages related to countries (Argentina) have been compared with regions (Latin America, Africa). The report also highlights that of the non-Argentine victims, 36.04% are of Peruvian nationality, followed by people of Senegalese (18.02%) and Paraguayan (15.9%) origin. In this sense, it pointed out that although the Senegalese were displaced to a second place with respect to the 2018 report, 2 As noted in the report, a significant milestone in this temporary delimitation is the transfer of criminal jurisdiction (through National Law 26,702 and local Law 5935) which meant the incorporation of new criminal definitions in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires’s jurisdiction and imported a mutation of institutional violence cases and consolidation in certain specific figures such as attack and resistance against authority and possession and sale of narcotics. 3 More specifically, 272 cases that represented “simple possession” (54.04%), “commercialization” (43.38%) and “simple possession for personal consumption” (2.57%). 4 Person who earns money on public space in exchange for taking care of the parked car. 5 Person who earns money in exchange for cleaning car windows at each traffic light.

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nevertheless they still register a high rate of victimization in institutional violence events. In addition, that these figures maintain the trend of over-representation of the Senegalese community in those situations. In relation to gender, 80.7% of the cases were against male, 14.29% against women and, finally, 5.02% correspond to trans people. Similarly to the 2018 report, the average age of institutional violence victims was 31 years, and the mode was 23 (in contrast, the 2019 report did not mention the median). Regarding occupation, the vast majority carried out informal or subsistence activities, by 49.53% and 42.9%, respectively. The 2019 statistical report also incorporated other variables such as education and housing situation, from which it was concluded: There is a relationship between people who have a level of labor informality, absence of compulsory schooling and housing problems with the possibility of suffering institutional violence [...] the greater social vulnerability and job insecurity, the more likely to suffer situations of institutional violence. (Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, 2019: 13–14)

As for the security forces involved in cases of institutional violence, and similarly to the 2018 report, a large majority (88.73%) corresponded to the different police stations and units of the Buenos Aires City Police, and the remaining 11.27% to the federal forces that perform functions within the City of Buenos Aires (Argentine Federal Police, Argentine National Gendarmerie and Argentine Naval Prefecture). Regarding the institutional violence maps, the report highlighted that the large number of charges for crimes against public safety and contraventions focused on the use of public space mainly affect two of the city’s neighborhoods: Balvanera (near Plaza Miserere and “Once de Septiembre” station) and Flores (surroundings of the commercial district located in Avellaneda Avenue). In line with my research interests, the report also indicated that they observed a large number of Senegalese victims of institutional violence. In fact, the Institutional violence against Senegalese report (2018) resumed this prominence, by highlighting—as a first instance—that

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people of Senegalese nationality lead the complaints for police violence received by the Program against Institutional Violence from foreigners. As in the 2018 statistical report on institutional violence, the briefing presented data disaggregated by age, occupation, city’s neighborhoods and charged crimes. In this regard, all the victims of institutional violence were men, between the ages of 21 and 49, with a median of 32 years, most of them engaged in street vending. Most of the cases occurred in the neighborhoods of Flores and Floresta, in the surroundings of the commercial area of Nazca and Avellaneda (44.11%), followed by Balvanera (32.35%), in Plaza Miserere’s surroundings. In terms of the charged crimes, Senegalese nationals who denounced a situation of institutional violence were detained for attack and resistance against authority (53.85%), trademark law (43.08%) and injuries (18.46%). Along with this statistical and quantitative summary, the report also highlighted relevant information on the interactions between the police and Senegalese migrants, especially considering what was mentioned in Chapter 3 (referring to previous research about this subject) and the testimonies that I will analyze in the following chapters of the book. First, it noted that the police make no effort to communicate their rights to Senegalese people who do not understand the language, and added that the lack of translation is a real problem that the Senegalese have, especially with the intensification of the criminal persecution that is being carried out against them. In addition, it presented a series of events that occurred between April and December 2018, highlighting serious and violent detention operations carried out by the police. Regarding these events, the report concluded the following, which I quote at length: In all these police operations, the stories of the victims are similar: the police go out to randomly arrest the Senegalese vendors, and in the event of having merchandise with brands, they initiate a case before the federal court, and the merchandise is seized. If it does not have marks, it generates a conflict to be able to stop them for resistance or attacking the authority. And in the event that the seller does not react to the police provocation, they will seize the merchandise either for a violation of the

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offense code, and even if no government inspector is present, they can still seize the merchandise for the article 86 of the contravention code. The objective is to stop the seller and seize the merchandise, even in a violent way. Then they will think about legal framing. This type of intervention generates arbitrary detentions, which are generally left without effect by justice, whether local or federal, which finally archives the case without charge. However, the damage has already been done with the mere subjection to the process and the kidnapping of the merchandise from which they survive through the streets of Buenos Aires (Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, 2018b: 5).

As can be seen, the Institutional violence against Senegalese report not only contributes to providing a quantitative panorama of the police arrests made during the Cambiemos administration and their main traits, but also incorporates a qualitative point of view, by referring to testimonies and stories of the Senegalese themselves. The Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires also edited, in August 2021, the Directorate of Assistance to People Deprived of their Liberty report (period 2015–2020). As a first instance, it highlighted that the Directorate is in charge of giving assistance for those people who are detained in cases in which the City’s Judiciary intervenes. Next, the report presented diverse statistical data (displayed in different types of graphs) some of which I consider relevant to mention below. Regarding contraventional assistance by nationality and institutional violence in the year 2019, the assists by nationality with indications of institutional violence was 18% for Argentine nationals, 22% for other foreign nationalities and 33% for Senegalese nationals. As for the criminal assistance by nationality and institutional violence in 2019, the report highlighted that there are practically no differences in the impact of institutional violence between Argentines (32%) and people of other nationalities (31%). However, it pointed out that, in aid to Senegalese people, it is noted that in 85% of them there were institutional violence indications (Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, 2021). By incorporating this report,

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in summary, we once again observe the significant relationship between the Senegalese population and institutional violence.

Ministry of Justice and Security (Buenos Aires City Government) As another source, I highlight the Criminal Statistic Report 2016– 2020 (Ministry of Justice and Security, 2021), which includes data from the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires between 2016 and 2020, with a focus especially in registered acts such as intentional homicides, robberies, thefts and culpable injuries in road accidents. Edited in December 2021 (with information up to the end of September of that year), it constitutes the complementary report to the 2020 Crime Map.6 It relies on a diversity of data sources such as the areas of the Buenos Aires City Police that register new events (including the 15 police stations), multiple ways of denouncing of the Public Prosecutor’s Office (web form, e-mail. App, 0800 prosecutor and booths in police stations), transport and public works secretaries (Road Safety Observatory), public security forums (FOSEP, by its acronym in Spanish) and the Nearby Police Stations Program. Among them, it is relevant to resume here the police statistics. In this regard, the report pointed out 29,954 total arrests made by the Buenos Aires City Police for the year 2019, and 29,502 for 2020. Disaggregated according to type of crime, most of the arrests in 2019 were for robbery and theft (31.79%), drugs (28.84%) and culpable injuries (7.75%), while, in 2020, for robbery and theft (34.17%), Law 23,737—drugs (30.76%) and intentional injuries (6.35%). As for the distribution of arrests by nationality, it is indicated, for 2019, 84% Argentine nationality and 16% foreign population. This figure had a slight variation in the year 2020: 82% people of Argentine nationality and 18% foreign born. 6

The crime map is an online tool with statistical data on crime in the City of Buenos Aires. Its first edition was in 2017 and it is updated twice a year. The user can consult numbers of homicides, road accident injuries, theft and robbery, divided by time slots (years, months and schedules) and by communes or neighborhoods. For greater detail, see: https://mapa.seguridad ciudad.gob.ar/.

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The report stated that the arrests are proportional to the structure of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires population, as well as the nationalities that present the greatest number of cases are related to South American countries. More specifically on the latter, it presented the following data regarding the distribution of arrests by country of origin for 2019: Peru (5.69%, 1676 detainees), Paraguay (3.11%, 931 detainees) and Bolivia (2.09%, 627 detainees). Considering the aforementioned regarding the Senegalese and institutional violence, it is relevant to note that they registered a percentage of 0.56% (168 detainees), according to the Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2020. For the year 2020, in turn, the data were Peru (5.98%, 1763 detainees), Paraguay (3.47%, 1025 detainees) and Bolivia (2.13%, 629 detainees). As can be seen, it maintains the same trend as the previous year, even regarding the quantity of Senegalese arrested for crimes (0.38%, which is equivalent to 111 detainees). Other significant data included in the report points to the distribution of arrested population by place of residence. In this sense, by 2019, 64% of the detainees resided in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, and 36% in Buenos Aires Province. For 2020, the report highlighted an increase in the proportion of residents in the City who commit crimes (from 64 to 74%), as well as a decrease in residents in the Province (from 36 to 26%), whose explanation is linked to the measures implemented against the pandemic COVID-19. Regarding the geographical distribution of the total arrests, the data showed a higher incidence in the neighborhoods of Retiro, Constitución, Monserrat, San Nicolás, San Telmo and Puerto Madero (7058 arrests), followed by Balvanera and San Cristóbal (3251 arrests), which coincides with the above-mentioned centrality of the Balvanera neighborhood in cases of institutional violence. The Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2021 (Ministry of Justice and Security, 2022) provides additional data regarding the arrests made by the Buenos Aires City Police. Specifically, it highlighted—in terms of distribution by country of origin of the detainees—that by 2017 85% were Argentines and 15% foreigners. The highest percentage participation of the latter corresponded to Peru (4.57%), Paraguay (2.31%)

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and Others (2.25%). It is significant to mention that, unlike the Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2020, Senegal was not included among the different nationalities. As for 2018, the report indicated that 74% of the detainees were Argentines and 16% foreigners.7 Disaggregated according to different nationalities, the highest percentages were Peru (5.04%), Paraguay (2.84%) and Bolivia (2.07%); that is, the same trend identified for the years 2019 and 2020, and that is even repeated for the year 2021, in which the percentage of Argentine detainees was 84% and that of foreigners 16%. In summary, the proportion of foreigners detained by the Buenos Aires City Police increased from 15 to 16% between 2017 and 2018, and maintained that number towards 2019, within the period of the Cambiemos administration. Whether this trend continued, or changed, in the subsequent years is something to explore further in future research.

Ombudsman Office of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires The Senegalese community in the City of Buenos Aires: diagnoses for a comprehensive public policy for the period 2018–2020 report, edited in November 2020, reiterated the key role of people born in Senegal around their interactions with the police. More specifically, the report presented information about the population of Senegalese nationality arrested during the year 2019, and which corresponded to situations regarding which the Unit for the Prevention of Torture became aware, and in which there were indeed people admitted to a police station (Ombudsman Office of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, 2020). In fact, such Unit recorded the arrest of 212 people of Senegalese origin in 2019. As can be seen, this figure differs from that presented in Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2020, which is remarkable considering

7 It is necessary to clarify that the total sum of the percentage participation does not result in 100% but 90.92%; there are thus 2294 cases that are not included in any of the categories of nationality, whether Argentine or not.

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that both briefings corresponded geographically to the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. In a disaggregated way, and according to the place of detention, the report highlighted that the neighborhoods with the highest arrests were Flores, Parque Chacabuco, Floresta, Monte Castro, Velez Sarsfield, Versalles, Villa Luro, Villa Real, Balvanera and San Cristóbal. Concretely, 190 out of 212 registered arrests related to those neighborhoods. Regarding the population detained by police station, police stations 7-c, 10a and 3a are the ones that had the most interventions in relation to the arrests, which coincide with the neighborhoods of Flores, Floresta and Balvanera, respectively. As for arrests by type of crime, the report highlighted that the most frequent were for infringement of the trademark law (76%, 176 cases out of 212), resistance against authority (13%, 27 cases) and injuries (2%, 4 cases). Except for one case (a woman arrested for an offence of the Narcotics Law), all the detainees were men. The vast majority were between 18 and 37 years old (78%), with a greater concentration in the range between 28 and 32 years old, followed by those who were between 38 and 47 years old (19%) and over 48 (3%). According to the place of residence, 84% of the detainees resided in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, 8% did not report data and the same percentage stated that they lived in a municipality in Buenos Aires Province. It should be noted that, as in the Institutional violence against Senegalese report, the briefing also included witness cases, processed by the Ombudsman’s Office between 2017 and 2018, where they identified arrests, operations and acts of discrimination by the Buenos Aires City Police against the Senegalese community; and above all, against street vendors of Senegalese origin.

Program Against Institutional Violence (Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina) The Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina presented annual reports between the years 2015 and 2019, where it highlighted—among

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other aspects—figures related to institutional violence, produced by the Program against Institutional Violence. Specifically, through the diffusion of statistics from the Unit for the Registration, Systematization and Monitoring of Facts of Torture and Other Forms of Institutional Violence. In this sense, the 2015 Annual Report informed the existence of 606 episodes of institutional violence, between January and September 2015.8 Classified according to nationality, the main victims were Argentines (551 cases), Paraguayans (14 cases), Peruvians (13 cases) and Bolivians (8 cases). Regarding the most frequent places of event, 324 cases took place on public road, 197 in a unit of the Argentine Federal Penitentiary Service and 38 under the category Others. In those institutional violence cases on public road, the Argentine Federal Police was the security force most involved (233 cases), followed—in descending order—by the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police (37 cases), the Argentine National Gendarmerie (26 cases) and the Argentine Naval Prefecture (21 cases). The 2016 Annual Report, in turn, presented 441 institutional violence situations informed by the different agencies of the National General Defender’s Office, in the period from January 1 to October 30, 2016 (Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina, 2017). As in the previous year’s report, Argentines continue to lead the percentage regarding the nationality of the victims (83%), followed by the categories Not informed (8%), Paraguayan and Peruvian (both with 3%). Most of the events occurred on public road (324 cases), in a unit of the Argentine Federal Penitentiary Service (197 cases) and in Others (166 cases, without further specification). It is relevant to mention that the distribution of cases according to the most frequent security force involved is exactly the same for the 2015 and 2016 annual reports, although the latter presented it in percentages: Argentine Federal Police (72%,

8

The report specified that “data collection is carried out through model forms in which information is inserted that allows the correct registration and systematization of the situations of institutional violence informed by the different dependencies of the National General Defender’s Office” (Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina 2016: 128).

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233 cases), Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police (11%, 37 cases), Argentine National Gendarmerie (8%, 26 cases) and the Argentine Naval Prefecture (6%, 21 cases). Along with the quantitative summary, the 2017 Annual Report highlighted the following, regarding its labor in intervention in collective situations of institutional violence: Given that it have been collected a significant number of cases under the charge of “resisting authority”, without connection to any other crime, which would account for arbitrary arrests, work began with the official defense offices that assist the people in the framework of the files in which they are accused. In particular, it has been revealed that these situations generally occur with respect to vulnerable groups, particularly Senegalese foreigners, sex workers, and similar situations have begun to be detected in relation to adolescents. (Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina, 2018: 43)

Although the report mentioned a significant number of cases of arbitrary arrests, and also that it particularly affected Senegalese, there is a lack of quantitative data in this regard. In addition, this is not reflected in the statistics presented regarding violence situations. In fact, it informed 373 cases of torture and/or abuse reported to the Program, in the period from November 2016 to October 2017. Disaggregated by nationality, most of the victims were Argentines (79%, 291 cases), those that did not specify their nationality (12%, 46 cases), and to a much lesser extent, Peruvians, Paraguayans and Bolivians (2% each one of them; 9, 6 and 6 cases, respectively). As for the place for most of the events, the distribution of cases maintained the same trend as in the 2016 Annual Report for that same year: public road (255 cases), a unit of the Argentine Federal Penitentiary Service (198 cases) and Others (55 cases). For 2017, on the other hand, the majority corresponded to a unit of the Argentine Federal Penitentiary Service (181 cases), public road (66 cases) and Others (65 cases). Regarding the most frequent security force involved in cases recorded on public road, they were, for the year 2016, Argentine Federal Police (193 cases), Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police (34 cases), Argentine Naval Prefecture (17 cases) and Argentine National Gendarmerie (9

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cases). The data corresponding to 2017 showed a different scenario: 41 out of 66 registered cases related to Buenos Aires City Police, and to a much lesser extent, to Argentine National Gendarmerie (12 cases), Argentine Federal Police (10 cases) and Argentine Naval Prefecture (2 cases). As the report indicated albeit not explicitly, this modification (and also the fact that there were no figures on the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police for 2017) is due to the creation of the Buenos Aires City Police,9 process to which I referred in Chapter 1 of the book. Since 2018, the Program against Institutional Violence began to produce its own annual and statistical reports, separately from those of the Public Ministry of Defense, although both contained similar information. Thus, in 2018 Annual Report highlighted repeated arrests of street vendors in the neighborhoods of Balvanera and Flores, which could imply that they are arbitrary arrests carried out by the Buenos Aires City Police. Although it indicated that “manteros”10 of different nationalities work in the mentioned neighborhoods, the arrests are markedly focused on sellers of Senegalese origin, which generates—from the Program’s point of view—an intense suspicion of racial discrimination in arrests. The report underlined three other relevant aspects. In the first place, that the arrests that were carried out mainly under accusations by the crimes of attack or resistance to authority, from the transfer of these crimes to the jurisdiction of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires on March 1, 2018, began to be produced under the accusation of infringement of the trademark law. Secondly, that none of these arrests was later validated as preventive detention, and that in almost no case were the sellers formally intimidated for violating the trademark law, since the activity they carry out does not fit the typical criteria accepted by jurisprudence. Third and last, the hypothesis being documented is that the security forces impute criminal charges against street vendors as a way of justifying the arrests and thus freeing up public space. 9 According to the report, “as a result of the transfer from the National State to the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires of faculties and security functions, the Metropolitan Police was renamed the City Police, and agents from the Argentine Federal Police were transferred to perform functions within the scope of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires” (Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina, 2018: 48). 10 As I mentioned in Chapter 3, it is a term that designates those people who sell on the street, arranging their merchandise on cloth or “mantas” in precarious conditions.

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As in the 2017 Annual Report of the Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina, when describing this scenario and the different traits of those arrests, there is a lack of quantitative data (or its mere reference) to support it. Regarding the quantitative information released in the ministry’s 2018 Annual Report, it presented 502 cases of torture and/or abuse informed to the Program, in the period from December 2017 to November 2018. The increase in cases compared to the previous period “may be due, in part, to the fact that it has been possible to obtain detailed information on denunciations of violence actions carried out on public road by police forces against children and adolescents” (Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina, 2019: 41). According to the most frequent nationality of the victims, it maintained the same trend as the previous report, with a slight variation in the percentages: Argentina (80%, 403 cases), Not informed (10%, 54 cases), Peru (3%, 16 cases), Paraguay (2%, 10 cases) and Bolivia (1%, 9 cases). Unlike the previous report, most of the denounced events occurred on public road (221 cases), followed by a unit of the Argentine Federal Penitentiary Service (136 cases) and Others (76 cases). 168 out of 221 registered cases had Buenos Aires City Police as a protagonist, and to a much lesser extent, Argentine Naval Prefecture (20 cases) and Argentine National Gendarmerie (19 cases). It is necessary to point out that Argentine Federal Police was relegated to a more marginal place (only 7 cases), compared to the reports mentioned up to here. Moving forward to 2019, the Annual Report of the Program against Institutional Violence reiterated the persecution of street vendors of Senegalese origin, underlining that: (a) constitute arbitrary arrests carried out by Buenos Aires City Police; (b) heavily target Senegalese’s vendors, raising strong suspicion of racial discrimination in arrests; (c) none of these arrests was later validated as preventive detention; and (d) the security forces impute criminal charges against street vendors as a way to justify the arrests and thus free up public space, which must be analyzed based on possible discrimination based on nationality, ethnic origin, poverty and other reasons for vulnerability (Program against Institutional Violence, 2019).

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Although the report highlighted that the situation described arises from a survey initiated by the Program based on information provided by the Federal Justice of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires related to alleged infringements of the trademark law, there is once again an absence of data or mere reference to quantitative data, as in the briefing corresponding to 2018. The ministry’s 2019 Annual Report, in turn, presented 466 cases of torture and/or abuse informed to the Program, between December 2018 and November 2019.11 Disaggregated by nationality, most of the victims were Argentines (82%, 382 cases), those that did not specify their nationality (10%, 48 cases), Paraguayans (3%, 14 cases), Peruvians (2%, 8 cases) and Bolivians (1%, 5 cases). As for the place of the event, most of them occurred on public road (242 cases), followed by a unit of the Argentine Federal Penitentiary Service (129 cases) and Search/arrest (27 cases), which made its appearance in the top three categories in this report. Regarding the security forces involved, Buenos Aires City Police recorded the largest number of situations of violence (207 out of 242 cases), followed—to a much lesser extent—by the National Gendarmerie (17 cases) and by provincial police (7 cases). As in the previous report, the Argentine Federal Police contemplated a very low number of 5 cases. By way of preliminary conclusions, unlike the reports of 2017, 2018 and 2019 which highlighted arrests focused on Senegalese street vendors, in those corresponding to 2015 and 2016, there is no reference to this type of arrest. Moreover, when the reports indicated these arrests, they did not include any mention of quantitative data. This aspect may be related to the “Not informed” category of nationality (which increased its percentage between 2016 and 2017, and remained at 10% between 2018 and 2019), especially considering the risks that it may incur for the

11

Under the heading Methodology, the report highlighted: “The data presented is obtained from the cases uploaded in the defensepublica.net system, based on the information provided by the ombudsmen who uploaded them, or own upload from the collection of information or direct contact with the complaints of the facts. As the report develops, the origin of this upload is diverse. This implies that the universe of cases worked is limited to that upload and the subsequent work on it. In this sense, all tables and graphs made arise from the processing performed by this Program” (Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina, 2020: 48–49).

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Senegalese community by disclosing their identity as a complainant, due to possible police reprisals against them. Another aspect that deserves our attention from the reports alludes to the displacement of the key role of the Argentine Federal Police towards the Buenos Aires City Police as the most intervening security force in the registered cases, which is fundamentally linked to the changes implemented by the Cambiemos administration in security at the local level, and specifically in the City of Buenos Aires context.

Synthesis As I pointed out at the beginning of the chapter, I present below different dimensions that allow us to carry out an adequate and rigorous methodological surveillance regarding secondary quantitative data (Table 5.1). To conclude this chapter, I highlight the main results. In the first place, this table allows illustrating different institutions and various ways of producing their data: on arrests, institutional violence situations and assistances to victims of institutional violence. Almost all the reports, with the exception of one of them,12 are publicly accessible and can be consulted online. Secondly, the time series comprehend the years of the Cambiemos administration, although some with more detail than others (and with a broader time arc, as those who produced data between 2015 and 2019). In the third place, the visual resources used to present the data are very similar to each other. It is worth highlighting the use of maps, a resource not only used by the Buenos Aires City Police (one of the pillars of its alleged technological profile) but also by the Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. Fourthly, the registered cases of institutional violence doubled between 2018 and 2019, according to the statistical reports produced by this last institution. Assistances to victims of institutional violence, in turn, underlines the presence of people of Senegalese nationality (both in aid for crimes and contraventions). Police arrests decreased from 2017 and 12

I thank the researcher Gisele Kleidermacher for providing me with this report.

2018

When was it produced?

How did they produce it?

Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires Interviews by Directorate of Assistance to People Deprived of their Liberty and intervening Ombudsmen

Who produced the data?

2018 statistical report on institutional violence

2019

Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires Interviews by Directorate of Assistance to People Deprived of their Liberty and intervening Ombudsmen

2019 statistical report on institutional violence

Table 5.1 Comparative synthesis

2018

Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires Interviews by Directorate of Assistance to People Deprived of their Liberty and intervening Ombudsmen

Institutional violence against Senegalese report

2021

Aid given by Directorate of Assistance to People Deprived of their Liberty to institutional violence victims

Directorate of Assistance to People Deprived of their Liberty

Directorate of Assistance to People…report Ministry of Justice and Security (Buenos Aires City Government) Areas of Buenos Aires City Police, ways of denouncing of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Road Safety Observatory, public security forums and the Nearby Police Stations Program 2021–2022

Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2020/ 2021 Annual Reports 2015–2019

2020

Situations of arrest in which the Unit for the Prevention of Torture became aware and in which were people admitted to a police station

2016–2020

(continued)

Unit for the Registration, Systematization and Monitoring of Facts of Torture and Other Forms of Institutional Violence/ defensapublica.net system

Ombudsman Program against Office of Institutional Violence the (Public Ministry of Autonomous Defense of Argentina) City of Buenos Aires

Senegalese community in the City of Buenos Aires…

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Yes (through official web)

March and December 2018

Bar graphs, tables and maps

Are they publicly accessible?

What time series do they include?

How they present the data?

2018 statistical report on institutional violence

Table 5.1 (continued)

Bar graphs, tables and maps

January and December 2019

Yes (through official web)

2019 statistical report on institutional violence

Bar graph and tables

March and December 2018

No

Institutional violence against Senegalese report

Pie charts, bar graphs and table

2019

Yes (through official web)

Directorate of Assistance to People…report

-2016–2022 (updated up to the end of September of 2021 and up to the end of January 2022) Tables, bar graphs, pie charts, graphs and maps

Yes (through Crime Map)

Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2020/ 2021

Bar graphs and pie charts

Yes (through nonofficial web) 2019

Senegalese community in the City of Buenos Aires… Annual Reports 2015–2019

- 2015: January–September 2015 - 2016: January–October 2016 - 2017: November 2016–October 2017 - 2018: December 2017–November 2018 - 2019: December 2018–November 2019 Tables, bar graphs and pie charts

Yes (through official web)

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Arrests or institutional violence cases

2019 statistical report on institutional violence 2019: 1210 cases

2018 statistical report on institutional violence

2018: 623 cases

84 cases (people of Senegalese nationality)

Institutional violence against Senegalese report - Contraventional aid: 18% for Argentine nationals, 22% foreign nationalities and 33% for Senegalese nationals - Criminal aid: 32% Argentines, 31% people of other nationalities and 85% Senegalese people

Directorate of Assistance to People…report

Senegalese community in the City of Buenos Aires… 212 arrests (people of Senegalese nationality)

Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2020/ 2021 - 2017: 27,729 arrests - 2018: 25,382 arrests - 2019: 29,954 arrests - 2020: 29,502 arrests - 2021: 32,683 arrests

2015: 2016: 2017: 2018: 2019:

606 441 373 502 466

(continued)

cases cases cases cases cases

Annual Reports 2015–2019 -

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Foreigners-Argentines proportion

76% Argentines, 24% foreign born

2018 statistical report on institutional violence

Table 5.1 (continued)

73% Argentines, 27% foreign born

2019 statistical report on institutional violence Only people of Senegalese nationality (84 cases out of 623)

Institutional violence against Senegalese report - Contraventional aid: 18% Argentines, 22% foreign nationalities and 33% Senegalese nationals - Criminal aid: 32% Argentines, 31% other nationalities and 85% Senegalese people

Directorate of Assistance to People…report - 2017: 85% Argentine nationality, 15% foreign - 2018: 74% Argentine nationality, 16% foreign - 2019: 84% Argentine nationality, 16% foreign - 2020: 82% Argentine Nationality, 18% foreign - 2021: 84% Argentine nationality, 16% foreign

Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2020/ 2021 Only Senegalese people (212 arrests)

Senegalese community in the City of Buenos Aires… Annual Reports 2015–2019 - 2015: 91% Argentines, 9% foreigners - 2016: 83% Argentines, 17% foreigners - 2017: 79% Argentines, 21% foreigners - 2018: 80% Argentines, 20% foreigners - 2019: 82% Argentines, 18% foreigners

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Most frequent foreign nationalities

57.53% Senegal, 20.55% Peru and 4.79% Paraguay

2018 statistical report on institutional violence 36.04% Peru, 18.02% Senegal and 15.9% Paraguay

2019 statistical report on institutional violence Senegal (13.48% out of the total)

Institutional violence against Senegalese report - Contraventional aid: Senegal (33%) - Criminal aid: Senegal (85%)

Directorate of Assistance to People…report

Senegalese community in the City of Buenos Aires… Only Senegalese people (212 arrests)

Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2020/ 2021 - 2017: 4.57% Peru, 2.31% Paraguay and 2.25% Others - 2018: 5.04% Peru, 2.84% Paraguay and 2.07% Bolivia - 2019: 5.69% Peru, 3.11% Paraguay and 2.09% Bolivia - 2020: 5.98% Peru, 3.47% Paraguay and 2.13% Bolivia - 2021 5.37% Peru, 3.62% Paraguay and 2.07% Bolivia

Annual Reports 2015–2019

(continued)

- 2015: 2% Paraguay, 2% Peru and 1% Bolivia - 2016: 8% Not informed, 3% Paraguay and 3% Bolivia - 2017: 12% Not informed, 2% Peru and 2% Paraguay - 2018: 10% Not informed, 3% Peru and 2% Paraguay - 2019: 10% Not informed, 3% Paraguay and 2% Peru

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Buenos Aires City Police

Plaza Miserere’s surroundings and Avellaneda and Nazca

Most involved security force

Geolocalization/place of event

2018 statistical report on institutional violence

Table 5.1 (continued)

Balvanera (near Plaza Miserere) and Flores (near Avellaneda Avenue)

Buenos Aires City Police

2019 statistical report on institutional violence

Flores, Floresta and Balvanera

[No data]

Institutional violence against Senegalese report

[No data]

[No data]

Directorate of Assistance to People…report

Retiro, Constitución, Monserrat, San Nicolás, San Telmo, Puerto Madero, Balvanera and San Cristóbal

Buenos Aires City Police

Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2020/ 2021

Flores, Parque Chacabuco, Floresta, Monte Castro, Velez Sarsfield, Versalles, Villa Luro, Villa Real, Balvanera and San Cristóbal

[No data]

Senegalese community in the City of Buenos Aires… Annual Reports 2015–2019 - 2015–2016: Argentine Federal Police - 2017–2019: Buenos Aires City Police Balvanera and Flores

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2018 and increased towards 2019. In addition, the cases of institutional violence registered by the Program against Institutional Violence fluctuated: they decreased from 2015 to 2017, increased in 2018 and decreased slightly towards 2019. In the fifth place, foreign victims of institutional violence rose between 2018 and 2019 (from 24 to 27%). The arrests of foreigners made by the Buenos Aires City Police, in turn, rose from 15 to 16% between 2017 and 2018 and remained at that number in 2019. According to annual reports 2015–2019, the percentages of foreign victims of institutional violence increased between 2015 and 2017, and decreased slightly towards 2018 and 2019. Sixthly, regarding the foreign nationalities, most of the reports emphasized the Senegalese population. Those of the police respect the same trend between 2017 and 2019 (alternating the percentages between Peru, Paraguay and Bolivia). In annual reports, it is important to highlight the increase in the percentage of “Not Informed” nationality. In the seventh place, there is a centrality of the Buenos Aires City Police in the recorded facts (either arrests or institutional violence episodes), and an increasingly marginal place of the Argentine Federal Police. Eighthly and last, either with quantitative or qualitative references, it is worth highlighting the centrality of the Balvanera, Flores and Floresta neighborhoods, near commercial spaces, although not exclusive to street vendors.

References Cohen, N., & Gómez Rojas, G. (2019). Metodología de la Investigación, ¿para qué? La producción de los datos y los diseños. Teseo. Ferraris, V. (2021). Inmigrazione e criminalità. Teorie, norme e reppresentazioni. Carocci editore. Glanc, L., & Page Poma, F. (2019). Seguridad pública y política: Un análisis de los datos en la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires. DILEMAS: Revista de Estudos de Conflito e Controle Social, 12(2), 357–379.

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Ministry of Justice and Security. (2021). Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2020. https://cdn.buenosaires.gob.ar/datosabiertos/datasets/ministerio-de-justiciay-seguridad/delitos/MDD2020-InformeEstad%C3%ADstico_Ed2.pdf Ministry of Justice and Security. (2022). Criminal Statistic Report 2016–2021. https://cdn.buenosaires.gob.ar/datosabiertos/datasets/ministerio-de-justiciay-seguridad/delitos/Informe_complementario.pdf Monclús Masó, M., & García, M. B. (2012). El impacto de las migraciones en la criminalidad en la Argentina: mitos y realidades. In Cuadernos Migratorios N°2 El impacto de las migraciones en Argentina (pp. 323–365). OIM. Monclús Masó, M., & Brandariz García, J. Á. (2014). Políticas y prácticas de control migratorio: estudio comparativo del control de los migrantes en el contexto latinoamericano y europeo (Didot, ed.). Olaeta, H. (2015). Surgimiento de las estadísticas criminales en Argentina. La influencia de los discursos criminológicos en la producción y análisis de datos de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (1885–1921). Revista Delito y Sociedad, 24 (40), 31–62. https://doi.org/10.14409/dys.v2i40.5585 Olaeta, H. (2018). La construcción científica de la delincuencia. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Olaeta, H. (2021). Apuntes sobre la construcción de datos oficiales en materia criminal en Argentina. Revista at/pica. Reflexiones Sobre Política Criminal, 2, 26–31. Ombudsman Office of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. (2020). Senegalese community in the City of Buenos Aires. Diagnoses for a comprehensive public policy for the period 2018–2020. The labor of the Ombudsman Office of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires 2018–2020. https://www.calameo.com/ defensoriacaba/read/002682399122f99508860 Program against Institutional Violence. (2018). 2018 Annual Report. https:// www.mpd.gov.ar/index.php/publicaciones-violencia-institucional/5198-inf orme-anual-2018 Program against Institutional Violence. (2019). 2019 Annual Report. https:// www.mpd.gov.ar/index.php/publicaciones-violencia-institucional/5201-inf orme-anual-2019 Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina. (2016). 2015 Annual Report. https:// www.mpd.gov.ar/pdf/Informe%20Anual%202015.pdf Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina. (2017). 2016 Annual Report. https:// www.mpd.gov.ar/pdf/Informe%20Anual%202016.pdf Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina. (2018). 2017 Annual Report. https:// www.mpd.gov.ar/pdf/Informe%20Anual%202017%20Libro%20con%20T apa.compressed.pdf

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Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina. (2019). 2018 Annual Report. https:// www.mpd.gov.ar/pdf/Informe%20Anual%202018%20web-comprimido. pdf Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina. (2020). 2019 Annual Report. https:// www.mpd.gov.ar/pdf/Informe%20Anual%202019_compressed.pdf Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. (2018a). 2018 statistical report on institutional violence. https://www.mpdefensa.gob. ar/sites/default/files/informe_vi_2018_0.pdf Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. (2018b). Institutional violence against Senegalese report. Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. (2019). 2019 statistical report on institutional violence. https://www.mpdefensa.gob. ar/sites/default/files/informe_vi_2019.pdf Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. (2021). Directorate of Assistance to People Deprived of their Liberty report. Period 2015–2020. https://www.mpdefensa.gob.ar/sites/default/files/ archivo/21.08.06_informe_dappl_2020.pdf Sozzo, M. (2003). ¿Contando el delito? Análisis crítico y comparativo de las encuestas de victimización en la Argentina. Cartapacio De Derecho, 5, 1– 143. Sozzo, M. (2008). Pintando con números. Fuentes estadísticas de conocimiento y gobierno de la cuestión criminal. In Inseguridad, prevención y policía (pp. 21–65). FLACSO Ecuador.

6 Mean Streets. Interactions Between Police and Migrants

Abstract This chapter presents the interactions between police and migrants in the scope of the City of Buenos Aires. In particular, I highlight five interpretations according to which the interviewees describe a different police action depending on whether it is an Argentine or foreign person: ignorance of the “other”, racism and xenophobia, lack of communication, sharing the workplace on the streets with the police (which would give a greater margin for them to “collide” each other) and having an accent that is perceived diverse from the Argentine. By focusing on the spatial dimension, the testimonies empirically support the premise that the police institution contributes to the reproduction and maintenance of a certain social order, but above all, a spatial order that defines both inclusions and exclusions from certain zones of the city as well as displacements and borders. Keywords Discrimination · Racism · Xenophobia · Differentiated treatment · Migrants · Police

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Abiuso, Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46379-2_6

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Introduction “This is the street where people live in fear Of senseless crime and poverty And the color of your skin decides If you should pay the penalty”. (Die Toten Hosen, 1994)

According to the definition proposed by Michel Wieviorka (2009), discrimination corresponds to a hierarchical logic and consists of giving a group a differentiated treatment. As I already pointed out in Chapter 3, discrimination can be exercised in all areas of social life, including the functioning of justice and the police. Similarly, Benjamin Bowling et al. (2019: 126) define it as follows: Discrimination refers to a pattern of the exercise of power or provision of service that result in unequal, unfavorable, and unjustifiable treatment based on a person’s sex, gender, ‘race’, ethnicity, culture, religion, language, class, sexual orientation, age physical disability, or any other improper ground.

The authors emphasize that the law makes a distinction between direct and indirect discrimination. Regarding the first, it points to the context in which formal policies that disadvantage particular social groups are enshrined in law and enforced by police. As for indirect discrimination, it refers to the scenario in which the treatment is formally considered “equal” but disadvantages a particular group in its actual effect. In addition, Bowling et al. (2019) describe different types of discrimination, considering especially its social and psychological sources. Among them, individual or categorical discrimination, which alludes to the ways in which police officers treat members of a group disadvantageously purely because it’s their group of belonging, regardless of the relevance of this to any specific performance criteria. Statistical discrimination constitutes another form of discrimination, which is also defined as an important feature of the police organizational culture. More concretely, involves giving members of a group differential

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treatment due to the stereotyped belief that they are more likely to have certain characteristics, unrelated to the specific behavior of individual members. A broader and structural perspective situates discrimination in the wider processes of social and economic exclusion. This is where the authors introduce the idea of situational discrimination, understanding as such the scenario in which socio-economic position shapes groups disproportionately as undeserving of police services or as legitimate targets of police suspicion. Other authors described this differentiated treatment from diverse concepts. Among them, Eugene McLaughlin (2011) refers to police bias, understanding by such a concept that allows us to comprehend different selective discriminatory practices, among which we can distinguish those that imply an excess of surveillance of ethnic minorities, and those that suppose a deficit of response in relation to the specific security demands of such minorities. Regarding the first case, the author adds that traffic controls, searches on public roads, arrests, and excessive use of force are examples, among others, of the discriminatory use of police powers in dealing with minority communities. In a more general way, Jock Young (2012) highlights diminishment, the fact that “them” are less than “us”, as one of the moments in the othering process. In the same sense, he refers to a distance with respect to the “other”, which is reflected in a series of binary formulas: us-them, majority-minority, criminal law-delinquents and normal-offenders. Dario Melossi (2015), in turn, points out that—at least in southern European countries—the issue of criminalization is strictly related to inferiorization and racialization. Similarly, Kitty Calavita (2005) analyzes the mechanisms of expulsion (law, economics, ideologies of race, among others) that define the experience of migrants and place them on the margins of the social order. Alessandro De Giorgi (2005) stresses the assimilation between difference and dangerousness in the modalities of control and surveillance on the risk-producing groups that inhabit the territories of exclusion. He also describes the differentiated status of the migrant subject as a precarious and punitive legal status, discriminatory in terms of citizenship rights, and constantly exposed to expulsion.

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Although related to another field of studies, it may also be useful to refer here to the notion of subordinate inclusion (Melossi, 2018) to account for the aforementioned differentiated treatment, understanding that, together with discipline and obedience, the subordinate inclusion of outsiders constitutes the raison d’être of the prison. According to the testimonies of the interviewees, I was able to identify five interpretations according to which they describe a different police action depending on whether it is an Argentine or foreign person.

Differentiated Treatment: Interpretations In this sense, Cheikhou,1 who arrived in Argentina in August 2007, and who worked—at the time of the interview—at the National Foundation for Refugees, noted: When I tell you that they act in different ways, I can give you examples that are, perhaps, negative, and many of them. And sometimes, positive too, because we have cases in which we have seen excellent cooperation from the police. And that even surprises us sometimes, which are very few, unfortunately. Why do I tell you yes and that there are many? When there is a conflict, and it is not that there is a conflict, but rather the presence of immigrants, and in particular, African immigrants, Senegalese, for example, the way the security forces act is different, from the other way of acting, when dealing, for example, with an Argentine national. I suppose that perhaps it is due to ignorance, and perhaps due to racism and xenophobia. Why ignorance? Because sometimes they take into consideration that he is a foreign person, that we don’t know him, that perhaps he is very strong, or that he is very big, tall, black, etc. And if is the case to confront that person, two or three policemen confront him. Then the way of acting changes completely. And this is what we are seeing with the entire Senegalese community, for example. Where a police officer should go to talk, or try to have a dialogue with a Senegalese, as he does with an Argentine, he does not do it with a Senegalese. They usually come

1 I replaced the names of the people interviewed with fantasy names, to maintain the confidentiality of anonymity.

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and directly act, and use physical force, between two or three people. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

This type of scenario of ignorance regarding the “other” opens the conditions for the possibility of the emergence of prejudices, some of them being overgeneralization (beliefs about members of a group that are not true of all or most members) and falsehood (an entirety false attribution taken as characteristic of the entire group), both pointed out by Bowling et al. (2019). In this sense, being “very strong”,2 or “very big, tall, black” is assigned, in this testimony, as an attribute of the Senegalese community in general. Hence the consequence of how the police act in front of them, confronting several police officers to a single person. Understanding that prejudice is an attitude, “attitudes, therefore, are not a form of behavior in themselves but have a directive or dynamic influence on behavior” (Bowling et al., 2019: 125), that is to say, the prejudices of the police play a key role in the ways of acting in front of a foreign person (particularly in this case, of Senegalese origin). We can highlight the same thing about stereotyping processes. According to the aforementioned authors, stereotypes are an important aspect of prejudice since categorizing people helps to select and interpret traits that group members seem to have in common but that may in fact reside only in the minds of those who perceive it. Sometimes a halo of racism surrounds these categories. As pointed out by Cheikhou, the treatment of the police is different because, among other aspects, the Senegalese is a black person. In fact, Bowling et al. (2019) highlight racial prejudice as one of the chore characteristics of the cop cultures.3 Nevertheless, they note the connection between police culture and the prevailing power relations in a social order. In their own words, “police cultures reflect and perpetuate the power differences within the social 2

The same interviewee highlighted that a particular media outlet reproduced this idea, stating “that everyone has strength, that they were all ex-military or bodyguards, or are trained, or have a lot of strength”, justifying that the police go in groups in order to exert direct force towards them. 3 Along with racial prejudice, other characteristics are mission-action-cynicism-pessimism, suspicion, isolation/solidarity, police conservatism, machismo and pragmatism.

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structure. The police officer is a microcosmic mediator of the relations of power—a ‘street corner politician’” (Bowling et al., 2019: 171), thus contributing to the discussion on the links between police and politics, a topic already reviewed in Chapter 3. From a point of view similar to that of Esteban Rodriguez Alzueta (2014), mentioned in the chapter of the book dedicated to the state of the art, according to which there is no police nose without a social nose, the authors emphasize that the police racial prejudice is in part a reflection of general societal prejudice. Elsewhere, Benjamin Bowling (2011) adds that discrimination has strong ties to the concept of prejudice, that is, ideas that identify certain groups as “inferior” or “problematic”; thus identifying the connections between discriminatory practices, prejudiced opinions and negative stereotypes. In this sense, certain ideas associated with height, strength, size and skin color may imply a differential treatment by the police between an Argentine and a Senegalese migrant. Dion, another interviewee who arrived in Argentina in 2018 as part of a dance tour and who stayed in the country because the expiration of his passport did not allow him to follow the path of his dance partners, pointed out the following regarding the importance of skin color: I-

For example, suppose an illegal act is committed, a legal problem, do you think it is easier for the police to blame a Senegalese than a Bolivian, a Paraguayan, or a Uruguayan? D- Yes, if he is Senegalese. First, the Senegalese are black. They had nothing to do with Bolivians here. Senegal is far away. Do you understand? I- I wanted to deepen about the dark complexion. That seems to you to play a key role as well, in those interactions with the police. D- Yes. Also the thing that tires me a lot, are the papers here. The papers are also very important. (Dion, Senegalese, 5 years of residence in Argentina)

Going back to Cheikhou’s testimony, he also referred to xenophobia and to the fact that the police act differently because it is “a foreign person”. By xenophobia, we can understand attitudes that imply the direct dislike of foreign elements (or, at least, a skepticism towards them) and, in the specific sphere of the police, the police negativity towards

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foreign national (Krott et al., 2018; Sausdal, 2023). Here the distance lies in the fact that the “other” is a foreigner, regardless of the migrant community to which he belongs: he is not Argentine and therefore receives differential treatment. Thus, his foreign status exposes him to a different interaction with the security forces. Another interpretation that I was able to identify, from the analysis of the narratives obtained in the interview situation, was the lack of communication. In this regard, the language component plays a crucial role in the contacts between police and migrants. I could say that almost the entire Senegalese community are very peaceful people; there may be a problem of interpreting the speeches. A lack of understanding of the language, or a lack of communication when the policeman wants to communicate something to the Senegalese, and the Senegalese does not clearly understand what he is communicating. Alternatively, you want to express something, and you cannot express it the way you want. That generates certain anguish, and can make the other, that is to say, the security force, believe that he is violent or that he does not want to abide by the decision of the security force. And that generates several problems, because police accused many of the compatriots of resisting authority, etc., or violence against the police or the authorities that are from the municipality, etc. And this I think is nothing more than a lack of communication. You can communicate what one wants to say or be able to understand what they are asking. This for me is what generates a certain conflict between the Senegalese community and the security force. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

In turn, Henri, who arrived in Argentina in 2008 and works in a security company, also emphasized on the language: It also depends on the boy, the person, the element with whom the police act. If it is an element that speaks Spanish well, that knows what the law of the country is, the police act in exchange. If he is a boy who does not understand anything, or does not want to know anything, or does not want to understand, the police also have to act in one way or another. And we know that. For this reason, we always help to call a third person. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

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Regarding the same, Dion referred that language is a problematic aspect when Senegalese street sellers defend themselves against the police displacing them from their workplaces: I-

It seems to you that it also has to do with the language difficulty, also, that type of conflictive interaction, that they do not understand each other. D- Yes, sometimes yes. Sometimes, between them, one person talks to improve, and the other can take it badly. Sometimes yes. The language here is very difficult to defend, to talk. (Dion, Senegalese, 5 years of residence in Argentina)

Previously, Gisele Kleidermacher (2019) highlighted the development of internal communication codes as a form of resistance; in this sense, Dion affirms that the sellers have WhatsApp groups to notify and alert everyone that the police are coming. These are interactions between police officers and migrants, as detailed by Cheikhou, in which the instance of dialogue does not predominate or even exist: Yes, it’s always the police that come. Because there are some situations that are quite complex. For example, at times when many were selling, many were selling in Flores or Once,4 or perhaps in Constitución. We understood that it is the public space and we try to see how to make people pick up their things. And if there is a ration of resistance, the security force only participates. Unfortunately, it is the opposite. We know that in the public space he is there with his arms crossed and the police who arrive pick up merchandises […] This is something very frequent and it is quite complicated to establish a dialogue with the security forces. And less when it comes to a person who does not understand the language well. And the police do not always look for an interpreter, or look for a point of dialogue or discussion, to try to win the trust of the citizen. Because it is also that, to start a dialogue first, try to see if the person is going to abide by a dialogue or is going to abide by an order […] but sometimes, he is coming with the sole intention of displacing the person or stealing things. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

4

Once is the usual name of the Balvanera neighborhood in popular jargon.

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In fact, the interviewees themselves had to go, on occasions, to assist their fellow detainees in police stations in matters of language, as can be seen in the following textual excerpts: Present myself at the police station to assist him, the language, explain things to him, so that he is not disappointed. That facilitation, nothing more. It is not to go to the police to make some trouble, or to demand that the police do their job, no. It’s just assistance. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina) Many times, they call me from the police station itself because they cannot communicate with a Senegalese. That person needs an interpreter because they cannot communicate, we don’t know how... Then one has to go, etc. Alternatively, by phone, talk to him, etc. We also do that so that the boys can identify themselves. Sometimes because of fear, one does not want to identify […] the police call me to find out or to go as interpreter when there is a conflict with a Senegalese at a police station. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

In other chapters of the book, I already highlighted the centrality of language comprehension in migrant-police officer’s interactions. In this regard, Pacecca et al. (2017) reviewed a raid carried out in 2014 by numerous agents of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police in a pension located in the Balvanera neighborhood, requested by the Complex Investigations Coordination Unit of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the City of Buenos Aires. Despite the fact that the police acted violently and abusively towards all the residents of the home, the Senegalese in particular suffered the worst consequences, and this was because their not-very-fluent Spanish made it difficult for them to understand what was happening and to respond to police orders appropriately, which increased mistreatment by uniformed officers. Furthermore, the authors highlight that when the Senegalese citizens refused to sign the search certificate because they did not understand it, the police officers forced them to do so by threatening them with their weapons. As I pointed out in Chapter 5, dedicated to secondary quantitative data, Institutional violence against Senegalese report (2018) noted that the police make no effort to communicate their rights to Senegalese people who do not understand the language. In addition, the report

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added that the lack of translation is a real problem that the Senegalese have, especially considering the intensification of criminal persecution towards them. From other latitudes, Lara and Santos Alvins (2016) highlighted, in the case of northern regions of Chile, the role of the cultural factor (and, above all, relevant differences in language use) in the detention of foreign population. Some examples provided by the authors are the following: Among the various scenarios is that of people who speak another language because they come from nations whose official language is different from Spanish. Others are those monolingual of an indigenous language or with a little comprehension of Spanish, which is the case of those who belong to indigenous peoples such as Aymaras or Quechuas. (Lara & Santos Alvins, 2016: 111)

Similarly, David Sausdal (2018) referred to gaps in language (or language barriers) as a difficulty in establishing rapport and creating a positive atmosphere in interrogations with foreign detainees. In addition, he linked the language and knowledge gaps together; or more particularly, that gaps in knowledge amplify the language barriers. The lack of knowledge is a relevant topic that also emerged from the analysis of the interviews, as an aspect that even the police take advantage of it. In this sense, regarding the ignorance of tools of the Senegalese to denounce abusive practices and the kidnapping of their merchandise, one of the interviewees affirmed the following: There are many other cases in which, perhaps the police took advantage of their lack of knowledge, and let’s say they were taken advantage of in this situation. Sometimes it is too late, when one no longer knows where to denounce. But yes, there are cases in which they do such a thing, that they took merchandise, or asked them for things, as if they asked for some kind of money to let them go, etc., and honestly, the quantity is many cases here. And more in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

Along with the ignorance of the “other”, racism and xenophobia and the lack of communication, another interpretation according to which

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the interviewees highlight a different police action depending on whether it is an Argentine or foreign person is because of sharing the workplace on the streets with the police. In this sense, Henri affirmed that the collisions between Senegalese and police officers were “normal”, given and considering that their places of work are the same. If I can say, generally, we don’t complain, because we are a community that acts in the street and the police also act in the street. So maybe we’re going to have collisions, it’s normal. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

Thus, the fact that they share and dispute paths, expressing it in the terms used by Kleidermacher (2019) in the title of his text, constitutes a recurring aspect in the interactions between Senegalese street vendors and the police. Sometimes the police bother, and they don’t let them work. Because if they don’t work, where are they going to live? Where are they going to pay for their rent? (Dion, Senegalese, 5 years of residence in Argentina) Sometimes they leave me alone to work and sometimes they don’t leave me alone, it depends on the boss, there are people complaining because we are on the street, because the boy is not going to sell on the stores because we sell on the street, sometimes people are a bit fucked up with that. (Nampalys, Senegalese, 8 years of residence in Argentina)

There are three aspects worth underlining from these textual excerpts. In the first place, the discretion of the police when it comes to arresting people (“sometimes it bothers, sometimes it doesn’t”). Secondly, that this selection depends on the shift boss, inviting us to reflect on how street policemen and bosses are linked to each other: if the street policeman only executes an order from above or has a certain margin of autonomy to carry out his quotidian routine. Third and last, the residents of the neighborhood also perform a role in the complaints against street sellers. To expand on this last point, this is how Nampalys, arrived in Argentina in 2015 and a street vendor, referred to the difficulties of the street:

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N- Sometimes there are people who bother you, it’s not your job alone, the street, everywhere, sometimes they bother us, there are people who look at us as very poor, they tell you something ugly but I’m not interested because I don’t have time to talk about nonsense. I- And do you think that your economic situation favors or disadvantages the possibility of having more work or more clients? N- It’s very complicated. You don’t have regular customers. When you sell on the street, you have a good vibe with people to sell but you don’t have a permanent position, tomorrow it may rain, tomorrow the police can pick you up, you don’t have a permanent position, that’s the problem. Sometimes you do things on WhatsApp or Instagram to earn something with people. Since we don’t have regular customers, the street is difficult. (Nampalys, Senegalese, 8 years of residence in Argentina)

On other occasions, the conflicts are not with the residents of the neighborhood, with passers-by, or even with the police, but with those who sell in stores (either small or large) as the following interview excerpt illustrates. It is quite complicated and almost impossible to prohibit street vending. I am not only talking about the Senegalese community, but I am also thinking about the need of all those who lost or never had a permanent job. And that they need to get ahead, go out and sell something. Then, try to talk to see where we can stop selling in those places, in that space, and try to occupy other spaces in a much more moderate and much more thorough way. And try not to generate a certain amount of competition, which it’s a word they always use, with the merchants who are also in certain places, like the malls, or the big galleries that are on Once, too. Avoid straying a bit away from those places, so that it doesn’t create a conflict between them, too. Because we must take into account that, many times, it is the same sellers who present complaints before the police station, or before the government authority. And that makes the police have to act, and unfortunately, they act violently. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

In this sense, the complaints of the vendors of malls or galleries can be the trigger for a police action, which from Cheikhou’s perspective, constitutes a violent police action.

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It is possible to interpret theoretically these dynamics from the previously mentioned idea of situational discrimination, understanding as such the scenario in which socio-economic position shapes groups disproportionately as legitimate targets of police suspicion. In addition, taking into account the concept of “availability”. In this regard, Bowling et al., (2019: 129) state: Much of the disproportionate use of stop and search powers against young, black, and ethnic minority, less affluent men arises from the fact that they spend more of their time than other groups in the places and at times where stop and search is most widely used. The extent to which a social group is ‘available’ to come into contact with the police is shaped by structural factors such as unemployment or employment in occupations which require evening and night work, homelessness, or exclusion form school.

In this particular case, Senegalese migrants who are engaged in street vending are in conditions of greater availability than other social groups, in the face of patrols and eventual police arrests. In other words, the fact that they develop this type of informal subsistence activity, a common thread in the research reviewed in the state of the art (Chapter 3) and in some of the quantitative reports presented in Chapter 5, situates them in direct contact with the security forces that patrol the neighborhoods, areas and streets where they work. One of the interviewees himself referred, in his own terms, to that availability: HIHIH-

Yes, it’s normal. It’s not the police’s fault. It is normal. Why do you think it happens like this? Yes, because we are more on the street. Because of the visibility you have on the street itself. Sure, we are more. Now we have a problem on that topic. The boys always hang out in the street. That is our problem. Internally we are trying to solve it but we cannot. Because going and selling on the street, depends on each one. What politicians and newspapers say? There is no organization, there is no network that sends the boys. Each boy, as you can see, on the street selling, is his own boss; he

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doesn’t have to answer to anyone. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

Furthermore, this availability opens the condition of possibility for street sellers of Senegal origin to become one of the many categories of police property. Following Bowling et al. (2019), a category becomes police property when the dominant powers of society leave the problems of social control of that category to the police. From a structural perspective, the authors also highlight that the root of racial prejudice should be located in societal racism, which exposes ethnic minorities to public on-the-street lifestyles, contact areas where such minorities are most likely to become disproportionately police property. As highlighted by Kleidermacher (2019), one of the resistance strategy developed by Senegalese street sellers to keep with their activities was to vary their places of work. In this regard, and although we run the risk of moving away from the Cambiemos administration period, Cheikhou gave an example for the pandemic context. An example of where there has always been, and continues to be, some violence against the Senegalese community, throughout the pandemic, until now, and if we can see that there is a slight decrease in violence, or conflicts, between the Senegalese community or the street vendors and the security force, in Once. There is a slight drop, throughout the pandemic, because they made the decision to prohibit everything that is in the cordon on Pueyrredón Avenue, up to Callao. In other words, everything that is in front of the train, at certain times, throughout the morning, until the afternoon, 6.7 in the afternoon, as if you cannot, and you cannot, and you have to respect that. And the boys, the vendors in general, and the Senegalese in particular, followed this guideline and all began to put their merchandise in the internal streets, going for example, on the Callao side, but advancing on Pueyrredón, forward. And that meant that, to this day, you see much less conflict in Once, in the community, or between street vendors and the Federal Police. And that perhaps gives us a little teaching. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

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Henri, for his part, described the way in which Senegalese vendors complied with orders to sell exclusively in the authorized places, thus respecting the guidelines made by the administration on duty. It’s true, the city, the province, the administration have to organize the streets, and they have to organize the environment. The boys know it too. If the city government says you can’t set up stalls on this square, no one is going to set up. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

Nevertheless, for him, the main form of resistance against police abuse is to organize, both among Senegalese vendors, with other sellers who occupy the same public spaces and with social organizations. On another occasion, Dion recounted an episode in which the police prohibited Senegalese from selling in a certain neighborhood in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (which, in addition, registered one of the sources of major denunciations for institutional violence, according to what I presented in Chapter 5). I-

And has it happened to you, for example, if you suffered some type of raid, did they take your merchandise? D- Yes. Sometimes it happens here in Once […] well, the boys too, we are everywhere in Argentina. La Plata, Tucuman, Jujuy, Cordoba. Well, sometimes they sell somewhere in Flores, and the police tell them that they cannot go there. (Dion, Senegalese, 5 years of residence in Argentina)

This type of action allows us to illustrate the way in which the police segregate certain groups and manage territories, according to authors such as Rodríguez Alzueta (2014), Pita and Pacecca (2017), among others, already reviewed in Chapter 3 of the book. The last interpretation according to which the interviewees highlight a different police action depending on whether it is an Argentine or foreign person is for having an accent that is perceived diverse from the Argentine. Yefferson, a Venezuelan who arrived in Argentina in 2011 as part of a CONICET PhD scholarship, expressed it in these words: Even if the security forces are not white with blue eyes and with foreigner itself, it doesn’t matter, if you have a different intonation, whether you’re

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from Jujuy, they already think you’re Bolivian, then that’s it, it’s like they treat you differently. Well, my opinion, right? Or what I perceive. (Yefferson, Venezuelan, 12 years of residence in Argentina)

The same interviewee referred to the relevance of the perceived accent, when recounting the following episode: I’ll tell you an anecdote when I managed to move, I just moved to the Belgrano neighborhood, Villa Urquiza, around there. About 12 years in the country, I lived there for six. I paid my rent in Monroe and almost Triunvirato. Pacheco and Monroe. One day I went out to pay the man who, at that time, did not accept a transfer at that time was cash and well, when I was leaving to take the bus, I saw the eviction, by the Police of the City of a girl who was doing something with puppets all over the corner of Monroe and Triunvirato. The police were a bit violent so I began to record them and with me was another person from Argentina who was recording it, so when that person took out the cell phone and I took it out too, the police did like this, [they shook their hands as if to say no] although they left me record whatever. This person told him in her Argentine tone that she had the right to record whatever she wanted, and then they started to slap her. I told him, “huh? But calm down”, I know that he listened to me, to my accent, and put me against the wall and that person left her alone. Well, nothing happened, they just told me that they let me go right there, but well, nothing, that is, they attacked me, and not that person. (Yefferson, Venezuelan, 12 years of residence in Argentina)

In addition to the accent, another aspect that, for Yefferson, implies a differential treatment by the police points to skin color: in this sense, the features, both physical and language, allow concluding and showing if someone is not from “here”. Although elaborated from another field of studies (the social representations that high school students in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires produce towards population of Bolivian origin), the category of sensitive marker is a relevant conceptual component to inquire here the significance of accent. Following Gisele Kleidermacher and

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Darío Lanzetta (2019), this category points to those social representations associated with the sensitive dimension of an “other”. In a more concrete way, that “other” is alien to “our” linguistic interpretation frameworks, enabling logics of feeling that can imply and embody distancing, rejection and differential treatment between “us” and “them”.

References Bowling, B. (2011). Discriminación [Discrimination]. In E. McLaughlin & J. Muncie (Comps.), Diccionario de Criminología (pp. 197–200). Gedisa. Bowling, B., Reiner, R., & Sheptycki, J. (2019). The politics of the police. Oxford University Press. Calavita, K. (2005). Immigrants at the Margins. Law, Race and Exclusion in Southern Europe. Cambridge Studies in Law and Society. De Giorgi, A. (2005). Tolerancia cero. Estrategias y prácticas de la sociedad de control. Virus editorial. Kleidermacher, G. (2019). Compartiendo y disputando veredas en “Avellaneda”. El caso del colectivo senegalés y la (de)construcción de relaciones interculturales en el espacio público. In F. Fischman (Comp.), Migraciones, movilidades e interculturalidad. Nuevos espacios de (des)encuentro en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (pp. 85–125). Teseo. Kleidermacher, G., & Lanzetta, D. (2019). Una aproximación a las relaciones interculturales en escuelas secundarias de Villa Lugano, a partir del análisis de las representaciones sociales hacia la población de origen boliviano en Buenos Aires (2015–2018). Autoctonía. Revista de Ciencias Sociales e Historia, 3(2), 132–158. https://doi.org/10.23854/autoc.v3i2.135 Krott, N. R., Krott, E., & Zeitner, I. (2018). Xenophobic attitudes in German police officers: A longitudinal investigation from professional education to practice. International Journal of Police Science & Management, 20 (3), 174– 184. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461355718788373 Lara, M. & Santos Alvins, T. (2016). La detención policial de las personas extranjeras en las regiones del Norte de Chile. Nova Criminis. Visiones Criminológicas de la Justicia Penal , 8(12), 79–133. McLaughlin, E. (2011). Selectividad policial [Police bias]. In E. McLaughlin & J. Muncie (Comps.), Diccionario de Criminología (pp. 477–481). Gedisa Melossi, D. (2015). Crime, punishment and migration. Sage.

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Melossi, D. (2018). “The Prison and the Factory” Revisited (2017): Penality and the Critique of Political Economy Between Marx and Foucault. In D. Melossi & M. Pavarini, The prison and the factory (40th Anniversary Edition). Origins of the penitentiary system (pp. 1–24). Palgrave Macmillan. Pacecca, M. I., Canelo, B., & Belcic, S. (2017). “Culpar a los negros y a los pobres”. Los “manteros” senegaleses ante los allanamientos en el barrio de Once. In M.V. Pita & M.I. Pacecca (Eds.), Territorios de control policial: gestión de ilegalismos en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (pp. 199–219). Editorial de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras - Universidad de Buenos Aires. Pita, M. V. & Pacecca, M. I. (2017). Territorios de control policial: gestión de ilegalismos en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Editorial de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras - Universidad de Buenos Aires. Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (2018). Institutional violence against Senegalese report. Rodríguez Alzueta, E. (2014). Temor y control. La gestión de la inseguridad como forma de gobierno. Futuro Anterior Ediciones. Sausdal, D. (2018). Pleasures of policing: An additional analysis of Xenophobia. Theoretical Criminology, 22(2), 226–242. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1362480617707947 Sausdal, D. (2023). Xenophobia. In Globalizing local policing. Transnational crime, crime control and security (pp. 25–59). Palgrave Macmillan. Young, J. (2012). El vértigo de la modernidad tardía. Ediciones Didot. Wieviorka, M. (2009). El racismo: una introducción. Gedisa.

7 Violences

Abstract In this chapter, I describe in detail episodes of police violence experienced by the people interviewed (or well, by acquaintances of them), by recovering their own voices from the testimonies. Specifically, the chapter presents stories that account for practices of police bias, stigmatization, persecution, robbery and kidnapping of merchandise and raids without a judicial warrant or certificate. At the same time, describes the frequency with which the interviewees perceive this type of practice (if it is a rule or rather, an exception) and the spatio-temporal context where they frame these practices (especially if the change in administration in 2015 and 2019 influenced an increase, or decrease, in narrated cases of violence). Keywords Police violence · Stigmatization · Persecution · Raids · Police bias

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Abiuso, Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46379-2_7

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Introduction “Whispering voices in my head Sounds like they’re calling my name A heavy hand is shaking my bed I’m waking up and I feel the strain”. (Die Toten Hosen, 1998)

Since year 2017, the reports of the Program against Institutional Violence (from the Public Ministry of Defense) highlighted the repeated and increased number of arbitrary arrests markedly focused on street vendors of Senegal origin in the neighborhoods of Balvanera and Flores, which generates—as mentioned in the fifth chapter—an intense suspicion of racial discrimination in the arrests. Appropriating the qualitative technique of the semi-structured interview allows us to broaden and deepen the testimonies of those people who experienced different kinds of violent interactions with the police (or well, their acquaintances) from their own voices or points of view. As I already showed in Chapter 3, Esteban Rodríguez Alzueta (2014) alludes to the ways in which the police shaped, based on their practices, a negative identity. In this chapter, I highlight various practices developed by the police, illustrating the ways in which the Senegalese community became the object of police attention. More specifically, I will refer to police bias, stigmatization, persecution, robbery and kidnapping of merchandise and raids without a judicial warrant or certificate. At the same time, I also describe the frequency with which the interviewees perceive this type of violent practices (if it is a rule or rather, an exception) and the spatio-temporal context where they frame these practices (especially if the change in administration in 2015 and 2019 influenced an increase, or decrease, in reported cases of violence). In addition, I refer to the negotiations between migrants and the police, and the ways in which the former resist rights violations, as well as abuses against them.

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Violences We start the itinerary with Cheikhou’s highly detailed description of an episode occurred in the platforms of Sarmiento train. Cheikhou1 arrived in Argentina in 2007, and worked, at the time of the interview, at the National Foundation for Refugees. Due to the quarantine regime in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this is one of the interviews that I adapted to a virtual/remote modality. It was a very interesting topic because the police, for the sole reason that he was black and a migrant, intercepted the boy. Why am I telling you? Because from the Sarmiento train, hundreds of thousands of people come down every day. So, the police, seeing a person walking with a backpack, nothing else, told him, stop! Open your backpack. Not every day happens to us as citizens, when we put on the jacket, and everything, and walk with a briefcase or a backpack. So, when it happens, always in that case, there is something behind. One is thinking you are already stigmatizing the person. It’s as if you’re taking him as a criminal without having any reason, because he doesn’t say it running, he doesn’t say it... You didn’t catch him red-handed or anything. It is a person walking during the day and you tell him, stop, and show me what you have in your backpack. And that boy, unfortunately, when he opened the backpack, he had 400,000 pesos.2 That a part belonged to him, that he is a worker, for example, that he has his store on the coast. He came to buy merchandise... and had two or three friends who sent him money to buy merchandise for them. So, he said he had the origin of the money, the National Document Identity and everything checked. They took him anyway, they mistreated him, they discriminated against him, they did everything to him, and they detained him for 48 hours. We did the cause, and the judge ended up ruling the return of the money. Besides, they said that they had only found 370,000 pesos and the person had 400-something. They had no witnesses, they did not want to. They used the recordings of the subway, etc. Everything they told him at the time, the boy told them. And the judge, after ordering the return of the money to him, because there was 1 As mentioned in the previous chapter, I replaced the names of the people interviewed with fantasy names, to maintain the confidentiality of anonymity. 2 The peso is the Argentine national currency.

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no reason to stop this boy, had to open a new case, in another court, so that we could continue the cause of discrimination. So, that case serves us well. Not only that case, which we appreciate that there is justice, at that time. Also for new cases. So that people see that sometimes, the police act without having any reason to act that way. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

Henri, arrived in Argentina in 2008, affirmed that the most frequent cases are of actions by exaggeration of the police. Among them, and similarly to Cheikhou, he provided the following testimony around the interactions between Senegalese street sellers and police officers: Another case, you come, there are many vendors on the street, including some of another nationality, for example, who are not African. You tell the Africans to pick up their merchandises and the others don’t. The boys will resist. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

We may interpret both testimonies, as empirical records, by referring to police bias (McLaughlin, 2011). That is to say, the discriminatory use of police powers (arrests, stop and searches, excessive use of force) in dealing with minority communities. Also, as selective practices that imply an excess of surveillance of ethnic minorities. By way of illustration, of all the passers-by who got off the train, the police only detained the Senegalese person. Despite the fact that there are many street sellers of various nationalities, the police officers asked only to the Africans to pick up their merchandises. In addition, Rodríguez Alzueta (2014) underlines the importance of arrests for identity check, conceived as a discretionary, regular and selective practice. For Cheikhou, these identity checks were a pretext for—or even replaced by—the explicit request to show or display the backpack to the police. In addition to the fact that it is a selective practice where the officers identify who they are going to request (based on what arguments, we could ask ourselves), while the other people follow quietly their path. It is something very recent, and when I say very recent, I am talking about the years 2015, 2016 onwards. At a given moment, it seemed that there began to be certain irregularities, or certain injustices on the part of

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the police themselves. And the boys began to say no. To try to save themselves. Because when you are walking and suddenly a policeman stops you and tells you what you have in your bag. Sometimes it is not the same as stopping someone and saying: Will you show me your identification? No, open your backpack for me. And you see that the rest of the people are walking. That generates a certain impotence. And sometimes what people do is to say no and ask why are you doing this to me? And when you start to ask certain questions, directly what they do is […] then, we too, at a given moment, we started to run. Not to run so as not to be caught by the police, out of fear, or anything, but to save the merchandise, our livelihood. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

Following Rodríguez Alzueta (2014) again, the police do not detain to meet a person but to assign him a territory. The narratives that emerged from the interview situation allow us to link also this territorial police control to episodes of persecution, robbery and kidnapping of merchandise. In this sense, Henri recounted in detail episodes of persecution and robbery by the police, even protected by the actions of the State and the authorities. Situations in which there were also abuses and rights violations. H- There are some moments here in Argentina, before the pandemic, what did the police do? Follow the boys to their houses, to go inside and take out everything they had there, even their cell phones. So the houses where the boys live are clandestine houses, they make things there. And no official, no judge, no minister, no authority spoke. Trucks to load the boys’ things and immigration was accompanying them. I- Excuse me, were these types of cases more frequent before the pandemic? H- Sure, before the pandemic, in Flores, in Liners, in Once, in Constitución. And the State and the authorities know it. Still no answer. […] everything can happen. If there is an injured policeman, what are they going to say? That’s why the boys stay calm. They put them like animals, they put them all in a corner, with two, three policemen guarding them and they go into the houses, into the rooms to look at what is there and take it out. The boys don’t even know what they got. Later, when they left, only the boys see: they

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took my money that I kept here, they took my new phone that I kept here, they took me, my shirt, the clothes that I bought for my wife in Senegal. The policemen calmly load the trucks and leave. The papers they leave you, you take to the prosecutor’s office. There are prosecutors who tell you: still no merchandise has arrived here. Still, 2 years ago. I- I was thinking that hopefully they leave you a paper. H- Hopefully they leave a paper, but that paper, you go to the prosecutor’s office, where they say they take the merchandise, you go there and they tell you: nothing arrived. How are we to understand these operations? For this reason, to protect ourselves we are obliged to collaborate with the groups that exist here, because the boys are tired. They do not give them what corresponds to them in law. There is a lot of abuse. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

Although previous investigations on this subject highlighted this and other aspects, such as that of Pacecca et al. (2017), incorporating additional testimony gives greater visibility to this kind of police practice. As can be seen, this type of abusive behavior and mistreatment has also given rise to acts of resistance, such as the need for Senegalese vendors to establish contact with organizations and groups that can advise them in legal issues. In addition, the neighborhoods mentioned by Henri coincide with the centers of institutional violence due to their highest cases of denunciations, as presented in Chapter 5. Another excerpt of an interview illustrates a similar situation, in which the interviewee situated the starting point of the intensification of the persecution against the Senegalese community at the beginning of the Cambiemos administration. So, since 2015, I believe that one of the first cases that I present, a certain persecution of the Senegalese community, xenophobia and stigmatization, too, was a raid on Sarmiento Street and Pueyrredón Avenue. During the raid, they were looking for counterfeit merchandise, but they ended up mistreating, something I can hardly repeat, the Senegalese community that lived there. Some who were bathing, in the morning, they took them out like that naked, in the courtyard. They took them out of the shower, they went with dogs, with long weapons, like… One says, these people are really looking for counterfeit glasses, or Nike pants, or are they really

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trying to impose some fear on the Senegalese community. That’s when we start to mobilize; in fact, we reported that raid to the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism.3 Unfortunately, the National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism, at that time, 2016, said that it was not discrimination, nor was it stigmatization, or anything. The only thing they ordered was that before any raid, there should be an interpreter. The resolution of the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism, I have until today. Unfortunately at that time. But it is true, that during all these years, it was very difficult for the Senegalese community and for the entire migrant community in general. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

There are different categories of institutional violence that can help us to interpret and support theoretically the testimonies of Henri and Cheikhou, such as procedural irregularities (which include “robbery” and “illegal raid”) and psychological violence (which, in turn, includes practices such as “mistreatments”, “humiliations” and “lack of information”). It is worth noting that Cheikhou further added xenophobia and stigmatization to the narrated persecution. As pointed out in the previous chapter, by xenophobia, we can understand attitudes that imply the direct dislike of foreign elements (or, at least, a skepticism towards them) and, in the specific sphere of the police, the police negativity towards foreign national (Krott et al., 2018; Sausdal, 2023). Regarding stigmatization, Néstor Cohen (2009: 9) highlighted that “it is frequent that [migrants] must suffer daily situations of stigmatization and mistreatment in their relationship with the security forces, as their phenotypic characteristics and their national origins are often associated with alleged criminal activities”. Continuing with the practice of persecution, although he did not explicitly use these words, Henri referred to the years of Macri’s administration as a context of total persecution.

3 INADI, by its acronym in Spanish, is a state agency of the Government of Argentina (answerable to the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights) which is charged with receiving complaints and pursuing charges against citizens accused of acts of discrimination or hatred. Created in 1995 by Federal Law No. 24515.

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Macri’s 4 years, the boys suffered a lot. All those situations that I was telling you happened there […] now it is changing. Because now there are organizations. The boys organized. Whenever there is something, the referents come, like me. But before it was not like that, before they came, did what they wanted and left. Afterwards, nothing, they forgot. Before, they would grab any boy anywhere, they would wait for him at the door of his house, and they would wait for him at the bus stop, everywhere. They don’t even give him time to go […] that’s changing; it’s not that it happened, but the boys have organized themselves much more, better. But before, it was terrible friend. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

As mentioned before, this type of police persecution constituted a kind of teaching for Senegalese migrants, that of organizing as a way of confronting the abuses and rights violations. On other occasions, it is not a mere persecution, but the robbery and kidnapping of merchandise (or even money), as illustrated by different excerpts of interviews. There are many. Today I looked at Instagram, I looked at a publication, there are some policemen, from I don’t know what province, they bothered the Senegalese, and they took all their things that they bought. Sometimes also, they do not return your material. The person who works a lot, earns little money, goes to buy other clothes to live, you, sitting in one place, they come to you, I can’t decide... No. You change... They take all your things, you run out of pesos. It’s a bit shocking. Also, sometimes, the Senegalese resist, fight with them. (Dion, Senegalese, 5 years of residence in Argentina) Sure, yes, yes. There are many other cases in which, perhaps the police took advantage of their lack of knowledge, and let’s say they took advantage of this situation. Sometimes it is too late, when one no longer knows where to denounce. But yes, there are cases in which you have […] That they do such a thing, that they picked up merchandise, or asked them for things, like they asked for some kind of money to let them go, etc., and honestly there is a huge amount of cases here. And more in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

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I consider it valuable to underline three aspects of these testimonies. In the first place, that in these situations the Senegalese resist the seizure of their merchandise or the theft of their money, which could trigger an arrest eventually for resisting authority. Secondly, these narratives add additional support to the previous research made by Kleidermacher (2019), who had already highlighted stories that describe the theft of merchandise carried out by the police, or that sellers should leave part of their profits (and I would add, money) as informal arrangements. Third and last, it is important to highlight the fact that the largest number of these cases occur—at least from Cheikhou’s point of view—in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. Henri, in turn, detailed other witness cases of similar police action, defined as “excessive”: The most frequent cases, which we see the most in recent months, is the excessive action of the police, really. Because also, the boys come from a country that has order, the Senegalese come from a country that has a stricter police force than the Argentine police. They know what police is. They know what the gendarmerie is, they know what customs is. So if the police act properly, it may be that there will be no resistance from the Senegalese, because the Senegalese know. But if there is resistance, the cases where there is resistance, if you see it in the background, the boy had to resist. If you look at it in the background, the boy had to resist. Why? Because they generally want to seize the merchandise, without giving a certificate, for example. Many cases are like this, kidnapping the merchandise and letting you go. So the boys say no, because they know that the right, the law. If they are going to make you pay a fine, you pay it, if they are going to seize the merchandise because of the trademark, they will do it, but the police who act on the street have to collaborate with the person who is on the street to help him understand what his job is. But […] in a way, kidnapping the merchandise without giving him a piece of paper and letting him go, that Senegalese boy is going to resist. Yes or yes, he will resist. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

As in other of the transcribed testimonies, the most frequent situation is that the police seize or kidnap merchandise without drawing up

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a record. Given these conditions, there is a proportionally direct relationship between police abuse and resistance by the Senegalese street vendors. In addition, these resistances only occur in those cases in which the police do not act properly, which takes them away (or not, we could ask ourselves) from their usual daily police work. Henri himself narrated another episode, in this case, of conjugation between persecution and kidnapping of merchandise. Another case, which is also frequent, a boy who lifts his merchandise. For example, you work until seven in the evening, pick up your merchandise with your cart to go home. The house is five blocks away; the police control it to wait for the road. A police officer who sees a boy with the cart going to his house stops him to kidnap the merchandise. There the boy will resist […] they are particular cases that are different, and many cases, yes, the boys resist, because they have to resist. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

Once again, the interviewee emphasizes the possibility, or even the need to resist against an abuse of the person, but also of his livelihood, that is, the merchandise he has to sell every day. Other narratives obtained from the interview situation point, instead, to the act of withdrawing or lifting people. In this regard, the following textual excerpts are illustrative: Tomorrow the police can pick you up. (Nampalys, Senegalese, 8 years of residence in Argentina) But sometimes, it is coming with the sole intention of withdrawing the person or taking things. And sometimes also, the situation makes one have to argue a bit, because it is not because they do not want to comply with the judicial order, or the order of the authority, but rather the need to survive makes one want to protect what they have […] we know that in the public space he is there with his arms crossed and the police who arrive lift. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

Rodríguez Alzueta (2014) highlights that the police exercise territorial control that segregates certain groups of people (marginalized, immigrants or marginal youth), referred to as risk-producing or dangerous

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groups. As mentioned before, the police do not detain to meet a person but to assign him a territory; and I would add, to displace a person from a certain territory. Through their practices, street vendors of Senegalese origin become privileged objects of police action, even to the point of the persecution and interception in their ways to their homes or hotels, as the quoted excerpts attest. The fact of being “lifted” by the police is thus an everyday risk that they run for their livelihood. Regarding the involvement of the police in this type of merchandise seizure activity, one of the key ideas of an interview was that of “bandit cops”. For example, today, they kidnapped merchandise, maybe they didn’t take it where it belonged, to leave it, and they didn’t put any record, so that merchandise, we’re going to see it again on the street. What does it mean? It means that the same merchandise was sold again. The issue of phones. Currently many Senegalese boys have cases in court. The police themselves, several times, we saw that they were involved. The police seize phones, and later we find those same phones on the street, selling them [...] there is a circle, just as there is a circle with the phones, there is a circle with the merchandise. At one point, those days, for example of the pandemic, it is rare for […] but when we were in normality, that circle was much more visible. Because the kidnapped merchandise, the boys see it again on the street. Even with our association, we are finding out the boys who are collaborating with the police. Some bandit cops are doing those things. Here, in that area, Constitucion, Flores, Once, we have three policemen with the boys; they have their names and everything. In general, they drive a truck, maybe a motorcycle. They abuse each other, and they collaborate with a Senegalese boy, or with boys of another nationality to kidnap merchandise. And we have denounced him several times, via human rights or another organization. We have image, everything. That’s why, since those three policemen, several times […] that’s why that area has been quiet for months, for example, 5 or 6 months. They were those three policemen who did that very ugly job. And thanks to the Senegalese boys, we help justice; we help the prosecutors to find out about this practice on the street, thanks to the Senegalese boys. So the Senegalese boys collaborate. That’s right; we are helping the police, some agents who have bad will, who are dirtying the police. The police is a noble job, because it protects. Thanks to the police, the boys have

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peace of mind to work. If there are corrupt policemen, if there are sleazy policemen, who use Senegalese boys again in that mafia, it’s ugly. And we are fighting to denigrate all of them. We are collaborating with groups, with social organizations here, to be able to denounce them, everyone. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

A relevant theoretical framework to analyze this type of situation is from the reference to moral territories of police control. As mentioned in the third chapter, such territories delimit a social space demarcated by a mixture of legal, illegal and illicit practices, which define zones submerged in a particular police right (Pita, 2012). Alternatively, from the conceptual tool of the “grey zone”, by situating the narrated practices in the testimony in the interstices between what is legal and what is illegal, between the blurred limits between the police and crime, between law and the state of exception. That is, indeed, the place from where Rodríguez Alzueta (2014) provides features to reflect about the interactions between police officers and migrants. I also stress that the media also play a role in the construction of certain stereotypes. As Eduardo Domenech (2011) pointed out, the media builds a negative image of migrants, by privileging and broadcasting news related to illegality or crime. In this particular case, both about an alleged link between Senegalese street vendors and mafias, as well as giving press to operations in which the police enter their homes for raids. In our interview, Henri himself wondered how many times the television showed police operations that enter the houses of the Senegalese. Although Yefferson, a Venezuelan who arrived in Argentina in 2011 as part of a CONICET PhD scholarship, referred to different treatment by the police (defined even as an annoying treatment) when one is a foreigner, however, he narrated only the following episode: I’ll tell you an anecdote when I managed to move, I just moved to the Belgrano neighborhood, Villa Urquiza, around there. About 12 years in the country, I lived there for six. I paid my rent in Monroe and almost Triunvirato. Pacheco and Monroe. One day I went out to pay the man who, at that time, did not accept a transfer at that time was cash and well, when I was leaving to take the bus, I saw the eviction, by the Police

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of the City of a girl who was doing something with puppets all over the corner of Monroe and Triunvirato. The police were a bit violent so I began to record them and with me was another person from Argentina who was recording it, so when that person took out the cell phone and I took it out too, the police did like this, [they shook their hands as if to say no] although they left me record whatever. This person told him in her Argentine tone that she had the right to record whatever she wanted, and then they started to slap her. I told him, ‘huh? But calm down’, I know that he listened to me, to my accent, and put me against the wall and that person left her alone. Well, nothing happened, they just told me that they let me go right there, but well, nothing, that is, they attacked me, and not that person. (Yefferson, Venezuelan, 12 years of residence in Argentina)

Beyond the motivation that led the police officer to put Yefferson against the wall—a topic already mentioned in Chapter 6—this situation, occurred in 2016 and carried out by the Buenos Aires City Police, is isolated and marginal compared to the quantity and diversity of cases narrated by Senegalese. Even more so, if we consider that this was the only interaction that Yefferson had with the security forces since his arrival in Argentina, even among his circle of friends. For Roberto, arrived in 2016, the interactions with the police were exclusively for carrying out different types of bureaucratic and administrative procedures, such as requesting a certificate of address. Go to request the certificate of address […] and they are agile because it is a simple procedure; they are not the kindest person when you go, they don’t invite you to have a cup of coffee or anything, but it is like if you give me your document for the specific thing you want or need and bye. I’ll take it to your house in 48 hours, they’re not the kindest, but they don’t mean that they love me about this, but it’s like my perception is that treatment is the same all over the world. (Roberto, Venezuelan, 7 years of residence in Argentina)

Nevertheless, he narrated an episode of police vehicle control experienced, together with his husband, in Salta Province. Even noting that it was something that surprised the officers themselves about what to do.

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When we were on vacation, but it wasn’t the City Police, it was the Salta police, who asked you for your documents, yes, now that I remember that one that seemed very peculiar to me, I don’t know if that case is useful to you, but I’ll tell you. Yes, we had a rented car on vacation, we were in Salta Capital and the GPS didn’t take us where it was, we went into a neighborhood that wasn’t very nice and there was a police control. So obviously we loaded a rented car, I don’t load a rented car all the time, and then when we go through the police checkpoint, the police, well, they order us to stop. We stop, lower the window, my husband lowers the window and tells him that the car is rented, if he needs anything and the police like they had no idea how to proceed and just like that it just dawned on them to ask for the documents because we probably weren’t from here. He gave him the documents and he told us to wait for a moment and he took it, brought it back and that’s it, keep going, but it was like he had no idea what to do in that case, that is, they didn’t know what to ask for. (Roberto, Venezuelan, 7 years of residence in Argentina)

Outside of this episode, then, Roberto’s interaction with the police only consisted of carrying out administrative and bureaucratic procedures related to his migrant status. Although he never highlighted mistreatment by them, he nevertheless pointed out that “they’re not the kindest” when it came to communicating with them. Comparatively, the quantity (and quality) of situations narrated by the Senegalese and Venezuelan interviewees is very different. Perhaps an interpretive key is because the Cambiemos administration, as highlighted by María Dolores Linares (2021), promoted Venezuelan immigration with a series of public policy and normative instruments developed between the years 2018 and 2019. While, on the other hand, we can characterize the arrival of Senegalese as a spontaneous migration. That is, a possible explanation that connects us to the links between police practices and selectivity in immigration policy, between encouraged and unencouraged migrations.

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Violences, Rule or Exception? According to the frequency with which the interviewees perceive this type of violent situations, Cheikhou recounted in a high degree of detail different episodes, as well as their occurrence. Look, unfortunately it ends up being a rule. Why am I telling you the rule? I could tell you that the conflict with the Senegalese community, we could say that it is an exception. It is very little to see Senegalese in the rest of the country having problems with the security forces. It is not frequent. Here in Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, it is a fact that it multiplies every day. And at one point, there was, let’s say, a multiplication of raids. And we cannot say that there is no raid. As long as there is some alleged crime and there is a court order, based on real events, with evidence, that’s fine. But what happens is that the same Argentine Federal Police or the same authority, takes advantage of those raids, or those court orders, to do things wrong. Many take advantage of those moments, of the court order to steal cash from the community, which is not a banked community. They all keep the money there, in the place where they live. So, it ends up being a rule. “Ah look, we want there to be a search because we are not going to look for the branded merchandise, but we are going to look for all the goods that are there in that house”, because they already know that the Senegalese community keeps the money in cash in the places where they are. So many lost a lot of cash. And that maybe it was because of a particular person, who maybe is a clothing wholesaler, brand name, I don’t know what. Instead of going to his place, to catch him on the street, they go to look for him at the house, where he shares with 10, 20 or 30 Senegalese. They end up breaking into everyone’s house, when in reality, it may be that the search should focus on a single person. So it’s not as it was done just once. It has been done thousands of times, and honestly, it ends up being like a rule. All the police authorities want to go to a raid because they take everything from there without leaving a record. Because if they take everything and leave you a document saying that here we seized 40,000 pesos and we take it to the prosecutor’s office, yes, that’s fine, then we’ll see what to do with the prosecutor’s office, to determine the destination of that money. It doesn’t happen, that is, they take this situation as the moment they can do everything they want,

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without leaving any trace. ‘I don’t mind leaving a record; nobody is going to claim it from me’ [...] the boys on several occasions did not claim it. If one does not find out quickly, and tell them: I need the record, I need a copy of the court order. Nobody follows up and everything ends up in nothing […] not even half of the merchandise reaches the prosecutor’s office […] personally, I accompany boys who raided his house or kidnapped his merchandise on the street, two days later I call the court, because I tell the boy, when they are released, the police station will come out with the court and the intervening prosecutor’s office. If he doesn’t come out with that note, which says that he can accuse of violating the trademark law, or I don’t know what, and then he is in charge of such and such a Prosecutor’s Office, I tell him, go back to the police station so they can give it to you. And once they give it to them, two days later I am calling the court to tell them: ‘did you get the summary?’ Sometimes they never reach you. And just then, some try to get all the kidnapped or at least a part of the kidnapped. There are cases that it doesn’t even come. Once they do that, like […] it ends or they say that they seized 40 Nike pants, when in reality there are 300. Even if you know that you won’t be able to receive it again, you realize that they keep a part. They always invent a circumstance to be able to keep a lot of money, merchandise from the community itself. We are not against them kidnapping something and that they do, that they follow the entire legal circuit. That they send everything to the prosecutor’s office, the prosecutor’s office communicates with the court. Let them do justice. If the boy has to lose everything, let him lose everything, but let him remain in the hands of justice. That is what we always claim. Because if we come to do justice, let’s do it, from the beginning to the end. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

In a more direct way, and without such a degree of detail, Henri emphasized the reiteration of interactions between the police and the Senegalese, characterizing the years of the Cambiemos administration as a context of very frequent cases. A lot of people […] we couldn’t go a week without having cases. It was impossible. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

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Dion, in turn, stressed that the reiteration of cases could be due to the actions of the government, as well as to that of the police. Perhaps it is a rule, of the government. Among them. There is an arrangement between the policemen. Here they also have a lot of mafia. Sometimes the government doesn’t know anything. Sometimes the policemen, among themselves, create that. (Dion, Senegalese, 5 years of residence in Argentina)

These connections between the world of politics and the world of the police situate us on the stage of the next and last heading of the chapter: the relationship between violent practices and their spatio-temporal context.

Violence and Governments in Power As mentioned before, Henri pointed out that during the Cambiemos administration, every week there were cases of violence against Senegalese. If there were modifications with the change of administration in 2019, this was especially due to the new ways of organizing (as a form of resistance) of the Senegalese street vendors. Cheikhou told me in our interview a similar scenario of what happened between 2015 and 2019. Actually, the most violent cases, let’s say that, we can say that even the multiplication of cases, conflicts, between the Senegalese community and the security force itself, took place, or takes place in that period of years. Between 2015 and 2019. This from the year 2020, in the middle of the quarantine, I think, is a continuation, or I could even say, a habit of what they had been doing for some previous years. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

For him, during all these years, it was very difficult for the Senegalese community and for the entire migrant community in general. In this sense, he even highlighted the implementation of the

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Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017 in the framework of a process of criminalization of migrations, to which I referred before in Chapter 4, by analyzing political discourses pronounced by officials around the immigration-crime nexus. The testimonies of Henri and Cheikhou coincide with the annual reports of the Program against Institutional Violence corresponding to 2017, 2018 and 2019, regarding the increase in arrests of street vendors of Senegalese origin. Although in these reports we do not find explicit quantitative references (as I previously mentioned in Chapter 5), the qualitative component of the semi-structured interviews complements the scenario of the practices carried out by the police in the City of Buenos Aires, thus giving a broader picture of the interactions between police and migrants during the Cambiemos administration. Dion’s point of view, regarding whether this increase was due to a government rule or a police rule, takes us back to a fundamental topic in the field of the sociology of police: the nexus between police and politics, reviewed in the third chapter of the book. Although I will describe later the perspectives of the interviewees regarding whether the police is an autonomous institution or a political instrument, I would like to conclude this chapter by advancing a possible connection. In our interview, Cheikhou himself related political discourses and police practices to each other, aspects analyzed throughout the book. Regarding the expressions of Pichetto, Bullrich and by Macri himself, he highlighted: All of these gave the security forces much more footing and power so that they could do, whatever they wanted to do, without receiving any punishment. And that is what we are suffering, to this day. The police believe that they still have that possibility to continue doing whatever they want, in front of the migrants, to act the way they want, without following the rules. And that there is no court ruling, no punishment from the Argentine State. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

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In this sense, the domain constituted by the semi-structured interviews allows us to add an empirical element and enrich the theoretical discussion, arguments and controversies about the ways of thinking the links between police and politics.

References Cohen, N. (2009). Introducción. In N. Cohen (Ed.), Representaciones de la diversidad: trabajo, escuela y juventud (pp. 7–10). Ed. Cooperativas. Domenech, E. (2011). Crónica de una ‘amenaza’ anunciada. Inmigración e ‘ilegalidad’: visiones de Estado en la Argentina contemporánea. In B. Feldman-Bianco, L. Rivera Sánchez, C. Stefoni & M. Villa (Comps.), La construcción social del sujeto migrante en América Latina: prácticas, representaciones y categorías (pp. 31–77). FLACSO-Ecuador / CLACSO / UAH. Kleidermacher, G. (2019). Compartiendo y disputando veredas en “Avellaneda”. El caso del colectivo senegalés y la (de)construcción de relaciones interculturales en el espacio público. In F. Fischman (Comp.), Migraciones, movilidades e interculturalidad. Nuevos espacios de (des)encuentro en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (pp. 85–125). Teseo. Krott, N. R., Krott, E., & Zeitner, I. (2018). Xenophobic attitudes in German police officers: A longitudinal investigation from professional education to practice. International Journal of Police Science & Management, 20 (3), 174– 184. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461355718788373 Linares, M. D. (2021). Migración venezolana reciente en Argentina: una política migratoria selectiva en el contexto del giro migratorio restrictivo. Migraciones Internacionales, (12), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.33679/rmi.v1i1. 2300 McLaughlin, E. (2011). Selectividad policial [Police bias]. In E. McLaughlin & J. Muncie (Comps.), Diccionario de Criminología (pp. 477–481). Gedisa. Pacecca, M. I., Canelo, B., & Belcic, S. (2017). “Culpar a los negros y a los pobres”. Los “manteros” senegaleses ante los allanamientos en el barrio de Once. In M. V. Pita & M. I. Pacecca (Eds.), Territorios de control policial: gestión de ilegalismos en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (pp. 199–219). Editorial de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras—Universidad de Buenos Aires.

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Pita, M. V. (2012). Mitologías porteñas en torno al poder policial. Policía, contravenciones y gestión de ilegalismos en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Revista La Biblioteca, 12, 182–209. Program against Institutional Violence (2018). 2018 Annual Report. https:// www.mpd.gov.ar/index.php/publicaciones-violencia-institucional/5198-inf orme-anual-2018 Program against Institutional Violence (2019). 2019 Annual Report. https:// www.mpd.gov.ar/index.php/publicaciones-violencia-institucional/5201-inf orme-anual-2019 Public Ministry of Defense of Argentina (2018). 2017 Annual Report. https:// www.mpd.gov.ar/pdf/Informe%20Anual%202017%20Libro%20con%20T apa.compressed.pdf Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (2019). 2019 statistical report on institutional violence. https://www.mpdefensa.gob. ar/sites/default/files/informe_vi_2019.pdf Rodríguez Alzueta, E. (2014). Temor y control. La gestión de la inseguridad como forma de gobierno. Futuro Anterior Ediciones. Sausdal, D. (2023). Xenophobia. In: Globalizing Local Policing. Transnational Crime, Crime Control and Security (pp. 25–59). Palgrave Macmillan.

8 Police Attitudes Towards Migrants

Abstract By establishing an explicit dialogue with the analysis of political discourses implemented during the Cambiemos administration (developed in Chapter 4), this chapter presents testimonies that describe the changes in the attitudes of the police towards different ethnicnational groups. On one hand, it establishes a relationship between these alleged changes and the Cambiemos administration between 2015 and 2019. In addition, considering the current administration by Alberto Fernández, inaugurated in 2019. On the other hand, highlights the ways in which these attitudes differ according to the security force in operation: that is to say, Buenos Aires City Police or Argentine Federal Police, both with jurisdiction in the City of Buenos Aires. Keywords Police attitudes · Xenophobia · Stigmatization · Persecution · Political discourses · Security forces

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Abiuso, Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46379-2_8

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Introduction Along with political discourses pronounced by officials around the immigration-crime association and secondary quantitative data regarding police practices of arrest of migrants, semi-structured interviews constitute another of the empirical domains of the book. Each of them focused on a certain theme in particular: interactions between police and migrants, narratives of police violence , police attitudes towards migrants, the nexus between police and politics and the perception of the vulnerability of the migratory community of belonging to police action. This chapter, particularly, presents testimonies that describe the changes in the attitudes of the police towards different ethnic-national groups of belonging. In the first place, it establishes a relationship between these alleged changes and the Cambiemos administration between 2015 and 2019. Secondly, considering the current administration by Alberto Fernández, inaugurated in 2019. Thirdly and lastly, the chapter highlights the ways in which these attitudes differ according to the security force in operation: that is to say, Buenos Aires City Police or Argentine Federal Police, both with jurisdiction in the City of Buenos Aires. By attitudes I mean, following Néstor Cohen and Gabriela Gómez Rojas (2019), predispositions that guide the manifest action, that influence the doing or practices of an individual with respect to something or someone. In other words, attitudes constitute a lasting system of positive or negative evaluations, feelings, emotions and tendencies towards or against the action referred to a social object. The authors emphasize that we can use either quantitative or qualitative methodology to account for these latent beliefs or values. In this particular case, I focused on the qualitative approach, considering that it is the most appropriate when we want to locate our emphasis on the perspective of the actors, when we seek to inquire into the in-depth visions that the interviewees have regarding certain topics.

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Police Attitudes Towards Migrants During Cambiemos Administration As I mentioned before in Chapter 7, most of the Senegalese interviewees indicated that there was an intensification of conflictive situations with the police during the years of the Cambiemos administration. In this sense, Cheikhou,1 who arrived in Argentina in August 2007, and who worked—at the time of the interview—at the National Foundation for Refugees, noted that from 2015, 2016 onwards there began to be certain irregularities, or certain injustices from the police themselves. For him, this type of interaction opened the conditions for the possibility of resistance by the migrants, mainly to prevent the police from kidnapping the merchandise to Senegalese street vendors (kind of practice that I referred to in the previous chapter). In their own words: And we start to say no. To try to save us. Because when you are walking and suddenly a policeman stops you and tells you what you have in your bag. For. Sometimes it is not the same as stopping someone and saying: ‘Will you show me your identification?’, ‘No, open your backpack for me’ And you see that the rest of the people are walking. Like that generates a certain impotence. And sometimes what people do is say no and ask, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ And when you start to ask certain questions, directly what they do is […] then, we too, at a given moment, we rather started running. Not to run so as not to be caught by the police, out of fear, or anything, but to save his merchandise, which is what he has to live on. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

We may interpret this interaction, from the perspective of Gisele Kleidermacher (2019), as a dynamic understood as “the game of cat and mouse”, in the sense that the sellers, far from remaining passive, develop a series of acts of resistance, such as start running with their merchandises.

1 As I previously mentioned, I replaced the names of the people interviewed with fantasy names, to maintain the confidentiality of anonymity.

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These episodes do not obscure, however, that Cheikhou recognized the Cambiemos years as those years of more violence and conflict between the Senegalese community and the police. Actually, the most violent cases, let’s say that, we can say that even the multiplication of cases, conflicts, between the Senegalese community and the security force itself, took place, or takes place in that period of years. Between 2015 and 2019. This from the year 2020, in the middle of the quarantine, I think, is a continuation, or I could even say, a habit of what they had been doing for some previous years. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

The concrete way in which he described certain persecution—or to express it in other terms—the attitudes of the police towards Senegalese migrants, he saw as reflected in xenophobia and stigmatization. As already pointed out in the previous chapter, by xenophobia, we can understand attitudes that imply the direct dislike of foreign elements (or, at least, a skepticism towards them) and, in the specific sphere of the police, the police negativity towards foreign national (Krott et al., 2018; Sausdal, 2023). Regarding stigmatization, Cohen (2009: 9) highlighted that “it is frequent that [migrants] must suffer daily situations of stigmatization and mistreatment in their relationship with the security forces, as their phenotypic characteristics and their national origins are often associated with alleged criminal activities”. Together with these two concepts, we can also describe the detention of a Senegalese while “the rest of the people are walking” by referring to police bias (McLaughlin, 2011), as mentioned in Chapter 7. Henri’s testimony does not differ, since he also gave centrality to the period between 2015 and 2019, which he defined, although not in his own words, as a scenario of total persecution. Macri’s 4 years, the boys suffered a lot. All those situations that I was telling you happened there […] now it is changing. Because now there are organizations. The boys organized. Whenever there is something, the referents come, like me. But before it was not like that, before they came, did what they wanted and left. Afterwards, nothing, they forgot. Before, they would grab any boy anywhere, they would wait for him at the door

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of his house, and they would wait for him at the bus stop, everywhere. They don’t even give him time to go […] That’s changing; it’s not that it happened, but the boys have organized themselves much more, better. But before, it was terrible friend. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

In addition, Cheikhou explicitly linked these attitudes of the police with the political discourses proliferated in a context—we might wonder—of moral panics (Cohen, 2015) around the immigration-crime nexus. Especially considering some of the features of Stanley Cohen’s classic definition of moral panics: consensus (general agreement that the threat exits, is serious, and that it is necessary to “do something”), concern and fear about the potential or imagined threat and feelings of hostility or moral indignation towards the actors who embody the problem. In fact, during the Cambiemos administration, characterized by a return to neoliberalism, and by a context of political conservatism, we witnessed a discursive proliferation of instances where officials from various areas of government explicitly and publicly referred to an alleged link between immigration and crime. Such speeches legitimized and supported changes implemented in the immigration policy, being the implementation of the Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017 (in January 2017, unilaterally by the National Executive Power) the most significant point of this process.2 As already mentioned in Chapter 4, different researchers belonging to the scientific-academic field have referred, among other aspects, to the ways in which the Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017 contributed to the process of criminalization of migrations . From the voice of its supporters, including different officials of the Cambiemos administration and also opposition representatives (such as Miguel Ángel Pichetto and Sergio Massa), the decree was presented as part of a policy to combat “international organized crime” and/or crimes related to “narco-criminality”, as can be observed in its own text:

2

To expand on this contextualization of the Cambiemos administration, see Chapter 1 of the book.

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That the need to work incessantly on perfecting the immigration regulatory order acquires special importance in the face of current phenomena such as globalization, the internationalization of tourism and the growth of international organized crime. (Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/ 2017: paragraph 9). That in the face of recent acts of public and well-known organized crime, the State-Nation has faced severe difficulties in carrying out expulsion orders issued against persons of foreign nationality, as a consequence of a complex recursive procedure that, in some cases, can reach SEVEN (7) years of processing. (Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017: paragraph 16) On the other hand, in relation to crimes related to narco-criminality, it is observed that THIRTY-THREE PERCENT (33%) of the people in custody of the FEDERAL PENITENTIARY SERVICE are foreigners. (Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017: paragraph 19)

In addition to this text, different officials also explicitly alluded to the link between immigration and crime, and above all—given its centrality—around drug trafficking. In this sense, Patricia Bullrich (then Minister for Security) highlighted that “our problem with the border is not the people, we do not have a problem with immigration, we have a problem with drug trafficking and with smuggling” (La Nación, 2017, January 29). And about the “express deportation” that the Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017 enabled, she stated: It is very important to fight a crime like drug trafficking. And in that reality, we have to find all the ways to avoid it. In the crime of ‘narcocriminality’, all avenues are important. The way of quickly expelling foreigners who enter and who commit crimes in drug-related offenses is the same as quickly putting Argentines in jail who do so. (La Nación, 2017, January 29)

Pichetto, who during Cambiemos administration was the head of the block of senators of the opposition party Front for Victory but who later on became Macri’s vice president candidate in the 2019 presidential elections, highlighted an association between certain nationalities and criminal behavior. By way of illustration:

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There is a structure linked to Peruvian criminal organizations that come out of the peripheral ‘villas’3 of the City of Buenos Aires and the province. Peruvian crime is oppressive in Argentina in the scheme of ‘motochorros’,4 armed robberies and drugs linked to cocaine. And the control of the ‘villas’ they have.... (Schmidt, 2019, January 8)

For Cheikhou, these speeches, and the decree itself, gave coverage to the security forces so they can do whatever they want, without receiving any type of punishment. But these are quite difficult times, because it is not easy, being a migrant, to listen to the criminalization of the migrant community, like what happened from 2015 to 2019. We cannot leave without mentioning, for example, Decree 70, which was typical and pure criminalization of the migrant community. When I say migrant community, I’m talking about all the migrants who are in Argentina. We cannot also, not mention, officials like Pichetto who, although he was not an official, who was previously a senator from the Front for Victory, but from his messages we knew that at any moment, this senator was going to show his true face, who was 100% a person related to the politics of Mauricio Macri, of the PRO. And he demonstrated it with his words, for years, when he disparage migration; he imposed decisions that went against the rights of migrants here in the country. Patricia Bullrich, no way. All of these gave the security forces much more footing and power so that they could do whatever they wanted to do, without receiving any punishment. That is what we are suffering, to this day. The police believe that they still have that possibility to continue doing whatever they want, in front of the migrants, to act the way they want, without following the rules. And that there is no court ruling, no punishment from the Argentine State. And I think that this is something that we have to continue fighting for so that it does not continue here in Argentina. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

3 Understood as urban agglomerations of precarious housing located on lands that are not originally owned by their occupants. 4 A “motochorro” is a criminal who makes use of a motorcycle to commit a robbery; it is a neologism created from the words “chorro” (thief ) and “moto” (motorcycle).

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As I mentioned in other chapters of the book, during his presidential term Alberto Fernández repealed Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017, considering that it includes aspects “irreconcilable with our National Constitution and with the international system for the protection of human rights” (Decree No. 138/2021: paragraph 6). We will see in the next heading if the change in the administration also implied modifications in the attitudes of the police towards migrants.

Modifications in the Police Attitudes Between the Previous and the Current Administration From Cheikhou’s point of view, the pandemic COVID-19 made it difficult to speak of a change in attitudes between the Macri and Fernández administrations. The pandemic meant that we couldn’t know if, perhaps, it is a change in attitude or they are trying like that... The case of the sale is not as exposed as before, or perhaps, in some cases they are trying to tolerate, how can we call it The fact that people need to go out and sell, etc. But it is not that there were many changes. Because yes, it is true, that there is a change at the national level. New president, new ministers, at the national level. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

However, he immediately added that the political ideology of the Buenos Aires City Government remained the same, thus emphasizing the weight of continuities. But the City Government is still the same policy. Be careful, in the City Government itself, we also see that there are people who get up every day, and also try to put cold cloths on the fire. But yes, unfortunately, the behavior of the City Police, a year after the pandemic began, remains practically the same. I say yes, there is a certain decrease in the conflict because the boys or the vendors stopped being there at Once, etc. But yes, there is always violence, and there are raids where they are not following the rules either. In practice, there is less violence; because there is less conflict, there is less persecution. But if, in case there is action, the few

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cases, or the few cases that there are of actions by the police, are not doing things in the best way either. They are always going to the side of the rules. The lack of professionalism that the police are using, at least in Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and La Plata, it’s still the same mechanism. There may be a decrease in cases, but the mechanism remains the same. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

I consider it valuable to highlight four aspects of this testimony. In the first place, we could consider that these displacements—the fact that the vendors were no longer in the Balvanera neighborhood, known as Once in popular jargon—were due either to the measures implemented to deal with the pandemic, or due to the practice carried out by the police themselves. In second place, that despite the change of authorities at the national level, the behavior of the Buenos Aires City Police remains practically the same. In third place, that if there are differences between one period and the other, it is because there was a decrease in cases (although the mechanism in police action remains the same). Fourth and last, and unlike other Cheikhou testimonies where he pointed to attitudes such as xenophobia, discrimination and stigmatization, here he refers, instead, to the “lack of professionalism” of the police. Henri recounted a similar scenario. For him, the Cambiemos administration experienced an increase in cases compared to the immediately previous government (that of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner), but at the same time highlights a lesson for the Senegalese community during that difficult period. H- But what we found, Mauricio Macri’s period was more difficult with the Senegalese. That does not mean that when Cristina there was no raid. There was, but not that much […] in Macri’s four years I told you that we couldn’t have a week without having to travel. Those things were more visible at that time. The repressions, the persecutions, the operations on the streets, the house raids, were more permanently from 2015 to 2019, than before, yes. I- That government marked a turning point. H- Yes. It made us have to organize ourselves. That’s the positive. Because we used to live in disorder. Thanks to those things, we

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ended up organizing ourselves and it helped us a lot. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

Although Henri shares the idea that there has been no change in the City of Buenos Aires (“it’s always the same system”), he nevertheless acknowledges that Horacio Rodríguez Larreta (Chief of Government of Buenos Aires since 2015) is making an effort to involve organizations in the dialogue table, to see ways out of these problems of occupation of the street. In addition, he was optimistic about the change in the presidency: But with the arrival of Alberto, we can say that there is change, because what happens in the provinces, in the Greater Buenos Aires, there is a lot of change. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

Regarding the context of the pandemic COVID-19, Henri emphasized that during a moment of the pandemic, around May 2020, negative (or even excessive) actions by the police occurred every day, especially in the neighborhoods of Flores, Balvanera or Constitucion. Then they decreased, largely due to the actions of the organizations in the police stations themselves. For other interviewees, the change of administration in 2019 did not imply any modification in the attitudes of the police towards migrants. In this sense, Dion, arrived in Argentina in 2018, stated in our conversation: The moment that we are here, Macri, he did not respect the Senegalese here; he did not respect the migrants here, for me. The thing that I look at, the workers, after that change, the Senegalese who had a little more better, is because of their work. For me. I looked at that, but nothing changed. (Dion, Senegalese, 5 years of residence in Argentina)

Yefferson, Venezuelan arrived in Argentina in 2011 as part of a CONICET PhD scholarship, in turn, said that the police “were always the same”: Y-

No, they were always the same. I think the police are like that, I don’t know if they make them like that.

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I- In what sense do you say, “They were always the same”? Y- They were always like that, nothing, I see that the police here, I also saw that the police or government entities, not only the police, but also the public administration, when they deal with someone who is a foreigner and when they deal with someone that it is not, the attitude is totally different, it is another. (Yefferson, Venezuelan, 12 years of residence in Argentina)

As mentioned at the end of the Chapter 6, accent and skin color, according to Yefferson’s point of view, imply a differential treatment by the police. To conclude this chapter, I would like to refer now to the ways in which these attitudes towards migrants differ according to the security force in operation: together with the above-mentioned topics, this was specifically another guideline included in the registry instrument used to conduct the semi-structured interviews.

Attitudes Towards Migrants and Security Forces According to Henri, the creation of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police in 2010 marked a turning point in the interactions between police and migrants. H- Before the City Police there was another police force, the Metropolitan Police. That’s where things started. I- With the creation of the Metropolitan? H- Metropolitan. Then comes the City Police. Until recently, the City Police were terrible. The Federal Police were better; they helped the boys to behave well. I helped the kids to write the minutes, the kids showed up at the police station, the Federal Police did a lot to make the kids feel comfortable and know their rights. From the Metropolitan Police and the City Police, it is something else. […] That’s what I told you, the boys felt much better in collaboration

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with the law, with the Federal Police,5 than with the Metropolitan Police and the City Police. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

Cheikhou did not differentiate the behavior of the different security forces, but rather emphasized their character as “instruments” of politics, a topic reviewed in Chapter 3 (dedicated to the state of the art) and which will also be analyzed in Chapter 9 of the book, considering the ways in which the interviewees defined the links between police and politics . For him, then, it is not about the actions of a security force, whether the Buenos Aires City Police or the Argentine Federal Police, but who is the one who directs them; appropriating, we could say, the metaphor of the hammer to think about the police. Depending on who directs there, who is the one who lowers the line there, in the performances. For me that is what is happening. Because at most, the police, beyond the fact that each one is a person, a citizen before being a police officer or another. But I think the treatment is quite different, quite different, compared to the rest of the country. I’m not talking about the other provinces. But I am only speaking of the rest of the other towns in the Buenos Aires Province itself or of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area. So I see that there are certain politicians, or certain leaders, who take advantage, use the issue of conflicts with the ‘manteros’,6 and the people who have less, or with migrants, to continue carrying out their politics. We must not forget that people speculate on these conflicts. And they want it to be demonstrated every day, or to put more fuel on the fire, so that their followers, the people who believe in them, know that you are against migration and you want to impose certain cleansing, you want to put things in order. So, they use that situation to say, ‘Look, I’m firm on certain points and I’m going to pick you up’. That unfortunately exists. For this reason, it cannot also remove the actions of the police from those political actions. Because many politicians use these tools of power, the security, to be able to impose certain 5 For a brief historical description of Argentine Federal Police, Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police and Buenos Aires City Police, see Chapter 1. 6 As I mentioned in Chapter 3 and Chapter 5, it is a term that designates those people who sell on the street, arranging their merchandise on cloth or “mantas” in precarious conditions.

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decisions or certain beliefs in order to continue keeping that eye that certain leaders have, I don’t want to say fascists but, well, they believe in other things and are against migration or that they don’t even want to see the people who have the least. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

In addition, the interviewee alluded to focal points of conflict such as Balvanera and Flores, outlining a continuity with those reports analyzed in Chapter 5, regarding secondary quantitative data on police arrests. For Yefferson, for his part, the treatment will always be worse if you are from another country or have a different skin color, regardless of the security force that is actually acting. If I am from another country or of another skin color, they will treat you worse, regardless of the security force we are talking about, that is, it can also be a gendarme. As they say ‘negro cabeza’,7 I once heard him say that to a gendarme. I was on a train to Tigre, there was a boy making noise, fucking around and messing with other people, and the gendarme just separated him. They warned and they went in and grabbed him from here, closed the door and lifted him up and I heard how they called him ‘negro cabeza’. (Yefferson, Venezuelan, 12 years of residence in Argentina)

According to Roberto, there are practically no differences in treatment according to the security forces, despite the fact that in our conversation he stressed that he did not know them well. I-

Do you think there is a difference depending on the police force? That is, if there is a difference in treatment depending on whether it is the Federal Police or the City Police. R- I wouldn’t know how to tell you because I can’t locate if at some point I had dealings with the Federal Police or not, I don’t know if that body still exists. I- Yes, the department where you took the trade, is the Federal Police department. 7 It is a pejorative way of referring to another person, although not necessarily with a racial connotation, which had its origins in the internal migrations of the 1930s, when the newcomers to the City of Buenos Aires were “cabecitas negras”.

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R- Ok it’s the Federal Police and the other is the City Police, of course, it’s different, but if there is a difference in treatment, you say and I think I don’t think so, that is, no, I can’t find any. (Roberto, Venezuelan, 7 years of residence in Argentina)

By way of conclusion, we can characterize these arguments as following: (1) rupture among the security forces regarding attitudes towards migrants, (2) emphasis on politics and on those who lead the security forces, (3) equality of all security forces in the mistreatment of those who are not from the country and have a different skin color and, finally, (4) there are no differences in treatment, whether the City Police or the Federal Police.

References Cohen, N. (2009). Introducción. In N. Cohen (Ed.), Representaciones de la diversidad: Trabajo, escuela y juventud (pp. 7–10). Cooperativas. Cohen, N., & Gómez Rojas, G. (2019). Escala de actitudes (I). In Metodología de la Investigación, ¿para qué? La producción de los datos y los diseños (pp. 39– 83). Teseo. Cohen, S. (2015). Demonios populares y pánicos morales. Desviación y reacción entre medios, política e instituciones. Gedisa Decree No. 138/2021. (2021). Decreto N° 70/2017. Derogación. March 5. Buenos Aires, Argentina. http://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/ane xos/345000-349999/347595/norma.htm Kleidermacher, G. (2019). Compartiendo y disputando veredas en “Avellaneda”. El caso del colectivo senegalés y la (de)construcción de relaciones interculturales en el espacio público. In F. Fischman (Comp.), Migraciones, movilidades e interculturalidad. Nuevos espacios de (des)encuentro en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (pp. 85–125). Teseo. Krott, N. R., Krott, E., & Zeitner, I. (2018). Xenophobic attitudes in German police officers: A longitudinal investigation from professional education to practice. International Journal of Police Science & Management, 20 (3), 174– 184. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461355718788373

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La Nación. (2017, January 29). Patricia Bullrich descartó de plano la construcción de un muro con Bolivia. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/pol itica/patricia-bullrich-descarto-de-plano-la-construccion-de-un-muro-conbolivia-nid1980013/ McLaughlin, E. (2011). Selectividad policial [Police bias]. In E. McLaughlin & J. Muncie (Comps.), Diccionario de Criminología (pp. 477–481). Gedisa. Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017. (2017). Modificación. Ley N° 25.871. January 27. Buenos Aires, Argentina. http://servicios.infoleg.gob. ar/infolegInternet/anexos/270000-274999/271245/norma.htm Sausdal, D. (2023). Xenophobia. In Globalizing local policing. transnational crime, crime control and security (pp. 25–59). Palgrave Macmillan. Schmidt, W. (2019, January 8). Michel Pichetto: “En la Ciudad de Buenos Aires destruyeron a la Federal y entregaron la calle”. Clarín. https://www. clarin.com/politica/miguel-pichetto-ciudad-buenos-aires-destruido-federalentregado-calle_0_5Cwq_IGiZ.html

9 The Role of Politics

Abstract In this chapter, I address a substantial and controversial issue in the field of the sociology of police: the nexus between police and politics . More particularly, and returning to arguments present in the state of the art (reviewed in the book’s third chapter), I describe the perspectives of the interviewees regarding whether the police can be thought of as autonomous institution (and independent of political will) or as a political instrument, which follows and executes the guidelines erected by politicians from the “top”. In this sense, the domain constituted by the interviews allows us to add an empirical element and enrich the theoretical discussion (and arguments) about the ways of thinking the links between police and politics . Keywords Police · Politics · Insularity thesis · Instrumentality thesis · Grey cheque

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Abiuso, Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46379-2_9

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Introduction “It should be a matter of State, not of government. The police must be a strong institution, respectful of democratic values and the republican system, faithful to constitutional principles and laws, focused on the common good, balanced in its management and professional. The police should never be weak, genuflecting, opportunistic, accommodating, corrupt and a slave to political power”.1 (La Nación, 2020, September 9)

The construction of a theoretical framework to read and research the links between police and politics constitutes a subject addressed by different authors from different regions around the world. Following Nicolás Dallorso (2012) and Didier Fassin (2016), we can summarize two hypothesis (readings or thesis, depending on each author) that interpret the relationship between police and politics in a general way. For some, the relationship is instrumental and forces of order would be the “armed wing of the State”; this hypothesis emphasizes the political dependence of the police forces with respect to the established powers and the State’s orders. Others conceive the forces of order as a “State within the State”; this interpretative key emphasizes, instead, the separation between the police sphere and the sphere of public power, establishing thus a form of insularity. However, when empirically contrasted, the relationships are not so simple and linear; hence the explicit need for different authors to overcome this antinomy, proposing their own interpretations to describe the connections between police and politics. In this sense, Dominique Monjardet (2010) points out that every police system has an institutional, organizational and professional dimension. More specifically, every police system is an instrument of a political authority that gives orders, a production tool characterized by specialization of tasks and procedures and hierarchical structure and a group—the police officers—defined by their own interests and 1

Néstor Roncaglia, head of the Argentine Federal Police from January 2016 to January 2020.

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culture, respectively. For the author, there are not necessarily convergences between these dimensions; rather they can face each other as different and competing logics of action, giving rise to conflicts and tensions. Despite the fact that Monjardet adopts as a starting point Ergon Bittner’s metaphor according to which the police is a hammer, he immediately points out that the complexity of the police instrument is of a different nature and argues that there is no profession without a quantum of autonomy. For its part, Jean-Paul Brodeur (2011) points out that there are two apparently opposite theses about the nature of the relations between the police apparatus and state power: the insularity thesis and the instrumentality thesis. By highlighting the limits and obstacles of each of them, Brodeur (2011: 38) emphasizes, “the notions of insularity and instrumentality are inadequate to think about the relations between the police and the political authority”. Instead, he provides his own interpretation of thinking the mandates given to the police as a “grey cheque”, understanding as such: The signature and the amounts agreed are, on the one hand, imprecise enough to provide the issuing minister with the ulterior motive of a plausible denial of what was actually authorized; however, they are legible enough to guarantee the policeman who receives this cheque a margin of maneuver which, in turn, he will be able to plausibly affirm that it was explicitly granted to him […] it is written in general terms and cashed in particular operations. This asymmetry protects both the issuer and the receiver. (Brodeur, 2011: 47–48)

For Hélène L’Heuillet (2010), it is convenient to overcome the false antinomy between instrumentality and autonomy: the police is an autonomous instrument. Concretely, the formula “in the name of the law” expresses the modality of the relationship between the instrumentality and the autonomy of the police. It is an autonomous institution insofar as it exercises a function of authority, and insofar as acting in the name of the law it acts in its name. It is an instrument, insofar as its authority derives from the law, which provides coverage.

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From a different latitude, Benjamin Bowling, Robert Reiner and Robert Sheptycki (2019) present another perspective or different point of view to think about the links between police and politics. They affirm that politics is integral to the practice of policing and to the institution of the police.2 In addition, they propose their definition of police, as well as about the relationship between policing and governance: The police have developed in modern societies as the specialist organization charged with the maintenance of order. Policing is the sharp edge of governance, the point at which law—as an abstract system of rules— becomes the concrete physical experience of being ruled. (Bowling et al., 2019: xiii)

Among other aspects addressed by the authors, I consider it relevant to mention the vicissitudes between policing and politics in different geographical jurisdictions, the tension between local and global politics of policing, the relationship between politics and politicization, the connections between policing and different political or government regimes and police accountability . In the particular case of the anti-crime brigade (BAC) that was the subject of the ethnography carried out by the author in Paris, Fassin identifies (2016) the existence of a circularity between insularity and instrumentality. More specifically, he points out a convergence between the expectations of the forces of order and the political objectives assigned to them. From Argentina, Marcelo Sain (2010) takes up the metaphor of Monjardet’s “hammer” to point out an instrumental vision of the police institution. Although he immediately recognizes that, in Argentina, the police have been simultaneously a hammer and a blacksmith. In addition, the author alludes to political misrule and delegation to police leaderships (Sain, 2015).

2 While the police alludes to a particular kind of institution, policing imply a set of processes with specific functions aimed at social control (not exclusively carried out by the police, but also by other institutions).

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Whether due to police resistance, government incompetence or a lack of political will, the author highlights that—on numerous occasions—the counterpoint between political subordination and the relative institutional autonomy that the police hold against political power, leads to a situation of political autonomy for police institutions, from which they can deploy self-sustaining forms of conducting their politicalinstitutional practices. Dallorso (2012) explicitly dialogues with the theses mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, highlighting—as his own interpretation—the autonomization of the security forces as a specific way of their political government, which would make it possible to problematize those statements that affirm that autonomization is the product of political misrule. Furthermore, the very separation between political power and security forces, presented as if they were monolithic spheres, isolated or distanced from one another, is proposed by the author as a product of a determined political practice. Along with these theoretical interpretations (which I developed in greater depth in Chapter 3 of the book), here I describe the perspectives of the interviewees regarding whether the police can be thought of as autonomous institution (and independent of political will) or as a political instrument, which follows and executes the guidelines erected by politicians from the “top”. In this sense, the domain constituted by the semi-structured interviews allows us to add an empirical element and enrich the theoretical discussion (and arguments) about the above-mentioned ways of thinking the links between police and politics.

Narratives About the Nexus Between Police and Politics In this regard, Cheikhou,3 who arrived in Argentina in August 2007, and who worked —at the time of the interview—at the National Foundation

3 As mentioned in other book’s chapters, I replaced the names of the people interviewed with fantasy names, to maintain the confidentiality of anonymity.

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for Refugees, affirmed emphatically that the security forces follow the guidelines of the State. Yes, I think it is a discourse they use to maintain a certain independence […] but yes, it is true that the security forces follow the guidelines of the State. In this case, for example, the Metropolitan Police, in its time, when it existed, followed totally, 100%, what the City Government entrusted to it. When the City Police arrived, also the same. For something, the way of living, or what migrants live in Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, is different from those who live in Mendoza or Tucumán. They are the same migrants, the same black community, Senegalese, working on the street... So, the way of working […] but the way of acting is always different. So, if we are all the same Argentine citizens, who share the State, but how we act in Tucumán is not the same as how we act in Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, which means that the directive in Tucumán is not the same as the directive in Buenos Aires. And when we look at the Buenos Aires Province, it is not the same as how they act with the Senegalese community in the city of La Plata, as in Lomas de Zamora, we can also say that there is a difference in the directive. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

As in other testimonies of Cheikhou transcribed throughout the book, he conceived the security forces as an instrument of state power. He also acknowledged that there might be geographical differences in terms of the various directives, which implies a diverse mode of police action with respect to the Senegalese community. In addition, he referred to the role of the police in the government of the City of Buenos Aires, within a broader political strategy of “cleaning up the city”4 : So the security forces are following the guidelines, the directives of the politicians, unfortunately, in certain places. I don’t think there is an independent action. Perhaps in some places, I wish it were so, both in justice 4

Previously, Ignacio Rullansky (2014) explored the political rationalities and government technologies present in the discourses and extra-discursive practices of the authorities of the Buenos Aires City Government regarding the differential treatment of “manteros” and artisans in the case of the social conflict caused by the reformulation of the Contraventional Code in Buenos Aires.

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and in the security forces. But unfortunately, it is not usual. And you have Larreta, for example. In the area of the City of Buenos Aires. I am not telling you that there is a direct action towards migration, or towards street vendors. But there may be an improvement in the ways of acting. A certain respect, a certain strategy. Something much more programmed, prepared so that the action is much more professional, much more responsible. And that there is a way to raise awareness, guide and reach a point of agreement with the same sellers. We can reach an agreement, a solution, with dialogue. And not go directly to do some kind of cleaning. And this is what we see, for example, in the center of Buenos Aires. They want to talk about a cleanup. They want to clean and leave everything neat, because the rest is like garbage, or rather, it dirty the City of Buenos Aires. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

This topic of street administration or migrant’s management as a way of regulating—or even “cleaning”, using the words of this narrative— public space also emerged from the review of the literature on the subject, specifically within Chapter 3 of the book. Continuing the itinerary through the testimonies, Henri, who arrived in Argentina in 2008 and works in a security company, shared a similar point of view though not as explicit compared to Cheikhou. We don’t understand. Do you know why we don’t understand? Because migration, migration officials... So things are done from the top. We do not blame the police. We cannot understand, and we are searching and we are going to understand and we are going to denounce them. We don’t understand […] That’s why I tell you the police are not to blame. There are things that they receive from the top (…) it is easier for the politician to blame the Senegalese. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

Although Henri clarified that the police execute orders that receive from the “top”, it is not entirely clear if he refers to the world of politics. It would seem to indicate that this is the case, by the way in which he concluded his story; by affirming, “It is easier for the politician to blame the Senegalese”. However, we are far from the level of detail, in terms

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of actors and locations, to which the aforementioned testimony referred. As a common aspect, neither Cheikhou nor Henri attribute autonomy to the police, but rather they follow the guidelines of political power, or do things that they receive from the “top”. Instead, Nampalys, street seller who arrived in Argentina in 2015, highlighted a certain police autonomy, but exclusively in terms of the orientations of the chiefs: I-

And what do you say about the police: do you think the police have a differential treatment with you? N- Sometimes, they leave me alone to work and sometimes they don’t leave me alone, it depends on the boss, there are people complaining because we are on the street, because the boy is not going to sell on the stores because we sell on the street, sometimes people are a bit screwed with that. (Nampalys, Senegalese, 8 years of residence in Argentina)

In this sense, if the police are going to “pick” a street vendor up or not, that is something that the chief of duty decides. In this narrative, then, I could not identify any reference to politicians, to the world of politics, or even—as in the previous testimonies—to the dependence of the police on political power. For Dion,5 on the contrary, the police do what the government tells them to do: The problem is that the policemen do their job. The people who manage the police are from the government. The policeman does his job. He takes an order and does it. Everything comes from the top. You say, the police do wrong. I say no. They do their job. Sometimes I get very angry, because you look and say the police are bad. Not the cops. There are police officers who are very good people. They are very generous, very good people. But the person behind, they are manipulating the cops. (Dion, Senegalese, 5 years of residence in Argentina)

5 Dion’s migratory trajectory is curious. He arrived in Argentina in 2018, as part of a dance tour. He did not decide to stay in the country, but the expiration of his passport did not allow him to follow the path of his dance partners back to Senegal.

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Unlike Cheikhou’s testimony, Dion did not specify what he meant by “government” (or which government in particular he was talking about; if the national, if the city government, etc.) or what “everything comes from the top” meant to him. However, he once again placed the police, like most of those interviewed, in a place of dependence on political power. Or even, recovering this last testimony, of manipulation.

References Bowling, B., Reiner, R., & Sheptycki, J. (2019). The politics of the police. Oxford University Press. Brodeur, J.-P. (2011). Las caras de la policía. Prometeo. Dallorso, N. (2012). La compleja relación entre el poder político y las fuerzas de seguridad: Desafíos para el análisis de la emergencia del Plan Unidad Cinturón Sur de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. HOLOGRAMATICA, 7 (17), 97–121. Fassin, D. (2016). La fuerza del orden. Una etnografía del accionar policial en las periferias urbanas. Siglo XXI. L’Heuillet, H. (2010). Baja política, alta policía. Prometeo. La Nación. (2020, September 9). ‘No se puede tratar a los policías como perros callejeros’, dijo el exjefe de la Federal. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com. ar/seguridad/roncaglia-nid2445391 Monjardet, D. (2010). Lo que hace la policía. Sociología de la fuerza pública. Prometeo. Rullansky, I. (2014). Los manteros del microcentro porteño: La construcción de una presencia ilegitima en el espacio público. Argumentos. Revista De Critica Social, 16 , 286–314. Sain, M. (2010). La policía en las ciencias sociales. Ensayo sobre los obstáculos epistemológicos para el estudio de la institución policial en el campo de las ciencias sociales. In M. Sirimarco (Comp.), Estudiar la policía. La mirada de las ciencias sociales sobre la institución policial (pp. 27–56). Teseo. Sain, M. (2015). El Leviatán azul. Policía y política en la argentina. Siglo XXI.

10 Vulnerability in the Face of Police Action

Abstract This chapter presents testimonies that account for selfperceptions about the greater or lesser vulnerability of the migratory group of belonging in the face of police action. In line with what was presented and analyzed in Chapter 7 (dedicated to situations of violence), I detail different factors that influence and impact in the vulnerability of different migratory groups, such as stigmatization, racism, discrimination, language, integration and labor insertion. In doing so, I also recovered opinions tending to overcome those obstacles and think, in this way, of a different type of interaction between migrants and police officers. Keywords Vulnerability · Stigmatization · Racism · Discrimination · Language · Labor insertion

Introduction In previous chapters, I referred to different interpretations according to which the interviewees describe a different police action depending on whether it is an Argentine or foreign person; and also, I described in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Abiuso, Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46379-2_10

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detail episodes of police violence experienced by them (or well, by their acquaintances), by recovering their own voices from the testimonies. In this chapter, particularly, I present narratives that account for selfperceptions about the greater or lesser vulnerability of the migratory group of belonging in the face of police action. Concretely, I detail different factors that influence and impact in the vulnerability of Senegalese and Venezuelan migrants interviewed. In doing so, I also recovered opinions tending to overcome those obstacles and think, in this way, of a different type of interaction between migrants and police officers.

Vulnerability to Police Action For Cheikhou,1 who arrived in Argentina in August 2007, and who worked—at the time of the interview—at the National Foundation for Refugees, there are different traits that make the Senegalese community more vulnerable to police action. Yes, the Senegalese community is vulnerable to police action, one because it is a migrant. We migrants from the beginning are part of a vulnerable group. More, if we come from Africa. Unfortunately, everything related to problematization, trafficking in blacks, etc. Everything that has to do with vulnerability. In other words, we are always more exposed to certain things because there is stigmatization; there is racism, discrimination, etc. Starting from that side. Then, the language issue is added, too. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

In summary, the interviewee noted that the migrant condition, stigmatization, racism, discrimination and language make Senegalese more vulnerable to police action. Regarding stigmatization, Néstor Cohen (2009: 9) highlights that “it is frequent that [migrants] must suffer daily situations of stigmatization and mistreatment in their relationship with the security forces, as their phenotypic characteristics and their national origins are often associated 1 I replaced the names of the people interviewed with fantasy names, to maintain the confidentiality of anonymity.

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with alleged criminal activities”. Bowling et al. (2019) point out that racial prejudice is one of the core characteristics of the cop cultures, but that it is necessary to locate it within societal racism. By discrimination, we can understand, following Michel Wieviorka (2009), giving a group a differentiated treatment.2 In the sixth chapter, I alluded to the lack of communication as a significant aspect in the interactions between police and migrants. For Cheikhou, the lack of understanding makes Senegalese more vulnerable, and opens the conditions for the possibility that the police “do whatever they want”: When the police, in that sense, ask you a question or ask you for something and see your actions, because you want to talk, but you can’t speak because you don’t understand the language and you start to act in a certain way, it rather generates more power for the police. Like ‘look, I am in front of a very vulnerable person and I can do what I want because they are not going to respond to me’. And this is in the mind of the policeman who sincerely does not want to do his job, because in front of a person who is in this situation, he should know that he is a very vulnerable person and try to guide him. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

For Henri (who arrived in Argentina in 2008 and works in a security company), on the other hand, the vulnerability of the Senegalese community lies in the fact that it is a community that spends a lot of time on the streets, which brings them closer to the patrol work carried out by police officers. HIHIH-

2

Yes it’s normal. It’s not the police’s fault. It is normal. Why do you think it happens that way? Yes, because we are more on the street. Because of the visibility you have on the street itself. Sure, we are more. Now we have a problem on that topic. The boys always hang out in the street. That is our problem. Internally we are

Bowling et al. (2019) refer to different types of discrimination. See, for more details, Chapter 6.

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trying to solve it but we can’t. Because what it is to go on the street and sell, depends on each one. What politicians and newspapers say… There is no organization; there is no network that sends the boys. Each boy, as you can see, on the street selling, is his own boss; he doesn’t have to answer to anyone. (Henri, Senegalese, 15 years of residence in Argentina)

Appropriating once again the concept of “availability” (Bowling et al., 2019), Senegalese migrants who are engaged in street vending are in conditions of greater availability (and vulnerability, I would add) than other social groups, in the face of patrols and eventual police arrests. Another interviewee, Dion (who arrived in Argentina in 2018, as part of a dance tour and who stayed in the country because the expiration of his passport did not allow him to follow the path of his dance partners), related the vulnerability of the Senegalese community to skin color, documentation and language. In his own words: D- Yes, if he is Senegalese. First, the Senegalese are black. Senegal is far away. Do you understand? I- That I wanted to deepen, the part of the dark complexion. That seems to you to play a role as well, in those interactions. D- Yes. Also, which is, the thing that tires me a lot, are the papers here. The roles are also very important. I- It seems to you that it also has to do with the language difficulty, also, that type of conflictive interaction, that they do not understand each other. D- Yes, sometimes yes. Sometimes, between them, a person talks to improve, and the other can take it badly. Sometimes yes. The language here is very difficult to defend, to talk. (Dion, Senegalese, 5 years of residence in Argentina)

Although Dion did not refer explicitly to racism (unlike Cheikhou), he pointed out that Senegalese constitute a vulnerable community because of their skin color (“the Senegalese are black”). In addition, the administrative procedures to achieve residence in the country and the difficulty in obtaining certain documentation also make them a vulnerable group. In this sense, Tedesco et al. (2019) highlighted that the changes implemented in the Argentine migration legislation intensified these issues. Finally, and as in other research and reports reviewed

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throughout the book, language occupies a key role in the interactions between police officers and Senegalese migrants. Yefferson,3 for his part, recognized that, compared to other migratory groups (Paraguayans, Bolivians and Peruvians), Venezuelans were not as vulnerable: We were talking about Venezuelans, that doesn’t happen to them, no, they are not as vulnerable as, for example, if the Bolivians are, they are quite vulnerable or the Paraguayans are not so vulnerable, but they are also, that is, the Peruvians are also very mistreated indeed, but the first two are the most vulnerable for me. (Yefferson, Venezuelan, 12 years of residence in Argentina)

For him, what would explain the lesser vulnerability of Venezuelans is, on the one hand, their resemblance to Argentines; and the greater vulnerability of the other groups mentioned would be explained, on the other hand, by the educational level with which they arrived. Y- The fact of the way we are what I told you that there is a certain resemblance, is as we fit together, the people who came to Argentina had studies. We had the opportunity because just as in Argentina the public university in Venezuela is also so there is another opportunity that other Latin American countries do not have so that is why there is not a certain vulnerability in the Venezuelan who emigrated. I- Why do you think that well, you mentioned Bolivians, Paraguayans and Peruvians, why do you think there is such greater vulnerability towards them then? Y- For that very reason because of the social status, the fact of having studied. (Yefferson, Venezuelan, 12 years of residence in Argentina)

As can be seen, this testimony situates us in other conceptual coordinates: the educational level implies, for different migrant groups, a greater or lesser vulnerability to police action. It is relevant, in this regard, to mention that Linares (2021) highlighted that the first investigations on recent Venezuelan migration in Argentina account for the high incidence of Venezuelan professionals. 3

Yefferson arrived in Argentina in 2011 as part of a CONICET PhD scholarship.

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Roberto, arrived in 2016, related—in the first place—vulnerability to basic needs. It could be that vulnerability that you don’t have to cover your basic needs because it’s so hard for you to get a job. (Roberto, Venezuelan, 7 years of residence in Argentina)

In addition, to the fact that you are not in your country of origin, it “doesn’t feel like home”. Look, I think that the Venezuelan here in Argentina is well accepted and not so other nationalities from neighboring countries because of what people speak. From my point of view, for me we are all equal and who sends one, well, he has to pay for it and the nationality does not matter, because one listens like that, who knows that the one who is in trouble is a Peruvian. Yes, dude, one listens to that for the record, not that I am certain that if we tell them the police act differently depending on nationality. I think you feel more vulnerable because you’re not in your country, I’m Venezuelan and you don’t feel as safe with some things as you would feel at home. Clearly time takes you to learn to manage yourself in the country where you live and so that’s why I’m telling you right now I feel safe because we’ve been here for a few years now and one learns to know how everything moves here. (Roberto, Venezuelan, 7 years of residence in Argentina)

In this testimony, the interviewee even outlined an association between crime and a certain nationality (Peruvian), contributing thus to a theme pointed out in other chapters of the book, both in the analysis of the political discourses implemented during the Cambiemos administration (Chapter 4), as well as in the review of previous research on the subject (Chapter 3).

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How to Overcome Vulnerability? To conclude this chapter, I would like to transcribe some fragments of Cheikhou’s interview, considering that they can be a valuable input to think about alternatives, so that in the future the interactions between police and Senegalese migrants do not end negatively and with problematic consequences, as in those episodes recounted in Chapters 5 and 7 of the book. On the one hand, he highlighted the need to train Senegalese colleagues in different aspects, perhaps the most important being the language or the lack of understanding. We are going to have to train the community more, explaining to them that they learn the Spanish language a little more, that they integrate a little more, mixing with the community. Although we have the obligation to maintain our culture, our (religion), but also a little more integration. And, perhaps, be a little more understandable at the time of the police action, in order to have those tests. And also to try to have a much more fluent dialogue with the services of the security agents, to never go to jail, always trying to understand that the one who loses many times, it is we, as migrants, who end up with a case, with problems of (relocation) tomorrow, with our merchandise kidnapped... So, always, we are the ones who have to see, the strategy that we have to use to avoid having a conflict with the police, here in the country. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

On the other hand, he referred to the importance of changing the main work activity, that is to say, street selling. Another thing is trying to get into another type of market. In other words, employment. Search for more employment, different from street vending. Those who have the possibility of having a local, tomorrow do it. Those who can set up cooperatives, the tailors, the masons. Each one becomes (...) a sector and try to reduce the presence of the Senegalese community on the street. (Cheikhou, Senegalese, 16 years of residence in Argentina)

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I hope that just as the interactions between police and migrants were a lesson for the latter, as stated by Henri in our interview, I also hope that these testimonies contribute to modifying the state of the situation and thus avoiding—in the near future—the rights violations against this community.

References Bowling, B., Reiner, R., & Sheptycki, J. (2019). The politics of the police. Oxford University Press. Cohen, N. (2009). Introducción. In N. Cohen (Ed.), Representaciones de la diversidad: Trabajo, escuela y juventud (pp. 7–10). Cooperativas. Linares, M. D. (2021). Migración venezolana reciente en Argentina: una política migratoria selectiva en el contexto del giro migratorio restrictivo. Migraciones Internacionales, (12), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.33679/rmi.v1i1. 2300 Tedesco, J. C., Kleidermacher, G., & Grazziotin Noschang, P. (2019). Un análisis de los cambios en las legislaciones migratorias en Brasil y Argentina: Implicaciones para la población de origen senegalés. Revista Brasileira De História & Ciencias Sociales, 11(22), 302–330. Wieviorka, M. (2009). El racismo: una introducción. Gedisa.

11 Conclusions

Abstract The book concludes by highlighting, on the one hand, the main results for each of the empirical domains analyzed (political speeches, statistics and semi-structured interviews). On the other hand, framing their scope within the various attempts to manage and regulate migration flows in an increasingly globalized world. In this sense, the book constitutes an invitation to reflect on the particularities present in the local context studied around the relations between police, politics, immigration and crime (and on the differences with other similar jurisdictions), as well as a contribution to produce empirical research from the Global South. Keywords Political discourses · Secondary data · Semi-structured interviews · Police · Politics · Immigration

Introduction This book constitutes an exploration of the relations between police, politics and the immigration-crime nexus in the City of Buenos Aires between 2015 and 2019, in the context of the Cambiemos national © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Abiuso, Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46379-2_11

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administration. As such, it is thematically located at the intersection between the sociology of the police and the sociology of migration, although it also dialogues—perhaps not so explicitly—with other disciplines and fields of knowledge. I specifically addressed the above-mentioned relations through the analysis of three empirical domains: political discourses pronounced by officials around the immigration-crime nexus, secondary quantitative data regarding police practices of arrest of migrants and semi-structured interviews with Senegalese and Venezuelan migrants. As a way of drawing conclusions, I highlight below the main results for each of these empirical domains. To conclude the book, I frame their scope within the various attempts to manage and regulate migration flows in an increasingly globalized world. In this sense, the book constitutes an invitation to reflect on the particularities present in the local context studied around the relations between police, politics, immigration and crime, as well as a contribution to produce empirical research from the Global South, to counteract the centrality of the Global North as a sphere of production of scientific knowledge.

Main Results On December 10, 2015, the political coalition Cambiemos won the national elections in Argentina, taking the candidate Mauricio Macri to the presidency for a period of four years. During this administration, characterized by a return to neoliberalism, and by a context of political conservatism (see Chapter 1), we witnessed a discursive proliferation of instances where officials from various areas of government explicitly and publicly referred to an alleged link between immigration and crime. Such speeches legitimized and supported changes implemented in the immigration policy, being the implementation of the Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017 (in January 2017,

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unilaterally by the National Executive Power) the most significant point of this process.1 Against this background, in the book’s Chapter 4, I addressed the ways of defining the nexus between immigration and crime in the political discourses implemented during the Cambiemos administration. As I mentioned in Chapter 2 (where I presented my methodological approach), I used Grounded Theory research strategy to analyze these discourses, taking up both its pioneering development in the 1960s (Glaser & Strauss, 2008) and its more recent elaboration by Strauss and Corbin (1998) around the different types of coding (open, axial and selective). Regarding the voices expressed on this issue, it is relevant to mention that of Macri himself, as well as it is significant to highlight, among others, Rogelio Frigerio, Patricia Bullrich and Horacio García, who held hierarchical positions in the Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Security and National Directorate for Migration, respectively. Together with the perspective of national and local officials, I also incorporated speeches by Miguel Ángel Pichetto, who during the Cambiemos administration was the head of the block of senators of the opposition party Front for Victory but who later on became Macri’s vice president candidate in the 2019 presidential elections. As main results, the book presented different categories (as well as their subcategories and properties), reconstructed through discourse analysis: (i) “We need to know who is who”, (ii) Distinction in the type of immigration that arrives in Argentina, (iii) Stricter controls for entering the country and (iv) Crime and migration. In Chapter 5, I presented a systematization of secondary quantitative data regarding police practices of arrests of migrants. Although there are different data for consultation, in Argentina we lack official statistical information on the arrests made by the police on the migrant population (Monclús Masó & Brandariz García, 2014; Monclús Masó & García, 2012). In this sense, I selected different reports that allowed me to 1 During his presidential term, on March 5, 2021 Alberto Fernández repealed Necessity and Urgency Decree No. 70/2017, considering that it includes aspects “irreconcilable with our National Constitution and with the international system for the protection of human rights” (Decree No. 138/2021: paragraph 5).

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reconstruct a quantitative panorama within Cambiemos administration period. Through the comparative analysis carried out on these sources, I highlight the following conclusions, by incorporating dimensions of an adequate and rigorous methodological surveillance (Cohen & Gómez Rojas, 2019). In the first place, I highlight that there are different institutions that produce data in various ways: on arrests, institutional violence situations and assistances to victims of institutional violence. Secondly, the time series of the consulted reports comprehend the years of the Cambiemos administration, although some with more detail than others (and with a broader time arc, as those who produced data between 2015 and 2019). In the third place, the visual resources used to present the data are very similar to each other. It is worth highlighting the use of maps, a resource not only used by the Buenos Aires City Police (one of the pillars of its alleged technological profile, as I mentioned in Chapter 1) but also by the Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. Fourthly, the registered cases of institutional violence doubled between 2018 and 2019, according to the statistical reports produced by Public Ministry of Defense of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. Assistances to victims of institutional violence, in turn, underlines the presence of people of Senegalese nationality (both in aid for crimes and contraventions). Police arrests decreased from 2017 and 2018 and increased towards 2019. In addition, the cases of institutional violence registered by the Program against Institutional Violence fluctuated: they decreased from 2015 to 2017, increased in 2018 and decreased slightly towards 2019. In the fifth place, foreign victims of institutional violence rose between 2018 and 2019 (from 24 to 27%). The arrests of foreigners made by the Buenos Aires City Police, in turn, rose from 15 to 16% between 2017 and 2018 and remained at that number in 2019. According to annual reports 2015–2019, the percentages of foreign victims of institutional violence increased between 2015 and 2017, and decreased slightly towards 2018 and 2019.

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Sixthly, regarding the foreign nationalities, most of the sources emphasized the Senegalese population. The reports prepared by the Ministry of Justice and Security (Buenos Aires City Government) reiterated the same trend between 2017 and 2019 (alternating the percentages between Peru, Paraguay and Bolivia). In annual reports, it is important to highlight the increase in the percentage of “Not Informed” nationality. In the seventh place, there is a centrality of the Buenos Aires City Police in the recorded facts (either arrests or institutional violence episodes), and an increasingly marginal place of the Argentine Federal Police. Eighthly and last, either with quantitative or qualitative references, it is worth highlighting the centrality of the Balvanera, Flores and Floresta neighborhoods, near commercial spaces, although not exclusive to street vendors. I complemented this quantitative component with the qualitative one in the subsequent chapters, through the testimonies produced in the framework of semi-structured interviews with Senegalese and Venezuelan migrants. Each of them focused on a certain theme in particular: interactions between police and migrants, narratives of police violence, police attitudes towards migrants, the nexus between police and politics and the perception of the vulnerability of the migratory community of belonging to police action. In this sense, in Chapter 6, I highlighted five interpretations according to which the interviewees describe a different police action depending on whether it is an Argentine or foreign person: ignorance of the “other”, racism and xenophobia, lack of communication, sharing the workplace on the streets with the police and having an accent that is perceived diverse from the Argentine. In Chapter 7, in turn, I detailed episodes of police violence experienced by the people interviewed (or well, by acquaintances of them), by recovering their own voices from the testimonies. Specifically, stories that account for practices of police bias, stigmatization, persecution, robbery and kidnapping of merchandise and raids without a judicial warrant or certificate. At the same time, I described the frequency with which the interviewees perceive this type of practice (if it is a rule or rather,

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an exception) and the spatio-temporal context where they frame these practices. Chapter 8 focused on the police attitudes towards migrants. More concretely, I addressed police attitudes towards migrants during Cambiemos administration, modifications in the police attitudes between the previous (Macri) and the current administration (Fernández) and attitudes towards migrants and security forces. Regarding the latter, I was able to identify four arguments among the people interviewed: (1) rupture among the security forces regarding attitudes towards migrants, (2) emphasis on politics and on those who lead the security forces, (3) equality of all security forces in the mistreatment of those who are not from the country and have a different skin color and, finally, (4) there are no differences in treatment, whether the City Police or the Federal Police. Returning to arguments present in the state of the art (reviewed in the book’s third chapter), in Chapter 9 I described the perspectives of the interviewees regarding whether the police can be thought of as autonomous institution (and independent of political will) or as a political instrument, which follows and executes the guidelines erected by politicians from the “top”. In this sense, the domain constituted by the interviews allowed us to add an empirical element and enrich the theoretical discussion (and arguments) about the ways of thinking the links between police and politics. Specifically, for most of the interviewees, the security forces follow the guidelines of the State; the police execute orders that receive from the “top” and the police do what the government tells them to do. In Chapter 10, I advanced testimonies that account for selfperceptions about the greater or lesser vulnerability of the migratory group of belonging in the face of police action. In this sense, I highlighted that for the Senegalese interviewees, this greater vulnerability is due to the migrant condition, stigmatization, racism, discrimination, language, for spending a lot of time on the street, lack of documentation and skin color. The Venezuelan migrants interviewed, in turn, did not recognize that their community was more vulnerable, but—instead— they mentioned others, such as Bolivian, Paraguayan and Peruvian migrants.

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This chapter concluded by providing some testimonies that allow us to advance in improving the interactions between the police officers and Senegalese migrants, so that they do not generate, as consequences, the episodes of violence described in Chapter 7.

Final Reflections Among other aspects, this book invites us to consider two challenges. One of them related to the distinction that Alessandro De Giorgi (2005) makes between instrumental and symbolic functions of punishment. And especially considering the way in which the author defines the latter: When we talk about the symbolic functions of punishment and the system of social control, we take into consideration the political universes of discourse through which certain punitive practices are legitimized through a representation that places them as a positive overcoming of other practices, in order to produce a social consensus against them. (De Giorgi, 2005: 136)

In this sense, such a symbolic dimension invites us to rethink the ways in which the reviewed political discourses legitimize certain practices, create consensus regarding alterities that are “dangerous” or that constitute a “threat” and, by imagining, create and shape borders between “us” and “them”—borders that are not only material, but also symbolic, between welcome and unwelcome guests, and that they can imply a differential treatment, for example by police, on those “others”. By reflecting on these issues, the book is a contribution to the field of studies of border criminologies and crimmigration’s literature. The other challenge of this book, and on this point I follow other authors who are currently working in this line (Aliverti et al., 2023), is to decolonize the criminal question, to decentralize the production of knowledge about the criminal question with respect to the Global North, providing a theoretical and empirical research situated from the Global South, a way to counteract the so far centrality of the Global North as a sphere of production of scientific knowledge.

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References Aliverti, A., Carvalho, H., Chamberlen, A., & Sozzo, M. (2023). Decolonizing the criminal question. Oxford University Press. Cohen, N., & Gómez Rojas, G. (2019). Metodología de la Investigación, para qué? La producción de los datos y los diseños. Teseo. De Giorgi, A. (2005). Tolerancia cero. Estrategias y prácticas de la sociedad de control. Virus editorial. Decree No. 138/2021 (2021). Decreto N° 70/2017. Derogación. March 5. Buenos Aires, Argentina. http://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/ane xos/345000-349999/347595/norma.htm Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (2008). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Aldine. Monclús Masó, M., & García, M. B. (2012). El impacto de las migraciones en la criminalidad en la Argentina: mitos y realidades. In Cuadernos Migratorios N°2 El impacto de las migraciones en Argentina (pp. 323–365). OIM. Monclús Masó, M., & Brandariz García, J. Á. (2014). Políticas y prácticas de control migratorio: estudio comparativo del control de los migrantes en el contexto latinoamericano y europeo. Ed. Didot. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Sage.

Index

A

Accent 213 Arbitrary arrests 122–124, 156 Argentine Federal Police 8–10, 12, 13, 50, 52, 61, 62, 67, 112, 114, 121–126, 132, 176, 186, 213 Attitudes 141, 176, 178, 182, 183 Availability 149, 204 Axial coding 26

B

Bandit cops 165 Buenos Aires City Police 8, 12, 13, 50, 112, 114, 117, 118, 123–126, 132, 133, 176, 183, 186, 212, 213

Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police 8, 11, 12, 39, 51, 61, 63, 121, 122, 185

C

Cambiemos administration 6, 7, 13, 25, 75, 76, 107, 110, 116, 119, 126, 160, 170, 171, 176, 177, 179, 211, 212, 214 Categorical discrimination 138 Categories 16, 25, 26, 75, 76, 95, 211 Colonial legacies 78 Communication, lack of 17, 137, 143, 146, 203, 213 Cop cultures 141 COVID-19 pandemic 23, 32, 118, 182, 184 Crime 52

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Abiuso, Police, Politics and the Immigration-Crime Nexus, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46379-2

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Index

Crime statistics 94, 108, 109 Criminalization 139 of migrations 85, 172, 179 Crimmigration process 59

L

Labor insertion 18, 201 Language 18, 143, 145, 152, 201, 202, 204, 214 barriers 146

D

Discrimination 18, 56, 120, 138, 142, 183, 201–203, 214 Documentation 204 lack of 214 E

Educational level 205 G

Global South 19, 209, 210, 215 Grey cheque 43, 193 Grey zone 53, 166 Grounded Theory 15, 23, 25, 76, 211

M

Methodological surveillance 16, 29, 108, 110, 126, 212 Metropolitan Police 123 Migrant condition 202, 214 Moral panics 179 Motochorros 91

N

Narco-criminality 7, 86, 93, 179 National taxonomies 56, 78 Neoliberalism 6, 76, 179, 210

O I

Identity checks 59, 60, 158 Ignorance of the “other” 17 Immigration and crime 5, 7, 15, 16, 24, 26, 35, 66, 75, 76, 94, 110, 180, 210 Immigration enforcement 58 Institutional violence 111–116, 118, 121, 126, 133, 151, 161, 212 Instrumentality thesis 43, 193 Insularity thesis 43, 193 Integration 18, 201

Open coding 26 Operation Nexus 54, 56 Order-police duality 42

P

Perceived accent 152 Persecution 17, 155, 156, 159–161, 164, 165, 178, 213 Police 194 accountability 45, 194 and politics 15, 18, 32, 35, 36, 41, 44, 45, 48, 50, 54, 172, 173, 176, 186, 191, 192, 213, 214

Index

bias 17, 139, 155, 156, 158, 213 -criminal pact 54 policy 42 property 150 reform 48–50 self-government 46 suspicion 139 system 41, 192 violence 17, 32, 36, 37, 65, 155, 176, 202, 213 Policing 44, 55, 56, 194 and governance 44 and politics 44 migration 56 Political activity 44 Political conservatism 7, 76, 179, 210 Political discourses 14, 15, 23, 24, 75, 76, 172, 176, 210, 211 Political misrule 46, 48, 194, 195 Politicization 42, 45, 48, 52, 194 Prejudice 141, 142 Properties 26, 75, 76, 95 Punitiveness 90

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S

Security forces 14, 112, 187, 188, 196, 214 Selective coding 26 Selective punitiveness 16, 88, 91 Semi-structured interviews 14, 17, 18, 23, 30, 172, 173, 176, 209, 210, 213 Senegalese migrants 14, 17, 31, 210, 213 Situational discrimination 139, 149 Skin color 152, 187, 204, 214 Societal racism 150 Statistical discrimination 138 Stereotypes 166 Stereotyping processes 141 Stigmatization 17, 18, 155, 156, 161, 178, 183, 201, 202, 213, 214 Subcategories 26, 75, 76, 95

U

Unwelcome guests 82

R

Race 56 Racial categories 56, 78 Racial discrimination 123, 124 Racial prejudice 141, 142, 150 Racial profiling 55, 56 Racial segregation 57 Racism 17, 18, 57, 137, 141, 146, 201, 202, 213, 214 Raids 17, 63, 145, 155, 156, 213 Reformist projects 49

V

Venezuelan migrants 14, 17, 31, 210, 213 Violence 57, 65, 122, 215

X

Xenophobia 17, 137, 142, 146, 161, 178, 183, 213