Modernizing Warriors

Trainingand urban warfare techniquesHuman Rightsand proximity policingThis chapter examines the tensions between attempts to modernize the police and the resistance towards these by analyzing the training of police officers through the Deleuzian notions of capture and escape. It shows how, on an institutional level, reform attempts failed due to the prevalence of a militarized institutional culture as well as a notion of cultural war that frustrated attempts to implement the human rights-framework in everyday police practices. Despite its softer rhetoric, understandings of policing as warfare also underpinned proximity policing, which was oriented towards gathering intelligence and gaining allies in the war on drugs. Rather than encouraging proximity and trust between police and the communities they patrolled, the prevalence of practices of elimination at the UPPs often deepened existing divisions.