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Whistles and clubs: the institutional and social history of the police of Lima, 1890s-1910s
Huertas Castillo, Luz Elvira
Huertas Castillo, Luz Elvira
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Date
2015
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Abstract
This study explores the institutional, social, and cultural characteristics of the police of Lima at the turn of the twentieth century. The research focuses on the contrast between the ideas and projects of the elite about policing and policemen and the reality of policing in everyday life. This project aligns with current studies on the role of the state by examining the state internally as a complex space in which diverse ways to see the state bureaucracy, the police, policies of social control, and society converged. First, it explores the limits and effects that a long history of reforms and patrimonial approaches to politics imposed on the police institution.^Second, it shifts the emphasis from state policies and the elite's ideas about order to the factors and filters that conditioned the enforcement of those policies and ideas, such as the working conditions within police stations in Lima and the disconnect between the upper levels of the police hierarchy and the rank and file of the Guardia Civil. Third, it humanizes the police forces by analyzing the socio-cultural characteristics of the patrolmen who monitored the city on a daily basis, the way they viewed the police institution, and their daily interactions with civilians, especially from the working classes. Finally, it explores civilians' views on the police and policing and the way their own mechanisms for self-surveillance affected official policing. This work demonstrates that the state did not have the monopoly of policing in the city.^Rather, the political use of the state bureaucracy and the disconnect within the police hierarchy ended up limiting role of this institution in the public sphere. While the elites focused on improving the technologies of surveillance and the image of the police as a modern institution, in reality, commissars and policemen had very little resources to satisfy the demands for social control of the upper classes. In everyday life, policemen, who belonged to the working classes of the capital city, enforced the law following their own criteria and views on order, justice, and social control.
Contents
Subject
Subject(s)
Police Peru Lima History 19th century.
Police Peru Lima History 20th century.
Lima (Peru) History.
Peru History 1829-1919.
Peru Social conditions 19th century.
Peru Social conditions 20th century.
Police Peru Lima History 20th century.
Lima (Peru) History.
Peru History 1829-1919.
Peru Social conditions 19th century.
Peru Social conditions 20th century.
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Genre
Dissertation
Description
Format
1 online resource (x, 368 pages) :
Department
History