The new government announces an increase in the number of police in some communes and a plan to combat rising crime. It has been a promise of governments from left and right and the data is bad.

From our parliamentary experience in citizen security, serious specialists confirm that the police is only one factor in the solution. The integral task, starting from education, cultural values of coexistence and social development, requires at least five integrated, systematised actions:

  1. Adequate legislation.
  2. Well-trained police.
  3. Effective and timely justice.
  4. A prison system of punishment and rehabilitation.  Something alien to punitive garophalic mentalities that continue to believe that prisons should be like La Conciergerie, which you can see in the Indian ink sketch at the top of these lines, which I drew standing on the Pont Neuf. In Paris, Marie Antoinette, humiliated before being cruelly guillotined, had better conditions than the overcrowded inmates in Chile and Latin America, in prisons that are schools of crime. And
  5. Controlled plans and programs for the social reintegration of released convicts.

In the Chilean social crisis, although the discrediting of institutions includes the civil police and the carabineros, citizens demand more police action. However, the same policy that summons them to use the force of the State against crime, conspires against police commitment when the latter still does not know how to regulate just repression with HR and therefore inhibits or exceeds itself. Carabineros feel threatened by the humanist-looking maximalism that President Boric’s program exhibits when the letter threatens to eliminate the difference between officers and non-commissioned officers and that in his political environment, he built a discourse of anti-Carabineros slips during his recent campaign. While the right-wing only calls for an iron fist and a sector of the left seems to call for action-inaction by the police, politics shows an inability to demand and equip the “carabineros” for an effective mission with humanist principles and to build from the state the integral task of the five minimum factors.