Join us for the first talk in CIPR’s 2026 Fall Series: Governance in Times of Crisis in Latin America.

Guillermo Trejo (University of Notre Dame) will give a talk entitled:
Bringing Communities Back to Community Policing: How Participatory Self-Governance Institutions Shape Preferences for Policing in Indigenous Mexico

How do historically marginalized groups in stratified multi-ethnic societies form their policing preferences? Guillermo Trejo, Shannan Mattiace and Natan Skigin focus on the Indigenous highlands of Guerrero, Mexico, where citizens confronting criminal gangs choose between an armed, professional municipal police force and a lightly armed community police force of unpaid village residents rooted in Indigenous self-governance institutions. Drawing on two ethnographically informed survey experiments, we find that Indigenous citizens expect the community police to be less likely to accept bribes from criminal gangs, more likely to bring offenders to justice, and more legitimate than their state counterparts. A factorial experiment shows that citizens prefer a police force composed of community insiders selected by community assemblies to serve on a rotating basis, rather than a professional force of outsiders over whom they have little control. Beyond police co-ethnicity or security outcomes, marginalized ethnic minorities are process-oriented— they prefer a bottom-up police force that minimizes corruption and abuse through robust community participation.