Community Policing in Sierra Leone

In this article in The Journal of Modern African Studies, Peter Albrecht explores how police reform has been implemented in rural Sierra Leone.

It is argued that while police reform was taken forward in Sierra Leone to consolidate a state system after the country’s civil war ended in 2002, it reproduced a local system of governance that centers on paramount and lesser chiefs. In this way, it is shown that policing has a distinctly political quality to it, as those who enforce order also define what order is and determine access to resources.

The argument is substantiated by an ethnographic exploration of how and with what implications community policing has been introduced in Peyima, a small town in Kono District in eastern Sierra Leone, and focuses on one of its primary institutional expressions, Local Policing Partnership Boards.