Police Deaths in El Salvador

Last week, Rodrigo Ávila, Director of the National Civil Police of El Salvador from 1994 to 1999, affirmed that the maras (gangs) were responsible for the increase in police deaths in 2015. Last year was one of  the three years with the most police deaths, along with 1998 and 1999, after eighty-six policemen were killed. In twenty-three years, more than 1,133 policemen have been murdered. In 2016 alone, twenty-nine Salvadoran policemen were killed between January and September. The three years with the highest police death rates in recent history – 1998, 1999 and 2015 – were all preceded by ceasefire attempts between the major maras in El Salvador.

The rise in direct confrontations between police forces and the gangs, which increased by 164 percent from 2014 to 2015, seem to uphold Avila’s claim, as the criminologist Carlos Carcash told El Salvador.com, a Salvadoran digital newspaper.

Carcash also points to the “National Police Force’s extremist rules’’ as another probable cause in the rise of police deaths. He refers to the reform to Article 16 of the Police Law, which was amended in 2015 after forty-five policemen were killed in the first four months. The reform allows for quartering, or troop lodging, whenever the Police director orders it. ‘‘Militarizing the police force would be a huge step backwards,’’ Carash says. ‘‘The solution [to police violence] is not concentrating them in special housing centers.’’

The legal permission for violent acts and the ostensibly corresponding rise in police deaths has caused a crisis within the police. Marvin Reyes, a former twenty-year Salvadoran policeman described the quartering as ‘‘inhumane,’’ asserting that the police did not have the space or the funds for quartering and that the law’s reform is dangerous because it fosters a culture within the police force of not questioning authority. Reyes also criticized the weak financial and psychological support offered to the policemen’s families by the National Police Force.

In addition, ‘‘low wages, marginalization, verbal and psychological mistreatment, degradation and deplorable conditions within the police delegations have been the most frequent complaints to the national police force’s union,’’ El Salvador.com reports.