Newswise — DeVere Woods Jr. spent 26 years fighting crime as a police officer in Michigan before joining the faculty of Indiana State University's criminology department in 1999.
Attorney David Skelton, an Indiana State criminology professor for 29 years, has served as regional administrator for the Indiana Criminal Justice Planning Agency and is currently director of the university's Institute for Criminology.
Now Skelton and Woods are lending their expertise to the National Civilian Police of El Salvador as that nation works to modernize its approach to law enforcement and shake off effects of an 11-year civil war, a 1998 hurricane and a pair of earthquakes in 2001 that killed 2,000 people, injured 8,000 and left nearly one in four of the nation's 6.3 million residents homeless.
The professors are serving as consultants to the Center of Criminology and Police Sciences (CECRIPOL), established in February in the Salvadoran capital of San Salvador to analyze crime data and develop effective crime-fighting techniques.
Since taking over law enforcement duties from the military at the conclusion of the civil war in 1992, El Salvador's civilian police force "has faced the difficult task of lowering the nation's high crime rates with steadfast dedication and bravery, losing more than 500 police offices in the line of duty," said Cecripol Director Carlos Ponce, who holds a master's degree in criminology from Indiana State.
While substantial progress has been made in fighting certain types of crimes, including kidnappings for ransom, which fell from 114 in 2001 to seven in 2003, Salvadoran police have met with more limited success in battling youth gangs, rape and drug trafficking. That's where CECRIPOL and its U.S. partners can help, Ponce said.
"High ranking officials of the National Civilian Police realize that the scientific and academic study of criminal behavior and police work is an important element in the development of crime control policies of modern law enforcement agencies," he said.
Indiana State faculty members will assist CECRIPOL in locating funding for research, designing technical aspects of research and evaluation and conducting such research. They will also prepare periodic critical evaluations of CECRIPOL. "I was very encouraged with the level of cooperation we got and the dedication of the individuals in the police department," said Woods, who joined Skelton in traveling to El Salvador for the announcement of CECRIPOL.
They have the potential to become a model police department for Central America and beyond. If things stay stable in El Salvador and we see people working, committed to democratic principles like we have, that could have a great impact on the region," Woods said.
El Salvador is the first Central American nation to establish an office devoted to criminal research.
Short term goals of the project "are to do some quick studies that would be of immediate use to the national police" while long term goals are "to maintain the partnership between Indiana State University and the National Police of El Salvador so that we can mutually benefit from academic research, policy research, and research in problems of police administration, in order to improve both our academic understanding of how the system works and to improve the operation of the national police," said Skelton.
"There are few criminological and police science researches and theorists that focus their work on Latin countries, even though many have argued that culture is an important issue in the study of criminal behavior and police work," Ponce said. "Hispanic communities are increasing worldwide. Thus, criminological and police science research that focuses on Latin cultures is needed to develop effective crime control and prevention strategies."
In addition to returning to El Salvador this summer, Woods and Skelton plan to attend a conference in Slovenia aimed at emerging law enforcement agencies in Eastern Europe. Police officers from Kosovo plan to visit Terre Haute later this year to learn from Indiana State University and local police.
"The new countries in the Balkans are going through a similar process, converting from the former Yugoslavia and a communist government to smaller units which are democratically committed and are also developing a democratic policing style in a very difficult environment," Skelton said. "That's the sort of thing that we want to encourage throughout the world."
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