Security & Strategic Review - November 2012 (ISSN 1741-4202)

President Danilo Medina announced in November that he was setting up a special commission to work out policies designed to ‘modernise’ the national police (PN). Only a few days earlier, media headlines had given great prominence to a study which predicted that rising criminality could lead to the collapse of democracy in the Dominican Republic within 10 to 15 years, against a backdrop of complaints against the excessive use of force by the PN and its complaisant attitude regarding persistently high rates of violent crime. Just below the surface is the extent to which the drugs trade, which acts in collusion with members of the security services and the business community, has contributed to the doubling of the country’s homicide rate since 2000.

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