How does subnational variation in repression affect attitudes toward police? Evidence from Iraq’s 2019 protests

Abstract

Recent episodes of severe police repression and violence against protesters around the world have brought new urgency to longstanding calls for police reform and in some cases more fundamental structural changes including abolition of existing police institutions. However, the police are not monolithic and there is considerable subnational variation in the extent to which individual police officers and units use excessive force against civilians, and this variation has important implications for police legitimacy in the eyes of the public. In Iraq, where federal police violently repressed anti-government demonstrations in 2019—killing more than 600 protesters—but local police refrained from violence and in some cases intervened to protect civilians, public opinion became significantly more negative toward federal police but not toward local police. These results suggest that civilians distinguish between the conduct of different actors in a decentralized, fragmented security apparatus and attribute blame individually rather than collectively blaming the state security apparatus as a whole. I suggest that two mechanisms—decentralization and fragmentation of state security institutions—interact to shape the pattern of subnational police violence in Iraq and discuss broader implications for police reform in Iraq and beyond.