Professor Hernán Flom Gives Lecture on Latin American Police Violence

Nick Cimillo ’26

Features Editor

Each semester, the Faculty Research Committee invites three faculty members to present their findings on research projects they’ve conducted to the Trinity community, intended to “showcase faculty excellence in specific areas of study.”  As the third and final installment in this semester’s Faculty Lecture Series, Professor Hernán Flom, Senior Lecturer of Political Science, gave a lecture on his research on police violence in Latin America. The lecture was delivered during common hour on Nov. 7 in Dangremond Family Commons before an audience of around 20 attendees, mostly faculty. Flom specifically delved into his findings from fieldwork conducted in the city of Cali, Colombia.

Professor Flom began the lecture with some background on what drew him to this topic. “What drew me to this case originally,” he began, “is looking into this idea of the politics of police violence in Latin America. I have studied this concept of police violence [for] my first book (“The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America”), which was centered on the regulation of drug trafficking in Latin America, but looked at police violence as a mechanism of such regulation.” The work compiled in Professor Flom’s first book was focused on the countries of Argentina and Brazil, and for his future work, he aimed to “expand the range of countries that I was considering.”

There were also some specific factors that led to his focus on Colombia, and specifically the city of Cali. “[Colombia] has, I would say, an unexpectedly low level of lethal police violence,” he explained. “I say ‘unexpectedly’ because Colombia has a lot of factors that would make it a case of high [levels] of conflict and police violence; it has been in a civil war for more than 60 years.” Alongside this armed conflict between the state and many guerilla groups, Flom also cited drug trafficking, specifically Colombia’s status as the world’s largest exporter of cocaine, as a major contributing factor for police intervention. Cali specifically had features that stood out to Flom: it is a dense urban center of 2.3 million people and also has Colombia’s largest Black population. He was also curious to inspect a city that wasn’t the capital city of Bogotá.

All of this culminated into three combined months of fieldwork in Cali, conducted in March and August in 2023 and March of this year, centered around the question: “When, how, why, and by whom is police violence legitimized?” Across 40 semi-structured interviews, ethnographic immersions from three neighborhoods and information collected from secondary sources like newspapers and government and NGO reports, Flom narrowed his answer down to a few key factors. Chief among them was the perception of police authority, or lack thereof; according to Flom, many interviewed police officers claimed that citizens didn’t seem to acknowledge their authority, and when this led to the assertion of authority from officers, encounters were more likely to escalate. “I found that this was a good encapsulat[ion of] most of the interactions I saw between citizens and police,” he said, “and also said a lot about police and other actors throughout the city, from politicians to sometimes the citizens themselves, justified police’s use of force and, in some cases, violence.” Flom also observed a kind of “othering” towards some of Cali’s neighborhoods; Flom specifically noted that police viewed residents of Cali’s eastern zone as having “no respect for the law.”

Flom aims to refine his research even further going forward. After an upcoming round of fieldwork in the spring of 2025, he aims to compile all his findings from Cali into a second book to be published in 2026.