Latin America and the Caribbean is the most violent region on earth. However, implementation of evidence-based policing (EBP) lags due to institutional, cultural, political, and skills barriers. This chapter analyzes the context in which EBP is implemented and the challenges encountered and identifies actions to further promote EBP in the region. Challenges to adopt EBP include those present in advanced countries such as the need to institutionalize EBP and to build academic-practitioner partnerships, and also some challenges more prominent in the region including lack of reliable data, instability of political institutions and lack of trust in the police

The case of El Salvador illustrates how temporal variation in the strength of government–elite linkages played a role in explaining the difference between a failed attempt in Mauricio Funes’ administration and a successful one in Salvador Sánchez Cerén’s administration. Even in the context of one of the highest levels of violent crime in the world, the country’s first left-of-center administration failed to adopt elite taxes in order to increase public-safety expenditures. It wasn’t until the government formed a coalition with right-of-center parties and linkages with the business sectors improved, that an increased tax burden on the wealthy became possible.

Focusing on Colombia’s “Democratic Security Taxes,” Chapter 4 is the first of four case studies illustrating causal logic of elite taxation in the adoption of security taxes. Since 2002, the government in that country has adopted a series of taxes on the wealthy to address a deplorable public-safety situation. The revenue from the taxes has played a central role in funding efforts considered successful in reducing violent crime. With a historically difficult conflict and traditional set of elites, Colombia is a least likely case in which elites would have become invested in financing the strengthening of the state. Moreover, with the approval of elite-funded security taxes on multiple occasions across administrations, the Colombian case allows us to study the conditions under which this investment in state building becomes sustained over time.

Chapter 5 studies the case of Costa Rica, an example of a diminished form of elite taxation due to weak linkages between the government and business elites. Whereas average levels of violence have remained lower in Costa Rica compared to several of its Central American neighbors, economic elites concentrated in the province and canton of San José experienced sharp increases in violent crime. In 2011, the country adopted a flat tax on corporations and earmarked its revenue for public-safety purposes. However, Costa Rica’s left-of-center administrations struggled to overcome obstacles related to elites’ mistrust in government, which led to a much less targeted form of taxation.

Chapter 7 studies the case of Mexico, whose security situation has deteriorated dramatically over the last decade. It shows that, although a crisis-driven explanation would predict elites’ investment in strengthening the state, the federal government has not adopted – or even entertained – security taxes. Instead, this chapter shows how Mexican elites have been relatively less affected than their counterparts elsewhere in the region because of the geographic concentration of crime outside of Mexico City. This has translated into much less pressure on the federal government to address the public-safety situation. Consequently, elites’ impetus to invest in the fiscal strengthening of the state has been subdued at the national level and has taken place instead at the state level.

Neurological theories of forensic psychology pertain to the brain development and neurological functioning underpinning behaviour. This chapter discusses the impact of insults to normal brain development and functioning (broadly termed neurodisabilities) on criminal and violent behaviour, including childhood trauma, abusive environments, acquired brain injury, and neurodevelopmental disorders. These neurodisabilities lead to psychological and emotional dysregulation, alongside behavioural, cognitive, and social difficulties. They constitute an underdiagnosed silent epidemic amongst populations in contact with the law, and when unaddressed are key factors in a revolving door justice system. They create a ‘melting pot’ of multiplicative neurodevelopmental risk factors which make people vulnerable to reactive and aggressive behaviour. Crime has huge social, human, and economic cost; and understanding this ‘melting pot’ of vulnerability is key to developing rehabilitative justice systems and reducing cycles of reoffending by screening and providing proper support for those with neurodisabilities.

The eighteenth century has been considered a flourishing era during the Qing dynasty, but the century also witnessed an upsurge in interpersonal violence that triggered a protracted crackdown on crime. Part of a broader ‘legislative turn’, Qing rulers responded with legislation that fine-tuned existing laws, created new offences, restricted pardons and expanded the use of the death penalty. By embracing a strategy that deployed the presumed deterrent power of capital punishment, eighteenth-century emperors presented staggering practical and ideological challenges that threatened to overwhelm the judicial bureaucracy. Violent crime exposed fissures in the social order that endangered bedrock principles such as ties of filiation, patriarchal privilege, social hierarchy and female chastity. Evidence gleaned from homicide reports illustrates incidents of horrendous violence that were inextricably linked to macro-economic and demographic changes. The rural poor engaged in survival strategies that were desperate, pathetic and horrifically violent. Unfortunately, the crackdown on crime alone could not adequately address the inequities of eighteenth-century economic and demographic change that undermined social and economic norms, vitiated conventional concepts of justice, and disrupted the ideological consensus of Chinese civilisation.