The Congo Cop through an Urban Lens

Michel Thill

December 3, 2025

My recently published open access book, The Police, the State and the Congo Cop, studies the state in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) through the prism of one of its central pillars and the supposed holder of its monopoly of violence: the police. Some would argue that the very purpose of the police is to keep civilians in check, and the powerful in place. International rankings on Congo’s governance, rule of law and security corroborate such views and help explain common perceptions and portrayals of its state as predatory, corrupt and failed. Yet such scores are unable to do justice to everyday policework with its countless facets and convoluted challenges. My book deep-dives into this complexity to try and make sense of it.

The book is based on thirteen months of fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2019, primarily in the eastern city of Bukavu, as well as in rural areas of South Kivu province, and in the western cities of Kinshasa and Matadi. During this time, I talked to over 300 people including 130 police officers of whom 18 were women. I collected and reviewed countless official documents on the police, their reform and regulations, led interviews, focus groups and serial conversations, and engaged in participant observation, in part as an intern in a police station. Together, these methods enabled me to study police encounters with the public ranging from the mundane to the bizarre, and trace the professional journeys of reformed police officers from the classroom to the station to the street. 

As policing is a predominantly urban phenomenon, my research touches on questions of urban governance and order, and on urban (in)security and crime. This blog seeks to filter my book’s central arguments through this explicitly urban lens, looking at the historical and empirical chapters with an urban gaze, before concluding with a broader reflection on the production of urban (police) spaces.

A history of the police between the urban and the rural

Histories of urbanization and those of the police are inseparable. The DRC is no different in that regard, yet its colonial past has given it a bifurcated character. In this understanding, the city was defined as a white space, governed by (racialized, colonial) law, while the countryside was largely ruled by often arbitrarily imposed customary chiefs. In Mamdani’s terms, urban (largely white) residents were citizens, while rural (largely African) residents were subjects. 

A colonial-era building functioning as a police station in peri-urban Kasha, Bukavu, 2016 (credit: author)

This bifurcation extended to policing practices. Police forces slowly emerged, were reorganized, abandoned, and reformed in growing urban centres, where they contained Congolese members ‒ who often came from the countryside ‒ to specific quarters and monitored any violations of segregated spaces and places. Policing of rural hinterlands largely remained in the hands of the army, the Force Publique. Called on by territorial administrators to discipline disagreeable subjects and crush any signs of rebellion, their work was referred to as ‘expeditions to maintain order’ or ‘police operations’. Many of these soldiers, along with their militarized ways of thinking and doing, integrated gradually emerging colonial police units. This practice is arguably reiterated in more recent demobilization and reintegration efforts of former armed group combatants, many of whom joined the police after the Congo Wars (1996-2003) and subsequent major episodes of violent conflict. At the same time, at least in practice, policing in today’s DRC continues to be spatially divided whereby the police are responsible for urban order, while the army does much policing work in the country’s vast rural areas. In a nutshell, while the Congolese Police as an institution emerged in decidedly urban(izing) spaces, the activity of policing along with its militarized logics, remains shaped by rural rationalities of conquest, control and subjugation.

Police reform with an urban bias

While reform has been a constant theme across the history of DRC’s police, current efforts date back to the end of the Second Congo War (1998-2003) and aim to create a new, a-political, accountable and community-orientated police service through a so-called ‘proximity police’ operating model. From its conceptualization and application, police reform has had a distinctly urban bias. At its peak and in pilot cities, there is no doubt that police reform left a substantial mark. As one reformed officer in Bukavu put it back in 2018: ‘Even a policeman who couldn’t write his name wanted to do proximity police. And when we left the centre, we had cars, we were impeccably dressed and the population said: “This is not our police! Where does this police come from that respects the people, respects international norms and human rights?”’. 

A faded billboard promoting police reform in the western city of Matadi, 2018 (credit: author)

The few efforts at extending the proximity police model to rural areas has been a major challenge due to differences in context. In the countryside, the police have even fewer means, distances to cover are vast, and, at least in the East, scarcely equipped officers face lethal armed groups. These challenges can mean that those arrested by the police are detained until officers can mobilize enough money for their transport to a court that can be hundreds of kilometers away, thereby violating the 48-hour detention limit in the process. Moreover and similar to the city, rural communities organize their own policing systems such as night patrols by village youth and vigilantism rather than relying on the police. Furthermore, this relative police absence means that the Congolese army plays a significant role in policing the countryside, perpetuating militarized policing practices as mentioned above. This absence also provides fodder for armed groups who present themselves as protectors of their communities who they portray as having been abandoned by the state. By channeling funding, infrastructure, equipment and training towards cities and towns, police reform with its urban bias likely corroborates this long-standing urban-rural policing divide. 

The station as police space

Turning more directly to the police’s everyday work, my book makes a distinction between that which happens within the station, versus outside of it. This clear difference illustrates once more how space is fundamental to policing. The station’s walls disconnect those who step inside of it from the outside world that plays by different rules. The layout of its rooms, the concentration of uniforms and other paraphernalia of state symbols speak and demand order and discipline; the station’s desks, chairs, files and folders, and, in rare cases, desktops and intermittent electricity hint at professionals at work. The station is a space that does much of the heavy lifting involved in claiming authority, and where officers therefore go largely uncontested. 

Framed by its walls, it is here that the Congo Cop comes into their own. They hone their craft of reconciling colliding demands, aptly balancing reform rules and principles with the need to feed their superiors and themselves, all while appeasing quarrelling families and mediating neighbourhood feuds. In the words of a police officer, they emerge as a ‘church in the middle of the village’, or, as criminologist Ildephonse Tshinyama put it, they function as ‘palaver tree where it is the village’s wise elder who strives to reconcile each person’s points of view by trying to find compromise’. 

Police station in the neighbourhood of Panzi, Bukavu, 2017 (credit: author)

Importantly, however, the Congo Cop does not forget about the need to feed his superiors, and to find ways to make ends meet for themselves and their family. They leverage their authority within the station in their negotiations with plaintiffs, suspects and witnesses alike so that they do not emerge out of these encounters empty-handed. They nudge their counterparts to ‘help them a bit’, remind them that the work of justice is ‘a right to be paid for’, increase pressure by threatening detention or even exclaim that if there is ‘no compromise, we use the whip’. Yet, the use of actual violence is very rarely necessary. In this walled-off space that is the police station, officers ultimately wield power and thus get the last word. 

City streets as a challenge to police power

Police power changes once officers step out of the station. Policework in the streets is a different kind of beast and therefore requires a different kind of policing. Firstly, contact with people means more opportunities to generate revenue, which in turn translates into police superiors’ demands for steeper kickbacks from their rank-and-file. Secondly, partly because of these opportunities, many others such as street kids, soldiers and a variety of gangs get involved in regulating all kinds of economic activities and movement, creating fiercely competitive policing spaces in which the right to impose and maintain order is contested. Thirdly, the police are far removed from their stations that convey authority. Out in the open, all they have left is their uniform to command respect. Yet all too often, its outworn look attracts ridicule, and its meaning provokes anger, forcing officers to use violence or simply walk away.

Due to this station-street duality, one may venture that the police in the Congo are not as actively participating in the production of urban space as other forces do in less competitive policing landscapes. Or, adding more nuance, the police operate differently in different urban spaces, adapting to and navigating the latter’s varying conditions. Their role in producing urban space is therefore also varied, and can only be pinned down more accurately when considering the specific context in which a given police practice unfolds. At times, officers directly contribute to producing spaces hostileto specific groups such as sellers at unlicensed markets; at other times, by teaming up with gangs and thugs in their joint search for revenue, they participate in creating unsafe urban environments; and at still other times, they are entirely absent, leaving policing, and its role in producing urban space, to others. Ultimately, this permanently contingent police presence and absence, always to be contextually qualified and nuanced, also helps explain how the state in the DRC can at times seem everywhere and nowhere, tangible and illusive, and enduring and fleeting all at once.

Policy and practice considerations

For outside interventions aiming to reform the police, these everyday practices of policework are important to take into account. They illustrate both officers’ agency, and their limits. They also offer a bottom-up perspective on what kind of reform initiatives could make a difference in actual police practice, and thus in state-society relations. 

Stickers as remnants of a UK-funded police reform project, Kadutu, Bukavu, 2016 (credit: author)

The persisting urban-rural dualism in policing that sustains militarized practices and maintains the army as an important policing actor is likely too tall an order for police reform to address alone. That said, as mentioned above and as criminologist Alain Mutombo writes, everyday police practice does already contribute to ‘creat[ing] societal harmony which is only relative and temporary’. A starting point would be to learn more about those moments, and spaces, in which such harmony arises. Platforms that facilitate encounters between police and community outside of the station and the street in order to foster dialogue, nurture a sense of accountability, and build trust are fundamental in this regard and are part and parcel of ongoing police reform efforts in the DRC. Moreover, the difference that stations, their walls and police uniforms can make in the way officers go about their work, and therefore about how citizens perceive their state, should not be underestimated. 

Overall, we still know surprisingly little about what kind of changes reform efforts trigger in police practice, how such changes are sustained over time, and the role of spatial aspects in this. It is therefore worthwhile making everyday policework a more prominent element of Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning in order for reformers to be able to better pinpoint, and leverage, the conditions that underpin ‘good’ police practice.

Dr. Michel Thill is a Senior Program Officer with swisspeace, a research and practice institute dedicated to effective peacebuilding. Sitting at the intersection of policy and everyday practice, his work and research is interested in security sector reform, governance of urban security and land, and the interplay between global policy and local realities, with a particular focus on the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Header image: a police station in rural Numbi, in the Hauts Plateaux of South Kivu’s Kalehe territory, 2019. Credit: author.

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