Amidst the virtual stacks

1 hour writing, 5 hours reading/researching

This week is all about focus: I continued working on the police chapter. Today, I wrote about why I focus on the police within the security forces (which also include the army and other federal law-enforcement agencies), and began figuring out how the chapter will turn into a conference paper for September. In the proposal, I said I would trace the development of police systems in Latin America and categorize them in terms of their impact on regime stability. What that means in practical terms is that I need to combine parts of the chapter on police systems and the chapter on Colombia in comparative perspective. This is a good thing, as those are two chapters that need the most work right now, and that my recent research is helping to build.

Along those lines, I scoured the library catalogs for historical information on Latin American police forces. As I was compiling a country-by-country list of sources, I realized that I had more information already than I anticipated. This is not an uncommon occurrence, and is an important part of the writing process: makigng connections between information you've gathered at very different times and in very different contexts. This is especially the case when it's been so many years that you've been working on a project off and on.

In particular, I know that I can identify three types of patterns in security forces: those in which there is a national police and an army (most of them, including Colombia), those in which there is no national police (only state police) and an army (Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela), and those in which there is a national police but no army (Costa Rica and Panama). That's already enough to talk about in a paper. What I'd like to fill in for this paper - and will need to do eventually for the dissertation - is the history of control over these institutions, so I can categorize each police system as politicized or militarized over time. We'll see how that goes the rest of this week.

Restaurant Week was, I have to say, quite a disappointment. The three places I went for lunch - Nobu, Megu, and Morimoto - really didn't try very hard at all. The menus of the first and last were almost identical, although Morimoto didn't even bother with a dessert. I mean, the ingredients were all fresh, the execution competent, and the service friendly, but there was no spark or imagination in the offerings. You'd think the point of Restaurant Week would be to entice folks like me who eat in high-end places every once in a while to come back and pay full price. I guess someone didn't get the memo. Instead, I have three on a list of places I'm not eager to go back to. I think it's also an issue of the most interesting places - Del Posto, Chanterelle, Gramercy Tavern - being already sold out. Lesson: act faster next year!