The proliferation of community-oriented approaches in criminal justice across the Global North has generated influential theoretical frameworks that explain the shift from welfarist to neoliberal penality. However, these dominant narratives have primarily emerged from Anglo-American and Western European contexts, where their explanatory power has also been critically examined (see Bell, 2011; Xenakis & Cheliotis, 2019). Moreover, they prove significantly insufficient when examined through the lens of Global South experiences. This chapter argues that Chile’s post-authoritarian trajectory reveals how appeals to the community in security governance serve to legitimise and consolidate problematic power relations rather than democratise crime control. Through an analysis of Chilean community policing and collaborative governance initiatives, we demonstrate how police institutions strategically deploy welfare provision and community engagement rhetoric to secure institutional legitimacy while maintaining hierarchical control over marginalised populations. Rather than representing genuine democratisation or effective policy transfer from North to South, these practices reveal how community participation becomes a mechanism for fragmenting resistance, responsibilising citizens for their own security and obscuring exclusionary consequences behind participatory facades.