Policing The Favelas Of Rio De Janeiro PDF Download

This thesis aims to study the daily life of a military police station in a favela in Rio deJaneiro, Brazil. This station is part of the Pacifying Police Unit that was created to change the wardynamic held in the favelas in Rio de Janeiro. The traditional violent police invasions were replacedby a proximity-based policing that combined surveillance and social initiatives. The main goal of thePacifying Police was to “preserve lives” through the restoration of democratic rule and relationsbetween favela residents and the police, a relationship historically based on fear and distrust.Observations of foot and vehicle patrols were made for more than a year (2014-2015), as well asobservations of initiatives organized by the station and puntual observations of a civil police stationand parlamentary discussion. A historical search of newspapers also complemented the analysis.Through this ethnographic approach it becomes possible to understand how soldiers act in the faceof operational, political, historic and institutional transformations. The relationship between thepolice and the community is based on a double enterprise of repression (through the continuity of thewar on drugs, territorial management, and fight against armed trafficking) and social, humanitarianactions (parties, seminars, marriages, donations, and other services). Local circumstances revealtensions, contradictions and ambivalences, namely between universalistic notions such as humanrights and local logics (naturalizations and culturalist explanations of favela residents and crime).The pacification police struggle to fight the armed drug trafficking that still prevails, establishterritorial control over pacified territories and maintain social legitimacy. Indeed, police control isbased on discrimination practices that serve to protect some and repress others. Thus, theparadoxical effect of the pacification police: while it seeks legitimization through the familiarity ofpatrols and social initiatives, it is delegitimized when soldiers reproduce discriminatory, stereotypingand violent interactions with residents of favelas. Ultimately, the pacification police reinforced thesociogeographic borders it aimed to erase. The context of pacification in Rio de Janeiro places thepolice as a privilege institution to study the dominations of race and class that prevail in Brazil,through discourses and logics that carry postcolonial and postdictarorial heritages. In a broadersense, an ethnography of the military police in Brazil reveals the ways of governing the urban poorpopulations in Latin America.