Police and Society in Brazil

Vicente Riccio, Wesley G. Skogan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351650151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Law

In Brazil, where crime is closely associated with social inequality and failure of the criminal justice system, the police are considered by most to be corrupt, inefficient, and violent, especially when occupying poor areas, and they lack the widespread legitimacy enjoyed by police forces in many nations in the northern hemisphere. This text covers hot-button issues like urban pacification squads, gangs, and drugs, as well as practical topics such as policy, dual civil and military models, and gender relations.

The latest volume in the renowned Advances in Police Theory and Practice Series, Police and Society in Brazil fills a gap in English literature about policing in a nation that currently ranks sixth in number of homicides. It is a must-read for criminal justice practitioners, as well as students of international policing.

1
Police and Society in Brazil

Wesley G. Skogan and Vicente Riccio

Contents

Crime and Policing in Brazil

Policing the Favelas

Paths to Reform: Organizational Restructuring

Paths to Reform: Internal Accountability and External Oversight

Paths to Reform: Finding a Community Focus

Paths to Reform: Building Legitimacy

Discussion

References

The chapters in this volume examine many aspects of the relationship between policing and society in Brazil. As will become clear, there are very tight linkages between many of the most important features of Brazilian life and the police and their problems. Crime is among the issues facing the police, but the list is much longer. In this essay, we describe this police-society nexus, and examine the possibilities for reform in Brazilian policing. Along the way, we point to specific chapters in this book that address the issues we raise, but in more detail. These chapters are based on research by experienced observers of the Brazilian scene, and much of what they report is presented here in English for the first time.

The first fact about Brazil is that it is very large. At 3.3 million square miles, it is slightly larger than the continental United States. In 2017, the population was just over 207 million, or about two-thirds that of the U.S. It features vast, rolling plains, semi-arid regions, jungle and mountains. Forty percent of the country falls in the Amazon region. The largest state in the area, Amazonas, is featured in several chapters of this book. But while the nation’s economy features large agricultural and forest products sectors, Brazil is an urban society. Most of its citizens (about 85%) live in cities. Even in Amazonas, more than 2 million people live in Manaus, its largest city, and they account for about half the state’s population. The largest Brazilian city, São Paulo, is home to 12 million people and is the country’s economic leader.

Like many physically large countries (ranging from India to Australia and the United States), Brazil has a federal system of governance. The constitution limits the powers of the national government and reserves a great deal of authority for its 26 states and the federal capital district. As we shall see, policing is one of those functions. Rio de Janeiro is another big city (6.4 million) that is featured in this book, but most of its policing is controlled by Rio de Janeiro State, which encompasses the city and its surrounding metropolitan area and includes an additional 12 million residents. There are another 15 cities in Brazil with populations above 1 million, and 24 of the 27 states have populations at least that large. São Paulo State is home to a total of 45 million residents.

Locally and nationally, Brazil has a multiparty political system, a vibrant mass media and a strong civil society, so many policies are hotly contested and fought out in elections at all levels of government. Voter turnout is compulsory, and thus high, at over 80%. There is currently a debate over the country’s very fragmented party system. The current party structure inhibits the formation of policy-oriented coalitions in the legislature. Executive branch policies, including those affecting the police and crime prevention, pass through the legislature only after difficult and often corrupt bargains are struck. Legislators themselves often dutifully represent powerful economic elites in their constituencies, especially in rural areas. The federal nature of Brazil also limits the reach of national policies, and bargaining has to take place downward as well if the states are to cooperate with national policy initiatives. One chapter of this book examines the national politics of police reform and the difficulties involved in promoting federal policies among the states.

But an important footnote to the fundamentally democratic character of contemporary Brazil is that in the not-too-distant past the nation passed through an authoritarian abyss that still affects the nature of its institutions, especially the police and the military. April 1964 began with a military coup that was politically aligned with the United States government. This ushered in a 21-year military dictatorship. During this period, most political and human rights were suspended, censorship was imposed and the elected national Congress was shut down. The army took general control of domestic society, and both branches of local policing in Brazil were converted into tools for political repression. Police shared information with army intelligence units. Even today, the Military Police branch of local policing is considered an auxiliary unit of the army, and its military identity is strong even at the state level. During the military dictatorship, thousands of people were tortured and many hundreds are known to have been killed, or they simply disappeared. Civilian rule was restored in 1985, but the overhang of this repressive period—and, until recently, some of those who did the repressing—has lingered on into the contemporary period. Before the military left power, an amnesty law was imposed that protected those in powe during the dictatorship period from prosecution, and their immunity was recognized following the handover.

Another feature of Brazil is that it is among the most unequal societies on earth. The gap between those at the very top and bottom of the income distribution is about five times as great as similar gaps in Northern Hemisphere industrial nations. This is despite the fact that economic inequality in Brazil was falling until its recent financial crisis. In Brazil, the richest 10% of households consistently received almost two-thirds of all household income, and they have done so for decades. In some years, the top 0.1% received as much as 15% of total national income (Souza and Medeiros 2015). In early 2017, the Financial Times estimated that the wage of Brazilian factory workers was US$2.70 per hour and that it was falling.¹ Inequality spreads beyond income and wealth; other social cleavages are closely linked to them. For example, wage gaps are reflected in educational attainment. Differences in reading and math scores between students coming from households in the top and bottom income groups are larger than in other countries with similar levels of development. The United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) “Human Development Index” (HDI) assesses three quality-of-life dimensions across many countries: longevity, levels of education and gross national income per capita. In the last HDI global ranking, Brazil scored 75th. It ranked below nations with lower levels of GDP per capita because of violence, health and education issues linked to income inequality. The nation’s education, health and security services have not contributed much to a broad range of social inequalities among poorer and richer Brazilians. The country’s high violent crime death rate is emblematic of this, and it is discussed in several chapters in this book.

There is also a great deal of inequality among the states. The Brazilian National Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) is responsible for monitoring economic statistics. In a report issued in 2014, the IBGE reported GINI indices for the nation’s regions. This indicator rates the distribution of wealth in a society based on the difference in income between the poorest and the richest individuals. It ranges from 0 (an even distribution of wealth) to 1 (highly concentrated wealth). The results showed some progress toward a more equal distribution of wealth in many areas. The Northeast (the poorest region in the country) scored 0.563 in 2004 and 0.509 in 2013; the Southeast (a rich area) scored 0.531 in 2004 and 0.483 in 2013. However, the recession that began in Brazil in 2015 has brought any reduction in inequality across the country to a halt.

A big social fact about Brazil is that it is significantly a mixed-race society. This is deeply linked to the issue of inequality. Long a colony of Portugal, Brazil was a slave-holding country until 1888. Many slaves were imported from West Africa, and there was originally a substantial native population. In contemporary Brazil, the result has produced a very complex racial dynamic. The 2010 census set the population at about 47% white. The remainder was divided among persons classifying themselves as “black” (8%), “yellow” (1%), or “indigenous” (fewer still), with the largest group (43%) classing themselves as mixed race, or “brown.” But all of these categories are situational and shifting, and each subsumes subtly defined subcategories that vary in significance from occasion to occasion. What these categories mean has been contested among Brazilians for almost two centuries. This includes vigorous debates over the role of class versus race in determining life chances in Brazil, a discussion that most recently has begun to feature statistical analyses weighing the significance of the two factors. However, for our purposes, there are two important facts about race. The first is that it overlaps sharply with inequality. The result is that where people live and how they live are clustered both economically and socially, and that clustering has a lot to do with crime. The second feature of race is that it overwhelms virtually every statistic produced by the criminal justice system. Victims, offenders and prisoners—and especially those in each of these categories who died—are overwhelmingly persons of color (Cano 2010).

Finally, several chapters in this volume consider the fate of Brazil’s favelas, or concentrated urban slums. Favelas are one of the places where poor people of color live, and their prevalence and visibility is another of the distinctive features of Brazilian society. Favelas are numerous. In Rio de Janeiro city, there are approximately 800 favelas, and in 2010, about 1.4 million of the city’s 6.4 million inhabitants lived there. Favelado s are not just poor; they are isolated in many ways from mainstream society. Residents often live far from shops or transportation routes. Mostly, these communities have running water, but often there is no provision for the sewage they generate, so health is an endemic problem. Social services may be nonexistent. Electrical service can be sporadic, and there may be few if any streetlights. Few residents have formal claim to the places where they live, and homes are often patched together from cardboard, corrugated iron and scrap wood. The streets are mostly not paved, and buildings have been thrown up without attention to a conventional street grid.

Many favelas are governed not by the formal political system but by criminal gangs that dominate the territory. Governing gangs extort money from residents and the informal businesses that are located there, they fend off incursions by other gangs that want to set up shop, they conduct sometimes large-scale criminal enterprises from their home base, and they form alliances with politicians and corrupt police officials to secure these operations. In a modestly sized area, these gangs might number about 50 or 60 members. Some (but fewer) favelas are under the control of vigilante militia groups. They differ from criminal gangs largely in that they are made up of former or off-duty police officers and other security employees, and they are often under the influence of economic elites and their political allies. They also are in the business of extracting protection money from local people and businesses, and they illegally resell electricity, cable television and other services to residents (see Magaloni, Franco and Melo 2015). No significant inroads into Brazil’s crime and policing problems will be made without directly confronting conditions in the favelas. (For a great deal more on favelas, see Jovchelovitch and Priego-Hernandez 2013.)

To be sure, it would also be a mistake to consider favelas as uniformly organized and disadvantaged. Preteceille and Valladares (1999) have questioned the “ideal type” that has been constructed regarding favelas. In fact, there is great diversity among and within them. There are “richer” and “poorer” favelas, and different levels of public services delivered in those areas. The incidence of crime also varies from place to place. The favelas in Rio de Janeiro (featured in several chapters of this book) have been a target of public policies since the 90s, with the Favela-Bairro program. It focused on paving the roads, building sidewalks and providing basic infrastructure in those areas. Some of these projects were supported by the Interamerican Development Bank and the World Bank. Understanding this diversity should be important in the design of public policies targeting these areas.

Crime and Policing in Brazil

Violence is endemic in Brazilian society. Most reports on crime in Brazil focus on homicide. These are used to compare Brazil to other countries, or to compare Brazilian cities to each other or over time, because body counts are seemingly the most reliable of the generally unreliable crime statistics produced by the country’s police forces. The absence of reliable statistics in Brazil presents a significant obstacle to developing and evaluating the effectiveness of security policies. There is also no equivalent to the National Crime Victimization Survey in the U.S. or the British Crime Survey. The most reliable source of information on violence are mortality data assembled by the Ministry of Health, and these provide the only basis for counting homicide in Brazil. However, there are problems even in that database. “Death by indeterminate causes” is the classification given to over 10% of fatalities registered in this database. Beyond homicide, there is also a lack of systematic information regarding drug dealing, rates of imprisonment and even police personnel (Cerqueira 2013).

Analyses of homicides on a national basis can be found in reports from the Ministry of Health Statistics that are published annually by Sangari Institute in partnership with Faculdade Latino-Americana de Ciências Sociais (Latin-American Faculty of Social Sciences). They produce the Mapa da Violência (Violence Map). This report analyzes data on homicides and other violent crimes. Each year the report includes a special focus on a specific issue. The 2016 report examined homicides by firearms and documented the spread of gun murders across the Brazilian states. The Northeast region (the poorest in the country) faced the largest increase in violence from 2004 to 2014; it went up an astonishing 124%. Other states showing major growth over this period included Rio Grande do Norte (237 gun homicides in 2004, 1,292 in 2014), Maranhão (up 367%), and Ceará (up 314%) (Waiselfisz 2016). An exception to this trend is the state of Pernambuco, where gun homicides dropped by 25%. This decrease may have been related to a program developed by the state called Pacto pela Vida (Pact for Life) that aimed to reduce levels of homicides in Pernambuco. This aimed at integrating the state’s police forces, public attorneys and the judiciary to curb the homicide rate. The participation of civil society was also essential to the program. The adoption of formal goals for the program and measures of its success were another salutary feature of the project. The initial results were very positive, and homicide levels began to decrease. Recently, critics have charged that Pacto pela Vida has been faltering and needs to regain the resources it needs to reduce violence and fear of crime in the area.² However, Pernambuco continues to not follow the trend of seemingly intractable increases in violence that characterize many states in the poor Northeast.

The Southeast region in Brazil, which is the nation’s richest area, is composed of the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo. Collectively they have high rates of crime, but they too have witnessed a decrease in homicide. Over the same period we considered above, gun homicides there decreased by 36%. The largest decreases were in the states of São Paulo (down 54%) and Rio de Janeiro (down 42%). These decreases are important, because these are the largest Brazilian metropolitan areas. In general, the rise of violence has occurred in states that have lowered their levels of inequality the most in the last decade (Kahn 2013). In turn, rising crime rates can jeopardize other gains in quality of life that can be observed in Brazil. Chapters in this book address policies dealing with violence and measures to improve the quality of policing and police legitimacy.

Comparatively, Brazil ranks among the violent countries in the world. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (2014) most recent report rates nations by their homicide rates. They count “homicide related to other criminal activities; interpersonal homicide; and socio-political homicide” (The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2014, p. 11). This definition discounts deaths due to war or suicide, for example. Based on their calculations, the world homicide rate is 6.2 per 100,000. In Southern Africa and Central America, the aggregate homicide rate was just over 24 per 100,000, and in South America, Middle Africa, and the Caribbean, it varied between 16 and 23 per 100,000. According to the same report, Brazil stood number three on the list for South America, with a homicide rate of 25 per 100,000 inhabitants. Venezuela was number one by a wide margin, at 54 homicides per 100,000, followed by Colombia at 31 per 100,000. In Central America, Honduras scored 90 per 100,000, and El Salvador 41 per 100,000. Brazil as a whole does not reach these peaks, but its rate has been stable at a relatively high level.

In addition to homicide, other fearsome crimes are not reliably counted, but they are widely reported in the media and discussed in political debates. These include kidnapping, illegal weapons sales, extortion from business, all manner of drug crimes and robberies committed at roadblocks set up between airports and their city centers. Drugs have had a particularly toxic effect on Brazilian society, because the trade is dominated by powerful and violent street gangs. Shootouts between them and the police account for a significant portion of the police-involved killings that are registere...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Editors
• Contributors
• 1 Police and Society in Brazil
• SECTION I The Organization of Brazilian Police
• SECTION II The Police and Their Problems
• SECTION III The Police and Public Policy
• Index