The dynamics of public security as object of study

Brazilian academics have made efforts to research and understand the area of study that has come to be loosely labelled ‘public security’ (Lima and Ratton 2011). Until the late 1990s, the topic of public security in Brazil was generally studied from a

juridical or a military perspective, leading to fragmented, mainstream and normative accounts (Kant de Lima, Misse, and Miranda 2000, Macaulay 2007). As a research topic, public security policies have not yet become as consolidated as other themes such as delinquency, violence, policing and the criminal justice system.

Public security policies (also known as ‘public safety policies’) are actions, strategies and programmes managed and sometimes developed by the State to address crime and violence. Sapori (2007) explains that there are many theoretical gaps in this field of study in Brazil. He argues that there is a need to deepen the knowledge about the dynamics of criminal justice since the field of public policies of crime control and public security policies remain under researched. There is thus a need to produce knowledge about governmental actions aimed at providing the collective good of public safety in Brazil. Growing insecurity and fear of crime affects trust in the State and its agents, therefore even the State’s legitimacy depends by and large on its capacity to maintain order and some degree of safety for the citizens subject to its authority (Sapori 2007). Consequently, as a topic, public security has become paramount in academic, practical, policy and political terms.

While there is a discourse in Brazil that the problem of violence cannot be resolved without profound reforms in the penal system or a change to the socio-economic structure, scholars such as Soares (2000) and Sapori (2007) argue that changing policies and the governance of public security institutions can reduce crime.

The focus is thus on tangible measures of crime reduction as opposed to addressing the deeper inequalities or the multitude of (often contested) causes of crime in Brazil.

The latter could take far longer to produce results and would require shifts in various long-term social policies, such as those in the field of education and development.

This is not to say that these researchers fail to understand or promote a more equal society, but rather that they perceive the need to take specific measures to promote public safety, beyond and in addition to long-term policies to address structural inequalities. For Adorno and Salla, public security policies need to adapt to rapid societal change and turbulence:

‘Crime has increased and become more violent; organised criminality has spread through society reaching economic activities far beyond traditional crimes against property, increasing the homicide rates, above all among adolescents and young adults, and disorganising forms of social life and

standards of inter- and intra-class sociability. Nevertheless, public safety policies continue to be formulated and implanted according to conventional, aged models, which are incapable of accompanying the quality of the social and institutional changes underway within society’ (Adorno and Salla 2007, 10).

Adorno and Salla suggest that while crime has become more widespread and innovative, making use of new technologies (e.g. telecommunications, transport, modern firearms), the application of law and order continues to consist largely of old, militarised police models of chasing known criminals. Understanding the dynamics of public security in Brazil demands engagement with the continuities and changes in this field of study.

Despite investments in public security by federal and state governments in the equipping of police forces, the overall model of policing and training of human resources remains unsatisfactory. Until the late 1990s there were no national official statistics on criminality, a problem that has only recently begun to be addressed. The data availablefrom the National Secretariat of Public Safety (SENASP), part of the Ministry of Justice, for the years 1999-2001 reveal that the rates of violent crime – homicide, theft followed by death, extortion by kidnapping, rape – are generally higher in Brazil than in other countries with similar socio-economic characteristics (Adorno and Salla 2007, 12-13).

Rates of violence and inequality remain high and impede the consolidation of civil rights. At the national level the Brazilian state has been shy in its initiatives to address these issues. A new agency was established at the federal level, Secretaria Nacional de Segurança Pública (SENASP), which translates as National Secretariat for Public Security, part of the Ministry of Justice. SENASP has introduced national public security policies with modest incentives for state governments to collect data and endorse reforms, but a number of barriers have hindered its progress (Pereira 2008).

As explained by Pereira (2008), SENASP has lacked continuous leadership, which has impacted adversely on its activities. Pereira argues that the key barriers to the improvement of public security include the fragmentation of the public sectors, the politicisation of the police and the privatisation of security, all of which constrain the effectiveness of public security organisations in preventing violence. The issue of

fragmentation is ingrained in the Brazilian federalist system, electoral regulations and the party system, which prevents presidents from having a majority in Congress. This means that in order to rule, elected presidents must negotiate a multiparty coalition in Congress, and negotiate (sometimes through bribery) with congress, state governors and mayors their support for legislative initiatives. A further issue is that since public security provision remains mostly a responsibility of each state, the funds invested by SENASP have often been used for different purposes.

Fragmentation is also seen in the Brazilian policing system, as discussed above. The division of labour between two main police forces, one civil and one military, and their disjointed training, limit the possibilities for implementing the community policing models proposed by SENASP. Moreover, the division between the two police forces often results in competition, rivalry, poor communication and inadequate information sharing (Pereira 2008).

The second issue – politicisation – affects both policing and the policy-making apparatus. Part of the problem is that most high-ranking positions in the police and even in SENASP are staffed with political appointees, so political patronage and loyalty continue to be a problem (Pereira 2008). This also leads to a discontinuation in policies and practices when new governments are elected. Members of the police are also able to deploy their contacts and police associations to run for office and despite it being illegal, the police often use strikes as political weapons. Thus the politicisation of the security system obstructs its effectiveness in curbing violence.

Finally, in relation to the privatisation of security, Pereira argues that it challenges the notion that security is a public good. Commercial and private interests rather than the collective good are prioritised. Private security is a thriving industry in Brazil (Cubas 2002). It is widely tolerated, although illegal, for police officers to supplement their income by taking second jobs in the private security sector. Public resources are therefore employed to protect private interests. Some contractors have even been known to perpetrate massacres so as later to be able to sell their security service to the affected communities demonstrating how the industry can be parasitic in nature (Pereira 2008). It is a business that thrives on the failures of the public security system and profits from the context of an intense fear of crime, while itself generating yet more inequalities (e.g. in access to safety), mistrust, and segregation in society.

Researchers have observed that increasing spending on public security has not necessarily led to reductions in the level of violent mortality (Caldeira 2000, Turollo and Guimarães 2013). As Pereira (2008) neatly puts it:

‘If resources are being poured into a system in which collusion between State agents and organised crime is common, in which corruption and illegal violence by State agents is widespread, in which basic sharing of information and cooperation between different agencies is often impossible, in which partisan political loyalties are more important than technical skill and diligence in police promotions and the implementation of State policy, and in which private security interests cream off public intelligence and personnel for profit – then much of these resources will be wasted’

Furthermore, much of the official data about violence and public security issues, do not always reflect the real situation of crime and violence in the country (Kahn 1998, Kant de Lima, Misse, and Miranda 2000) – official data are frequently poorly recorded, inaccurate or corrupted and research is also often fragmented. The Brazilian public security system has thus been described as a ‘bureaucratic labyrinth’ replete with ‘corporative immobility’ (Soares 2000, 88) – an ineffective system with intense resistance to change. Furthermore, while the country has one of the world’s largest prison populations, only 8% of homicides have actually resulted in successful convictions (Soares and Balestreri 2012, unpaged). Part of the problem, is that Brazil lacks an effective federal system of public security and as Soares and Balestreri argue, another concern is that military models continue to be reproduced in the (poorly paid and trained) police force:

‘The police are not valued. Overall, wages are insufficient. Working conditions are inadequate. As a consequence the police adopt illegal second informal jobs in private security. The authorities do not interfere to prevent the collapse of the government’s budget. They prefer to live with the illegality in the underlying system. The outcome is that irrational working shifts cannot be adjusted, the dual loyalty precludes the execution of routines; internal discipline is contaminated by binding with unlawful activities; and impunity

encourages the formation of interest groups whose extreme expression are the militias.’ (Soares and Balestreri 2012, unpaged)

Specialists have raised questions about the mechanisms that link enforcement and violence; about the policing strategies that are least or most likely to prevent or aggravate the violence related to the illicit trade; and argued that more research is needed about how law enforcement shapes the nature and level of organised violence (Andreas and Martinez 2012, 385). These questions are crucial since certain policing methods and public security policies can increase perverse effects, and even unintentionally fuel further violence.

For instance, as some actors are removed from the drug trade, new ones emerge to claim their market share while violent competition continues. Moreover, if social actors are simply removed from this context, for example by imprisonment, new questions may nevertheless emerge about the incarceration system, its sustainability, and what happens after those actors’ eventual release from prison.

Thus, considering how the State and society respond to and interact with the context of violence raises fundamental questions for this field of inquiry. Moreover, there is a need for research that takes these questions to geographical areas that have not so far been widely studied (Andreas and Martinez 2012, Garmany 2011).

In Recife, since the government of Eduardo Campos (2007-2014), these policies have been grouped together under the project Pacto pela Vida (‘Pact for Life’). Over one hundred projects were proposed as part of Pacto pela Vida, including: police reforms; the creation of specialised police stations for certain groups (e.g. the elderly, women, LGBT, children and young people); disarmament projects;

social and educational projects. Their alleged aim is to reduce mortality in the state of Pernambuco, but there are currently no studies examining the extent to which these projects have been implemented, nor their effects.

Among Brazilian states, Pernambuco remains near the top of the ranking in terms of homicides committed with guns, occupying 6^th position behind Alagoas, Espirito Santo, Pará, Bahia and Paraíba (Waiselfisz 2013). However, there has been an improvement, considering that the rate of homicides committed with firearms in Pernambuco dropped from 50.3/100,000 in 2001 to 30.3/100,000 in 2010 (ibid, 19).

In Recife, the state capital, the rate of homicides committed with a firearm¹⁷ remains high but it did also decline from 2000 to 2010 (Ibid, 25):

Recife’s rate of homicides committed with a firearm per 100,000 of population:

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Δ%

88.1 86.9 81.6 80.9 79.2 76.9 79.0 76.0 70.5 61.0 47.8 -45.8

Table 4: Homicide rate with firearms

Source: Mapa da Violência (Waiselfisz 2013, 25)

Recife has seen declining numbers of homicides with a firearm – unlike other cities in the Northeast such as Salvador and Fortaleza:

Number of homicides with a firearm in Brazilian state capital cities

2000 2009 2010 Δ%

Fortaleza 346 819 1,159 235,0

Salvador 619 1,921 1,596 157,8

Recife 1,254 941 735 -41,4

Table 5: Number of homicides in three cities

Source: Mapa da Violência (Waiselfisz 2013, 23)

Although the data above refer only to homicides committed with firearms – and do not include homicides committed with other means such as white weapons – this illustrates the saliency and level of the issue of armed violence in Brazil. It is important to note that homicide rates in one city are one narrow measure of the changes that have occurred in the context of hyper-violence. Violence occurs in many forms and lethal violence is only one of those. These figures do not necessarily mean that people feel safer or that they are safer in reality. Sometimes crime is simply displaced to other areas (Machado da Silva 2010). Sometimes security measures can improve the quality of life of the population, but they can also have no noticeable effect, or even have perverse impacts on people’s daily lives. It is therefore necessary to study these effects in more depth. This was the main objective of this thesis.

3.7 Conclusion

This chapter has outlined the birth of a field of study – public security – in the Brazilian literature. It has discussed the focus of these studies, geographically, in

terms of objects of study and theoretically and the gaps in this emerging body of literature. It argued that studies about violence and security have neglected the issues affecting, and the voices of, the marginalised and the young in the northeast of Brazil.

There are a few exceptions, for example the ethnographies conducted by Zaluar, Drybread and Morris, examining important regional, emotive and gendered aspects of violent relations that prominently affect young people in the northeast of Brazil. The chapter has also discussed key international debates about the role and presence or absence of the State and the rule of law in areas perceived as marginalised and highly unsafe. It has outlined some of the intricate problems of public security provision and the challenges faced by any group, State or civic, that aims to curb high levels of violence and insecurity.

The chapter drew on critical criminological theories proposing that security and democratic ideals, in particular social-democratic ideals, should not be conceived of as exclusive and incompatible. It acknowledged some of the problems and ambiguities in this debate, such as the issue that security measures can lead to the excessive criminalisation of some populations. This chapter provided the background and gaps in knowledge production that inform this thesis, which considers the forms, ideals and effects of public security policies in contemporary Recife. Academics have not examined how the policy and programme Pacto pela Vida has been perceived or what impacts it has had on the communities where lethal violence and sporadic policing are most common. This thesis examines this public security project and its effects. In particular, the research focuses (albeit not exclusively) on issues that affect marginalised young people and their relationship with the police.