Ethnic, gender and class discrimination

This section reveals that programmes of security and police reform such as PPV have, instead of addressing long-standing problems of segregation and discriminatory policing, aggravated these issues, further restricting access to public space and social relations along class, gender and ethnic lines. In the first part of this chapter interviewees blamed the poor for violence by talking about criminals as impoverished drug addicts and people who refuse to cooperate and communicate with the police due to fear. In this section, a moralising narrative about the poor is observed in interviewees’ opinions about crime. In all cases, poverty and crime are discursively

linked, in the latter in a more discriminatory narrative that directly criminalises poor, mulato and black people. The evidence emerging from interviews with members of the police and with residents in low-income communities indicates that both social class and ‘race’ were mobilising factors in police-community interactions. This is not a surprising finding – it is well backed up by the Brazilian and the international literature (Barros 2008, Bowling and Phillips 2007, Goodman and Ruggiero 2008, Hall 1978, Wacquant 2008, Zaluar 2004a) – but nevertheless it is a rather enduring and bleak one. What is distinctive in the evidence here presented is the extent of discrimination, disdain and ethnic and social class divisions in the ways in which community-police relations took form in Pernambuco, despite efforts to reform the police.

The police are the most visible state institution, the ‘State on the streets’

(Hinton 2006). Yet, the very nature of police work can enforce social distinctions and social divisions by enforcing the law against certain citizens in order to protect others.

This generates an unequal distribution of public safety. While some citizens receive police protection, others are the targets of police repression. This imbalanced provision of security and the way it affects diverse social groups is what González (2014, 24) calls ‘micro-citizenships’, which is to say constrained or fragmented citizenships. The concept refers not only to the imbalance in the receipt of security provision, but also to its consequences, such as the likelihood that some citizens will refrain from public space and community participation due to fear of crime and inadequate protection, and also the likelihood that some groups will resort to extra-legal measures or ‘take the law in their own hands’.

At the very least, the unequal distribution of policing and disproportionate policing tactics – such as police racial profiling, verbal and physical confrontation with residents of poor communities – generate resentment and hostility towards the methods of the police. The next chapter shows in more detail that this was a key concern for residents, who demanded to be treated with respect and dignity, but instead felt vulnerable to discriminatory and disproportionate policing practices.

Although in theory the police have the job of protecting any citizen in need and enforcing the law against perpetrators, in reality by targeting specific groups – for instance due to societal or institutional misconceptions and prejudice against particular groups or because a particular type of crime, prominent among certain social groups (e.g. drug-related offences instead of tax evasion or police violence) is

targeted – the State and its repressive arm, the police, generate the fragmentation of citizenships (González 2014, Neocleous 2000). However, this fragmentation is not simply caused by enforcing the law to protect some groups of citizens against other citizen groups, but also by societal prejudice and decisions about enforcing certain laws and prioritising certain crimes (that is, when the State decides to enforce the law or when it enacts surveillance).

Class discrimination is embedded into everyday interactions, in everyday talk, in the way spaces in the city are organised. It is widespread in Brazilian society in a way that is taken for granted by Brazilians. However, for an outsider, the way it occurs seems less subtle. In an interview with a high-ranking officer from the military police (major) we talked about the type of violence and drug trafficking that occurs in the communities that he polices. He complains that the trendy new musical style in the community only attracts poor people to the area, and is nostalgic about the days when the clubs in the community played samba and attracted an upper-class clientele.

He directly associates violence with poverty. Even the personal taste of the poor (e.g.

brega music) is allegedly a cause for violence:

‘We have this disorderly occupation [housing] in the morros [hillside communities], abandoned by the State. […] There is a lack of structure, lack of investment, lack of culture. They have a life that is different to the rest of the city. It is a different reality. If you walk past, [you will see that] these are party people. Sunday to Sunday there is always beer on the bar tables, the music is created in the community, those bregas [type of music]. It is mostly young people who are out and about. The other thing is that now it is natural here for women to be the mother and the father in the household. They get pregnant and they themselves raise the kids. So what happens is, in these parties, there are a lot of drugs, some people are addicted, others use them regularly. In the past, the clubs in these communities played samba, now it is just brega. I have already talked to them to put the samba back on but they choose brega. It is a culture shock really. In the past, we had Martinho da Villa, Zeca Pagodinho [famous samba artists], the people that would come to these parties were upper class, you could tell, because they were coming from Boa Viagem [upper-class neighbourhood], and you could tell by their nice cars. With these people, there is no type of violence, no fights, no theft. But

some people are seduced into the hill by young women that have active sexual lives, and then there are the traffickers, this is when violence occurs.’ (Major, military police, 1^st August 2013)

The major’s view places the blame for violence on poor young women and families perceived as dysfunctional. As he puts it, first, these women get pregnant (almost mysteriously, as the role of men in reproducing is neglected here), then they raise the children themselves – implicitly, these are the children who then become offenders.

Then, these women, in his narrative, seduce people into the community, where once again, mysteriously violence occurs when presumably ‘seduced’ people encounter drug traffickers. Young women are thus constructed as a ‘moral danger’ and young men as ‘criminals’ (Loader 1996, 48). The interstices of the asymmetrical power relations with regard to gender, class and age are mixed and meshed in a narrative that simply criminalises people in the peripheries of the city. But the nature of the major’s rhetoric does little to explain crime and much to place culpability on the victims of multiple forms of structural violence.

Even the musical taste of these populations, or any expression of their culture, is blamed and associated with violence. As social scientists have argued (Bourdieu 1984, Skeggs 1997, 2004) judging the tastes of the working class and the poor is a method of enforcing social distances and segregation by the dominant social classes.

For Bourdieu, the mechanism through which the dominant classes naturalise their representations and ideas is defined as ‘symbolic violence’ and is developed by institutions and agents of authority. However, the association of crime with poverty, and the repression and criminalisation of activities associated with the poor, is not new in Brazil, as illustrated by the work of Holloway (1989) on the criminalisation of capoeira and the work of Chazkel (2011) on the jogo do bicho (a form of informal gambling known as ‘the animal game’). The behaviour and activities of lower classes in Brazil have historically been perceived by elites as distasteful and threatening, often leading to brutal reactions, surveillance and control by police (Holloway 1993).

Just as Denyer Willis (2015) notes, ‘poor black and brown men have been – and are – the subjects of the social processes that criminalise bodies and spaces, alternatively called structural, everyday, institutionalized, or symbolic violence’ (9).

Some officials admitted the problems of class and ethnic discrimination in the police at an institutional level, as well the problem of police corruption, and argued

that more police are now dismissed due to this. While other officers denied discrimination or dismissed its extent, every official interviewed associated crime with poverty, and often with one’s ethnicity, as shown in the extract below, where a homicide detective, a delegada at the Department of Homicide and Protection of Persons civil police station, argues that poor black people are the main ‘recruits’ for criminal lifestyles.

‘Nobody likes the police. If I said that there is no corruption in the police and no discrimination in relation to race and class, I would be lying. But now we have a lot more officers being dismissed. There is prejudice everywhere. But here today the ‘marginal’ [criminal] doesn’t have a stereotype anymore, a stereotype of colour. […] But If I said that this is not a problem anymore I would be lying; it is the poor and black people that are still victims of this recruitment [into crime], unfortunately they are still the main actors in the practice of crime. If the police were just walking about the streets wearing uniforms, preventative police, people would like that. But if you go to make arrests, invade a community at night, knock down some doors to make an arrest, nobody likes that. There is no harmony in this relationship – of course not! But there is no guerrilla [referring to the inexistence of independent armed groups taking part in fighting against the police]. There are exchanges of bullets between criminals and police but more in cases of retaliation, not simply because the police went into the community, this is rare’ (Delegada, civil police, DHPP, 7^th October 2013)

Once again, crimes of the powerful, white-collar crimes and crimes committed by the police themselves are not considered. According to the delegada, ‘poor and black people’ are ‘still the main actors in the practice of crime’. This association of crime with poverty is well documented in Brazil, as discussed in Chapter 2. There is a body of literature focusing on critiquing this social representation (see also Nóbrega 2012, Beato and Reis 2000). The delegada notes the type of policing that is delivered to those perceived as criminal, that is repressive policing. As she puts it, making ‘arrests, invading a community at night, and knocking down doors’, all of which causes friction and disdain for the police.

In a study of racial profiling in the Pernambucan police, Barros (2008) conducted a survey with 923 participants (454 in training and 469 already working for the military police), 24 interviews and looked at 1,538 Boletins de Ocorrência (registered police crime records), he found that most officers (65%), most trainee officers (76.9%) and students in the school for non-commissioned officers (74%) believed that black or mixed race people are targeted during stop-and-searches. In line with the delegada’s views above, this approach (targeting on ethnic and class grounds) generates widespread distrust and dislike for the police. The distrust, disdain and dislike often emerge because of the police’s involvement with corruption and discriminatory practices. But rather than being unique to the police, such problems are endemic at most levels of the Brazilian state (Hinton 2006, 11) and, it could be argued, at most levels of Brazilian society. Police reforms and the implementation of PPV have not dealt with these issues. Although according to interviewees a number of dismissals due to corruption have occurred, the training of police and current internal oversight systems have not focused on addressing the lack of police accountability, institutional racism, classism and corruption in the force.