Policing and the Police Approach: social representations about the construction of the racialized suspect in Brazil.


Luiza Dutra, Pontifícia Universidade Católia do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS)

The studies on policing, police approach, and social markers in Brazil have shown that the racial social marker is the most important marker, from the perspective of police selectivity and inequalities in treatment, from the definition of who will be approached to the options regarding the use of police force in each case. Marked by a tradition of abusive use of force and militarization of police functions, the institutional dynamics of the military police in Brazil, and the focus on ostensive policing, guide the fight against crime, legitimizing and increasing the excessive use of force by these agents as a response to the phenomenon of criminality. In Brazil, considering the fact that the creation of legal norms for the use of force by the State does not prevent violence from exceeding designated situations where it can serve as a tool, it is necessary to recognize that discretionary police activity goes hand in hand with bureaucratic institutionalization, encountering cultural and institutional difficulties in overcoming its historically built authoritarian and repressive structures. Moreover, in racialized societies like Brazil, the research agenda on unequal processes of criminalization based on the race marker is already consolidated in the field of Sociology of Violence, whether identifying the weight of this marker in the justice system as a whole or in identifying processes of racialization in the actions of civilian and military police. From these initial points, this research sought to analyze in what ways the racial social marker is present at the moment of police approach and in the construction of the suspects figure, based on the social representations expressed in the discourses of Military Police officers in 04 states of Brazil. The view of different social actors in these police-community interactions is central to understanding the complexity of legitimacy disputes in police approach. In this sense, the present study deals with ostensive policing, more specifically with police approach, analyzing the construction of the "innate suspect" based on the racial social marker. The main objective was to identify the social representations expressed in the speeches of military police officers in Brazil, in 04 states - São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, and Brasília - regarding the presence and influence of this social marker in police approach, that is, how they perceive and justify police selectivity based on racial attributes that construct the figure of the suspect. In addition to a brief review of the most recent Brazilian literature on the subject, interviews were conducted with different military police officers, seeking to identify the social representations that shape - and are shaped by - these social actors about policing and the police role itself, as well as to identify how they perceive the influence of the racial social marker. Crossing the discursive data collected in interviews with quantitative data on police approach and racial issues, it can be affirmed that police approach is crossed by processes of racialization that carry with them the social construction of the "innate suspect". In other words, they demonstrate the existence of social representations based on narratives that highlight the mechanisms of racialization of suspects. This research seems to be relevant not only for presenting racialized violence as structuring a social institution in the context of a Latin American country but also as a way to complexify violence as culture in different social contexts.

Non-presenting author: Rodrigo Ghiringhelli de Azevedo, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul

This paper will be presented at the following session: