The dream, like the law, is the disguise of the wish,

and that disguise takes work

(Farley 2021: 88)

Introduction

In late 2010, the local government in Rio de Janeiro created a new branch of the military police called the Pacifying Police Unit (UPP). The UPP was created as part of the internationalization efforts of the city in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Authorities recognized the need to change the image of Rio de Janeiro as a chaotic and dangerous urban centre; this image was fuelled in part by a related narrative of an incompetent, lethal and corrupt police force. Certainly, the UPP seemed to appease national and international anxieties. What was unique about the UPP was its stated vision for policing based on ‘human rights, democracy and citizenship’.Footnote 1 With one of the world’s highest levels of fatal police violence (Hirschfield 2023), the introduction of these values suggested the possibility of change. For a moment, the UPP symbolized a renaissance of the military police in Brazil. Unsurprisingly, this dream was short-lived, and as many scholars have pointed out the UPP ended up creating local disruptions and new tensions within ‘pacified’ favela communities (Cunha and Silva Mello 2011; Mesquita and Amélia 2014; Misse 2014; Silva 2014; Valle Menezes 2014).

In July 2013, in the ‘pacified’ favela of Rocinha, Amarildo de Souza was declared ‘disappeared’ by his family (Carneiro 2013; The Independent 2013). Amarildo was in his forties. He was a father and a husband. He worked in construction. He was also a black man. After an investigation, it was revealed that police soldiers from the UPP Rocinha had tortured and killed Amarildo and disposed of his body. To this day, Amarildo’s body has never been recovered. This case sparked a national conversation about persisting police violence, specifically police killings, at odds with contemporary policing programs and education training based on ‘human rights, democracy and citizenship’. While BLM gained traction in the United States, Brazil reckoned with its own demons.

This was not the only controversy surrounding the UPP. Among others, cases of abuse and sexual harassment emerged (Freire 2010; Edson Alves 2014). The program received a string of criticisms from academics, activists and residents (Cano et al. 2012; Daniel Ganem Misse 2014; Denyer Willis and Mota Prado 2014). But the tragic episode of Amarildo’s ‘disappearance’ highlighted that, in Brazil, police violence is widespread and profoundly engrained in the institution’s modus operandi. Indeed, according to data from 2022, the police are responsible for an average of 17 deaths per day (Bueno et al. 2023). Since 2013, 43,171 people have been killed by the police (Bueno et al. 2022). The majority of those affected are men (99.2%) and black (84.1%). Importantly, the report also stressed that in 2022 the number of white victims of police lethality decreased while black victims continued to rise. As such, the police are a key state actor defining who lives and dies intentionally and violently in the country. Police in Brazil have such extraordinary force that, one might say, they hold in their hands—and through their guns—a unique necropolitical power (Amparo Alves 2018). This power is not restricted to a zone of extra-legality, it is instead tethered within institutional and legal frameworks (Bretas 1997; Trindade Maranhão Costa 2004; Costa and Thompson 2011).

In light of this discussion, I am moved by the following questions: In the context of Brazil, how does the law foster the institutional raison d’être of the police? How has the law been instrumental in the overwhelming normalization of police violence in contemporary Brazil? And more radically, can we see, enshrined in legal frameworks, the necropolitical power of the State?

In this article, I will argue that as an institution the police in Brazil have been historically built on an anti-black ideology of ‘order’. Furthermore, the institution has been incredibly resilient to change precisely because it finds legal and social legitimation within the law that officially eschews its place in Brazilian society.

As I shall suggest below, as a colonial force specifically created to control and punish slaves, the military police have always been the institution in charge of enforcing a very specific idea of ‘order’. This ideology of order, which we can name post-colonial in contemporary Brazil, has always been sustained by anti-blackness in the form of criminalization of Black life. Since their inception, the police have been delegated the task of surveillance, but also—and perhaps more importantly—punishment. Through all the country’s political and ideological transitions, the police have been an incredibly resilient institution. As such, Brazilian police forces have always accomplished quite fully their raison d’être. In light of this assertion, I argue that institutional and legal reforms have proven to be insufficient and only produce short-term effects. Just like the UPP, ‘soft’ policing initiatives and similar reforms often end up reinforcing police power that is tethered in this colonial logic.

However, even though legal frameworks have lost discriminatory language and overt racist tones, the structure, legal mechanisms, and creation degrees depict a stable institution that continues to function under the same anti-black logic and rationality of the past. By acknowledging the resilience of the police over the past centuries and the insufficiency of reformist approaches, I argue that it is only by taking seriously abolitionist claims (Kaba 2020; Davis et al. 2022; Gilmore 2022) that we can envision a shift in this form of state violence. In other words, police abolition can be the only hope to address the root causes of racialized police violence.

In this essay, firstly, I will outline concisely the research methods that inform this article. Secondly, I will address the question of the ‘neutrality’ of the law and draw connections to the necropolitical power of the police. Thirdly, I will turn my attention to the legal frameworks that have sustained police power throughout the different historical periods in Brazil. And finally, I will address how the police have resisted change, mainly by squashing calls that have emerged from within the institution.

A Methodological Preamble

To address the guiding questions of this article, I build on a genealogy of the military police in Brazil and ethnographic research. The latter was carried out during 2014–2015 in a UPP station in the southern area of Rio de Janeiro (Redacted). I accompanied soldiers on daily patrols and saw how they engaged with residents. I had countless informal conversations with them about the meaning of their work, everyday policing, and views about favela residents. I also collected information about their living conditions and position vis-à-vis the institution. Many ideas about the relation to the law that I espouse here are drawn from this fieldwork. For instance, history was an important refuge to talk about current ‘restrictions’ of police excesses (‘in the old days, we had real authority’ or ‘the law does not work on our side anymore’ were phrases that I heard many times by veteran police agents). Many soldiers expressed a lingering contradiction that they were on one hand not accountable, but/yet at the same time, the law weighed on their shoulders. Many expressed a tension between ‘human rights’ talk and their ‘duty’ to hold their place in Brazilian society (synthesized most clearly by the Brazilian popular saying: ‘A good bandit is a dead bandit’Footnote 2).

Secondly, I studied Brazilian federal archives, the creation decrees of police forces and the Criminal Codes that sustain contemporary police practices. Finally, I also reviewed a selection of news records to account for the social discussion generated by police violence. The genealogical method allows us to access the past to understand the present moment (Fassin et al. 2013). This approach meant navigating through archives and looking for shifting power dynamics (Kearins and Hooper 2002).

Two considerations of perspective: Firstly, Brazil has an incomplete cycle of policing, which means that all public security is dealt with by the Military Police (MP), and crime-solving is handled by the Civil Police (CP). This division crucially defines the history and dynamics of police forces. The relationship between the MP and CP is filled with rivalry; but also collaboration.Footnote 3 In this essay, I will only focus on the MP,Footnote 4 though I note that this potentially presents an incomplete picture because of the corresponding and intersecting role of the CP. Secondly, because Brazilian police forces are managed at the state level, I have studied the history of the MP in Rio de Janeiro, where I also carried out fieldwork. Again, this may present a limitation of analysis in not capturing other sites of MP history.

White ‘Neutrality’ of the Law and the Necropolitical Power of the Police

Critical legal studies have interrogated the role of the law in sustaining forms of oppression. Speaking about LGBTQ+ rights in United States, Dean Spade argues: “laws [that] arrange people through categories of indigeneity, race, gender, ability, and national origin to” work to “produce populations with different levels of vulnerability to economic exploitation, violence, and poverty” (Spade 2015: 2). Law and its outcomes have never been neutral. This production of vulnerability that Spade mentions can be found in different forms of state violence. Historically speaking, at least colonial, post-colonial and settler colonial contexts, the law has also had a white bias (Levinson and Smith 2012) that entrenches some forms of vulnerability aggravated by racial differences. In this sense, racial inequalities have been produced by legal frameworks. As Anthony Paul Farley argues, that law “is the monopoly on violence that is used to keep white-over-black” (Farley 2021: 84).

In parallel, Achille Mbembe’s articulation of necropolitical power (Mbembe 2019) allows us to interpret how the law can become an instrument within the State’s intentional management of death. The concept of necropolitics is born out of the insufficiency of the Foucaudian term biopolitics to account for how life is subjugated to the power of death. For Mbembe, there is an unequal distribution of this form of power, creating death worlds where “vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead” (Mbembe 2019: 92). To account for this terror, Mbembe invites us to “take a detour through the European imaginary itself as it relates to the critical issue of the domestication of war and the creation of a European juridical order” (Mbembe 2019: 76). Brazilian judicial order, as I will explore, replicates this same necropolitical logic.

Anthropologist Jaime Amparo Alves builds on these ideas and describes how the police, in practice, have created these death worlds in Brazil (Amparo Alves 2018). Indeed, the police have been a fundamental actor in demarcating geographies of death (Willis 2015). Following Mbembe’s work, within these disciplinary, biopolitical and necropolitical powers, the law has played a fundamental role in shaping and giving meaning to the police as a state institution. It is important to specify that what animates the necropolitical power of the police, as it is inscribed in law, is antiblackness. As Jung and Vargas state: “Antiblackness is an antisocial logic that not only dehumanizes Black people but also renders abject all that is associated with Blackness. This generalized abjection helps us grasp the ways in which, historically and contemporarily, Black people’s embattled bodies, spaces, knowledge, culture, citizenship, and humanity have served as the counterpoints to safety, rationality, belonging, and life. Unlike racism, which tends to focus on analogous experiences of oppression, antiblackness stresses the singularity of Black people’s dehumanization, antihumanization” (Jung et al. 2021: 8–9).

I argue here that we see the necropolitical power of the law in two different but parallel forms: (1) Criminalization of Black life: accounting for overt or covert legal mechanisms that perpetuate the oppression of non-white populations. We will see this unfolding historically in the Criminal Codes and records of social stigma, discrimination, and anxieties from white elites. And (2) The unlimitedness of police violence: Through explicit or implicit recognition, the law fosters or represses social behaviours and expectations. In the case of police violence, statistics of police lethality are a good indicator of the limits of the law. The current legal frameworks have been radically inefficient in curbing police lethality (and police violence more broadly). This wilful negligence should be alarming. Police violence as a pillar of police work can be found in MP creation decrees and the lack of effective frameworks to curtail this form of state violence. In sum, by considering legal documents within a broader moral economy of police violence,Footnote 5 we can understand how contemporary law perpetuates the necropolitical power of the police.

A Legal History of Police Violence

Before the Empire (1500–1821)

The Portuguese crown claimed the territory known today as Brazil in 1500. Soon after, economic production depended mainly on plantations (engenhos) that used native labour and increasingly enslaved people to work the land.Footnote 6 After 1695, gold mines were discovered, renewing the colony's relevance and propelling a massive influx of enslaved labour from Africa (Levine 1997). Rio de Janeiro, the nearest seaport to the mines, became the capital of the colony and underwent an important population surge. By 1800, two-thirds of Brazil’s population was of African origin, and many more were of ‘mixed origin’ (Levine 1997: 10). Enslaved people were perceived as ‘naturally’ unruly, immoral, and dangerous. Anxious elites quickly demanded an institution for surveillance and punishment: the police. As soon as the Portuguese crown arrived in Brazil (1808), they created the Intendência Geral da Polícia da Corte e do Reino made up of constables and justices of the peace. The Royal Police Guard (Guarda Real de Polícia) was created by decree in May 1809 and explicitly stated ‘good order and public peace’ (Bretas and Rosemberg 2013b). The Guarda Real, based on the Portuguese model of policing, followed its military fashion and was responsible for patrolling all areas of the city as well as imparting exemplary punishments (Table 1).

Table 1 History of Brazil, main events and police institution, summary table (State terror has a colour: the legal foundations of police violence in Brazil)
Full size table

Since 1603 and during this period, Brazil has ruled according to the Portuguese legal framework, the Livro V das Ordenações Filipinas. The Livro V was religious and reflected the Monarch's centrality. It is/was aimed mostly at ‘infidels witchery, and unruly slaves’ and purveyed various punishments towards enslaved people. A brief example: A slave that comes to possess the weapon of their master will have their hands cut offFootnote 7 and those who assist or hide fugitive slavesFootnote 8 will be punished with expulsion or lashes. Coronel Miguel Nunes Vidigal, infamous for extreme violence, commanded the Guarda Real. He was depicted as the judge and a punisher, with no law above him.Footnote 9 He insistently pursued those who practised capoeira,Footnote 10 already considered a criminal activity. Overall, the force was subject to little or no control from other authorities.Footnote 11 The legal frameworks fostered the extreme violence of the police, and the police were a key institution that sustained the slave economy.

The inception of the police sees its roots in the omnipresent fear of Black existence, the threat of Black freedom and the idea of ‘order’ attached to the former two. The ideology of colonial order demanded a police force that would punish quickly and efficiently. Only by limiting Black life from the public sphere and crushing any possibility of Black freedom did the police find their purpose. Here lies their raison d’être. It is in this anti-black ideology that they anchor their necropolitical power.

Empire (1822–1889)

Brazil became a constitutional monarchy in 1822 (MacLachlan 2003). Tensions between Portuguese central powers and emerging Brazilian elites sparked this rupture, followed by competing interests of regional elites (Levine 1997). All and all, slavery continued to be the motor of the Empire’s economy until 1888, the year that marks the abolition of slavery,Footnote 12 and the Empire came to an end.

The legal framework during the Empire period saw substantial changes: it had a secular character and was shaped by modern ideas of crime deterrence that were developing in Europe. The Código Criminal do Império do Brasil (Criminal Code of the Empire) replaced the Livro V das Ordenações Filipinas. The new Criminal CodeFootnote 13 typified both crimes and punishments, regulating the latter in relation to the former. But the Criminal Code continues to reflect the greatest anxieties of its time: the slave threat, either by individual misbehaviour or by collective insurrection. The new code limited physical punishments now considered excessive or inhumane for everyone except for enslaved people and accomplices. A few examples: It prohibited “whipping, torture, iron marks, and other cruel punishments along with other mutilations and corporal punishments”, but exceptions applied for enslaved people.Footnote 14 This created two different regimes of punishment that practically followed racial lines.Footnote 15

To regulate the extreme cruelty of (white) private owners, the code delegated punishments to the police (lashes should not exceed 50 per day and the ‘slave would afterwards be returned to their owner’Footnote 16). The establishment of the Calabouço—a notorious prison in downtown Rio de Janeiro—reflects how the police were delegated physical punishments on rebels, fugitives, or misbehaved slaves. Here, police authorities would inflict lashes and other forms of torture established in the Criminal Code.Footnote 17O Calabouço reflects the radical anxiety that the black body produced via individual resistance or collective insurrection.

But the Criminal Code also reflected a concern for the free-poor and born-free populations. Legal mechanisms, such as the criminalization of vagrancy, regulated migration to the cities and significantly restricted freedoms.Footnote 18 Enslaved or non-slave populationsFootnote 19 that contravened acceptable public behaviour would bump against “the institutions of repression the elite instituted to keep them within certain limits” (Holloway 1993: p. 8). African religions were labelled as a ‘dangerous element of slave rebellions’ and were closely monitored and repressed (Borges 2001: 183). In general terms, practices based on African culture were codified as crimes, solidifying the connection between Blackness and criminality, via race itself or culture associated with it.

In 1831, the Corpo de Guardas Municipais PermanentesFootnote 20 (Permanent Corp of Municipal Guards) replaced the colonial Guarda Real de Polícia, but their raison d’être remained practically intact. However, a crucial change took place, the Municipal Guards became subordinate to the army. This unique structure, still in place today, has given the MP expanded powers while guiding their heavy military philosophy.

One of the influential figures of the time was Diogo Antonio Feijó, the Minister of Justice. Feijó was a true reformist and issued a series of orders that limited private forms of punishment he deemed ‘inhumane’. In the complicated enforcement of punishments at the Calabouço, he declared that “more than 50 (lashes) should be understood as excessive punishment and thus prohibited by law” (Holloway 1993: 115). But even with reformist attempts and the modernization of legal frameworks, the establishment of ‘order’ continued to be enforced through physical punishment and the criminalization of Black life.

The abolition of slavery in 1888 did not radically change the practices and premises of policing. As I shall discuss below, with new legal frameworks and the expansion of military institutions during the Republican period, the purpose of the military police would continue to envision Black life as the most prominent threat to post-slavery ideological order.

Republic (1889–1964)

While other colonies declared independence in previous decades (as early as 1804 in the case of Haiti and the 1820s in Central and South American countries),Footnote 21 Brazil finally became a Republic on the verge of the twentieth century, in 1889. During this period, there was a shift towards maintaining order through managing the ‘dangerous classes’. Given the social structure of the time, much of what was defined as ‘dangerous’ followed racial lines. So, even with the ushering in of a new constitution and penal code, police powers continued to work towards enforcing the existing ideology of order.

The first Republican Constitution was proclaimed in 1891. The new penal code was mainly concerned with maintaining the integrity and internal security of the Republic (naming sedition, conspiracy against the Republic, resistance, and contempt in the first chapters of the code). It also focused on vagrancy and ebriety,Footnote 22 prostitution, and behaviours considered a threat to the post-slavery moral and social order. Similarly, as before, black or mestiços (former slaves or born free) and their practices (for instance, feitiçeria) or circumstances (for instance, vagrancy if migrating to the cities) were disproportionally targeted. The new penal code criminalized spirit possession and herbal folk healing as illegal medical practices (classified as ‘crimes against public health’) and would result in a penalty or a term of imprisonment.Footnote 23 Vagrancy and the practice of capoeira continued to be classified as crimes,Footnote 24 given their disruption of public order.Footnote 25 This conception of public order involved open expressions of African culture and Black freedom more broadly. Candomblé, drum parties (batuques), and carnivals were viewed as acts against the public order, notably because they transgressed the appropriate moral behaviour (Borges 2001: 183). Following the trend of the previous decades, Blackness continued to be a synonym of crime.

Police forces remain reserves of the Army and face new changes at both local and national levels. The police had to secure the new socio-geographies in the shifting dynamic of the cities.

Favelas and quilombos (fugitive and former slave communities) quickly became targeted communities and were relegated to an outlawed limbo (Zaluar and Alvito 1998).

At the national level, after the Second World War, the Brazilian army was mostly influenced by the USA and a strong anti-communism ideology that was “hostile to any sort of populism” (Nunn 1972: 52). Indeed, the Cold War climate had its expected influence on Brazilian domestic politics. During this period, the military took political action three times—in 1945, 1954 and 1955—to intervene in times of political instability. In 1961, the army, the navy and the air force intervened to prevent the incoming president, João Goulart—viewed as a leftist by conservatives—from holding too much power (DHBBPós 1930. 2001). And in 1964, they launched a military coup d’état, putting an end to the democratic republic.

Dictatorship (1964–1985)

The 1964 coup ushered in two decades of military rule. The rapidly growing urban poor knew long before most middle-class citizens what it felt to be constantly repressed by police and military forces. However, the military regime solidified police violence as a legitimate form of policing and extended military rationalities to purview domestic matters.

The new Constitution, approved by the National Constituent Assembly, centralized decision-making and organized the armed forces. It also declared a state of exception while censuring political dissidence. While national security was the main concern, a growing concern for the trafficking of narcotics appeared at this point. As expected, the military police repressed public demonstrations, protests, and popular movements. But they were also in charge of containing the growing illegal economy of drugs. The repression of common crime, trafficking and political repression often overlapped. The working classes, including black and brown communities, continued to be targeted and harshly treated within the mass of ‘internal enemies’. We see at this point another critical intersection: the pre-existing association of ‘dangerous classes’ with Blackness and poverty was aggravated by the hysteria of narcotics. The figure of the ‘internal enemy’ alluded to throughout the dictatorship as the biggest threat of authoritarian order is conflated with the old figure of the ‘dangerous classes’. In other words, the dangerous classes now become the enemy.

This Constitution also broadened the jurisdiction of military courts, and in 1977, a Constitutional Amendment (known as the ‘April Package’) expanded military jurisdiction to state military police forces. This change—still in effect today—solidified the place of military police soldiers under a military jurisdiction.

During the dictatorship, the military police played a significant role in controlling, identifying, and punishing ‘internal enemies’, anyone who threatened national security. Their official role was reaffirmed as a reserve force of the Army.Footnote 26 However, many of the central qualities of the organization of the police had been established over the previous decades. For instance, Gétulio Vargas had created special branches that specialized in ‘public order’, focusing on political and social dissidence (Davis 1996).

The maxim made famous by the elites of the old regime remained intact: ‘social issues are police matter’Footnote 27 (Teresa Caldeira and Holston 1999). It was within this combination of harsh public repression and a concern for the growing illicit drug economy that the radical militarization of the police force took place. The police presence was not limited to ostensive policing but included intelligence and surveillance, looking for possible suspects and connections between local leaders and communist insurrection movements. Black movements were also targets of police repression during the dictatorship (Comissão Da Verdade Do Rio 2015). Broad political powers allowed a radical militarization of the police, who now had a renewed authority to enforce violence as a form of policing.

The eventual transition to democracy in the mid 1980s was made in “orderly, gradual and safe” fashion. An amnesty law was passed in 1979,Footnote 28 securing the regime's impunity but also allowing opposition leaders to re-enter the country. The military files were concealed for decades and have only been gradually opened, the National Truth Commission.Footnote 29 In 1984, the first election—while indirect—had both military and civil candidates. By 1985, democracy was re-established with the titanic challenge to deal with the many legacies of authoritarian rule.

Democracy (1985–Present)

By the time of re-democratization, the military police had a consolidated place in Brazilian society. As an adjacent body of the army, it also had well-established practices based on a militaristic style of maintaining ‘order’. While the promise of democracy would ensure a withdrawal from authoritative and discriminatory language, the transition to democracy did not greatly impact the police institution or policing practices.

The hallmark and consolidation of democracy came with the new Constitution of 1988, considered one of the most progressive in Latin America, and clearly breaking away from some military prerogatives (Zaverucha 1998, 2001). It outlined civil liberties and human rights as state responsibility (‘it is the duty of the state and a collective responsibility to assure public security’Footnote 30). However, as defined by the new Constitution, the structure, organization, and goals of the military police did not change from previous legislation. Its role was defined as ‘ostensive policing and the preservation of public order’; as an auxiliary (subordinate) reserve force of the army. Not surprisingly, contemporary police forces are highly militarized and have clear resemblances with the Army in practices, logic, discourse, and symbols.

But the 1988 Constitution not only failed to modify the military’s jurisdiction, but it expanded its purview. Firstly, it confirmed its own internal legislation, the Military Criminal Procedure Code. Internal (disciplinary) or criminal behaviour is investigated, prosecuted, and judged according to this Code.Footnote 31 Secondly, state military courts ensure teams of military officers and judges are primarily drawn from the military to judge crimes committed by military agents; all proceedings are private. As such, M.P. police accountability remains negiligible due to the secrecy of its judiciary processes and restrictions of civil overview.

Fear and insecurity across classes contribute to justifying police violence as a legitimate -and indeed only- means to control crime and community violence. To make matters worse, the period of democratic rule coincided with a steady rise in drug trafficking and territorial disputes. The war on drugs rhetoric and policies have contributed to recasting the figure of those worthy of state violence: from ‘dangerous classes’ to ‘internal enemy’ to the ‘bandido’. This concern has seen the use of military equipment in everyday policing, from rifles to war tanks (even in community policing such as UPP). In Rio de Janeiro, local governments have gone as far as incentivizing police killings by providing financial compensation to those agents that showed ‘acts of bravery’ in open confrontations.Footnote 32 Perhaps this has been the most expressive form of the police’s necropolitical power.

Policing in democratic Brazil has shown no signs of change in terms of disproportionate targeting and killings of Black people. The police have continued to spread terror among non-white communities on a daily basis.

With a legal architecture that still insulates the military police, accountability is rare, and public opinion often supports police violence as legitimate. Calls to impose the same old ideology of order based on the criminalization of Black life continue to press the police. And the police continue to be the state institution that ritually enforces it at whatever cost necessary.

The Police: It’s Raison D’être Inside Out

During colonial and imperial times, a specific punishment regime ruled enslaved people’s relationship with the state. While other categories (non-slave, poor) shaped the dynamics of security, the number of enslaved people made them the main preoccupation of the elites. The abolition of slavery did not radically change the legal duty of the police. With the shift towards ‘dangerous classes’ associated with criminal behaviour, non-white populations remained the target of most repressive and violent policing. For instance, rural migrants coming into cities naturally became vagrants and were considered criminals. Practitioners of magic or Afro-Brazilian culture were criminalized as well.

The Brazilian legal frameworks have mostly been imported from European thought and reproduced the same racist presumptions about crime. After the Republican period, there has been a gradual shift towards neutral language, but the structure and ethos of the police remain vastly untouched.

The police, once created to manage, control, and punish enslaved people—as well as other non-slave categories—experienced a continuing radicalization of their methodical violence during the decades that followed, culminating in the dictatorship. This trend has not been disrupted by re-democratization. On the contrary, police power has only solidified in the past three decades. The duty to impart immediate punishments has persisted with modern social demands over the war on drugs and related criminality. Statistics of police lethality during the past decades indicate a clear increase in police lethality after re-democratisation (Dal Santo 2022), which illustrates the extent of this logic and the legal protections the police continue to have.

The rise of violence during democracy—within a context of neoliberal policies and human rights discourses—has shaped a policing logic that enforces true terror towards the specific groups that have been deemed dangerous. In contemporary Brazil, the task of the police is to distinguish accurately those who can be punished or killed. It is within this logic that the popular expression mentioned before makes sense (‘A good bandit is a dead bandit’). The police have been granted the duty to direct state violence towards those who fit the image of the criminal. In this way, the history of policing has had specific implications for favela residents, which authorities have long considered as urban, sanitary, moral and security threats (Zaluar and Alvito 1998).

The Brazilian military police have always drawn their identity and sense of duty from the country's own history. The extraordinary resilience of the institution has also been sustained by social imaginaries about race and class. Indeed, in an anti-black context, their stability can be explained precisely because of their unique necropolitical power.

But race and class have also played a crucial role within the institution. Indeed, racist imaginaries have also been crucial in retaining the institutional structure and continue to shape soldiers’ experiences.

Since their inception, upper hierarchies were of direct Portuguese descent: white and issued from the elite classes. By contrast, after the abolition of slavery, many former slaves joined the military forces, and many fought in the Paraguayan War and other conflicts (Bretas and Rosemberg 2013a). These black, mulatto and non-white soldiers were imbued in a racist society that reproduced values that associated Blackness with threat. Recognizing this inner threat, the institution disciplined and punished soldiers regarded as potential seeds of disobedience. Furthermore, military codes were decisively focused on internal discipline, and even nowadays, express a real concern for internal disobedience, subversion, and indiscipline.Footnote 33 This focus has also been at the cost of ignoring the external relationship of the police with the public. As I saw during fieldwork, this fear lingers in everyday policing and the common sense of agents (many talk about it, insubordinação). Disciplinary codes and rules generate more preoccupation than Criminal Codes and national legal frameworks. Some supervisors demand to follow certain rules of decorum or behaviour strictly and insist on them wearing full military uniform or giving a military salute as they enter the room. Often, these requests ‘make no sense’ for soldiers. The imperative to keep soldiers ‘in their place’ relates to the striking distinctions between the upper hierarchies (oficiais) and the lower ones (praças). Current requisites for application to these pathways continue to reinforce this divide. While the oficiais must have higher education, praças are not required more than an elementary school diploma. The two regimes are separate, which means praças can hardly aspire to become an oficial. This division enhances the fear of insubordination and generalized mistrust of the upper hierarchy towards the lower one. Soldiers also feel this huge disconnect with the upper hierarchies. Unsurprisingly, these hierarchies continue to follow racial lines and illustrate how institutional racism has historically shaped the police inside out. Longstanding anti-black logics and ideas also influence how black and non-white soldiers adhere to conservative views that associate Blackness with crime and enforce police violence against black citizens.

If we consider both the criminalization of Black life and how the law has been instrumental in the unlimitedness of police violence, we can conclude that Brazilian legal frameworks have actively fostered and sustained police violence. The institutional ethos of the police has reproduced their raison d’être throughout the historical transitions in the country. Navigating through the criminal codes, creation decrees, other legal documents, and records of social stigma and discrimination reveal the roots of their raison d’être within the law.

For the past three centuries, calls for reform have been heavily suppressed. To this day, police agents have been expelled when considered to have challenged the institution.Footnote 34 The accumulation of police power, expressed in its contemporary legal architecture, reveals an intractable institution.

Final Thoughts

Can we think of the law as a place of radical change? The law could be a place of substantial change in the cartography of life and death in Brazil, but a necessary step would be to recognize history, create collective understandings, and envision true change based on moral commitments that challenge any form of oppression (based on race, class, gender, etc.). A combination of legal and socio-cultural shifts is then required to see radical change that would shift the culture of policing in Brazil.

Civil society in Brazil has slowly gained space denouncing abuses.Footnote 35 In front of police resilience to change, we find Black resistance movements. The moral climate of today is reframing police violence. If democratic institutions need to be rethought, the police are certainly a place to start. But reforms or the creation of new branches of community policing, such as the UPP, have proven not to attain sustained change or significantly diminish police violence. The legal architecture that fosters police power allows us to trace its resiliency.

Police abolition involves rethinking and remapping the role of alternative institutions that could offer new avenues for the state to engage with its population, including finding local solutions, community-based initiatives, and other non-punitive approaches to justice (Kaba and Ritchie 2022; Maher 2022). In the words of Anthony Paul Farley, “emancipation’s place is beyond the juridical horizon” (Farley 2021: 83–84).

The law, a reflection of its historical context and a mirror of moral values of the time, could foster change if–and only if–as a society, we truly reflected on the extent of anti-blackness at the heart of state institutions.