Policing in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

In this chapter I describe how I gained access to the military police and examines the institutional and political dynamics of the pacification project. I argue that the tensions between attempts to modernize the police and the perpetuation of policing as warfare express ongoing processes of state transformation in Brazil. By bringing attention to these tensions we can gain a better understanding of how and why institutional reform processes fail, as well as how the police’s role in the emergence and formation of authoritarian state projects. While the pacification was a complex public security intervention shaped by different interests and objectives across multiple levels of scale, I argue that it is best understood as an attempt to capture the war machine dynamics operating across Rio’s urban landscape. That is, as a modernizing project that sought to expand bureaucratic state control both within the Military Police as well as the favelas.

A young black man stops me on the street. He appears to be around 20 and is only wearing a pair of worn Bermuda shorts. Can I buy him something to eat? He asks unabashed. I rummage through my pockets, where I have enough coins to buy him something from the kiosk at the corner. “Do you want a hot dog?” I ask. He does. He comes from Duque de Caxias, Rio’s northern suburbs. Usually, he sells caipirinhas on the beach, he tells me, as if to assert that he’s a trabalhador—an honest worker. Finishing his day’s work, he had sat down on the curb to smoke a joint. The police had stopped him, taking the weed, his money, and his cell phone. I’m surprised: “Oh, wow, is that common?” He nods and asks me what I do. “I am a social anthropologist. Do you know what that is?” He does not, so I explain. “Ah, so you’re a kind of detective?” I laugh. Yes, sure: I’m a detective. I like the sound of that (Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1

A favela on a hillside above the asfalto in Copacabana, March 2023

The Police and the Elites

I decide to reach out to Marcelo Freixo, deputy for the socialist party PSOL (Partido Socialismo e Libertade) at Rio de Janeiro’s Legislative Assembly (Assambleia Legislativa do Estado de Rio de Janeiro, ALERJ) and leader of the assembly’s Human Rights Committee. He was elected in 2007 and rose to fame in 2008 after leading the parliamentary commission that mapped the growth of paramilitary groups in western Rio. The commission published a report that uncovered close bonds between paramilitary militias, the Military Police, and elected politicians. Freixo became known across Brazil and is despised by many officers within the police. He puts me in contact with one of the investigators of the report on the militias, Vinicius George.¹

Vinicius is a parliamentary advisor at Freixo’s office. He is a tall and slender man, and casually escorts me through the Legislative Assembly and into his cubicle. Before Vinicius got involved in politics, he worked as a police detective—not in the Military Police, but in the Civil Police. In Brazil, this is an important distinction: The Military Police is not a branch of the Armed Forces, but an independent police institution tasked with ostensive street patrol and reactive policing. It would perhaps be more accurate to call them a militarized police force. The Civil Police, on the other hand, is investigative and mainly centered around detective work. Although, ideally, the two forces complement each other, in practice there is significant institutional friction between them. Widespread corruption in both forces and unclear distinctions between areas of responsibility strain trust between the forces, if such a trust exists at all.²

When Vinicius started his career at the police in the 90s, violence reached record levels every week. Meanwhile the local police forces, both civil and military, were involved in a series of scandals of international proportions. In July 1993, for instance, officers from the Military Police executed eight homeless children and one adult sleeping on the sidewalk next to the Candelaria-cathedral in the city center. The execution was ordered by local business owners who felt that the presence of homeless children was bad for business. Later that year, another group of military police officers murdered 21 civilians in the favela Vigario Geral. This massacre was a spectacular performance of collective punishment in retribution for the murder of four police officers by the gang that controlled the favela two days earlier (see, e.g. Rodrigues 2014). Similar practices were common among Civil Police officers as well: In the 90s, detectives from the police’s anti-kidnapping unit were responsible for a series of kidnappings, extorting family members for money through the crimes that they were supposed to investigate.

Vinicius pulls his chair out from behind the desk and sits down next to me. His face is marked by decades under the tropical sun, and he talks with a vigor that makes him sound a lot younger than his graying hair and receding hairline suggests. Speaking in an uninterrupted flow of words, his Socratic monologue is full of rhetorical questions. The history of the Brazilian police started here in Rio de Janeiro he begins. In 1807, when Napoleon invaded Portugal, the Portuguese king and court fled to Brazil: Fifteen thousand clergymen and aristocrats settled down in Rio! “The king was furious, but this was the only place they could come!” Vinicius laughs. The court needed a place to live, but the city was not prepared for such a rapid and immense increase in population. Many local aristocrats were thrown out of their houses to make room for the newly arrived Portuguese, making a less-than-optimal starting point for the relationship between the locals and the new foreign elite.

In those days, black slaves made out a third of the total number of the country's inhabitants, with Rio de Janeiro as one of the most important port cities of the Transatlantic slave trade. Just a couple of years prior to the arrival of the Portuguese crown, the slave revolt of Haiti had succeeded in expelling the French colonizers and logically, the Portuguese were afraid that the same would happen here. To calm their anxieties, one of the first state institutions to be established by the crown upon settling in Rio in 1808 was the police: The year after the crown’s arrival, in 1809, the Royal Guard Order was created.³ This was the predecessor of the Military Police: “And so begins the history of the Brazilian state,” Vinicius exclaims. “With the militarization of the state apparatus. Since then, the police and legal courts supported the King and Royal Court and controlled the rest of the people—first and foremost the poor, the beggars, the unemployed. They were all seen as worthless criminals. And that is the way it has been for 200 years. Instead of a King and court, we now have a Governor and the elites. The names have changed, but the logic remains the same: You have a state that serves a minority and controls the masses. But in order to control the masses… Ha! That is not easy! You must instill fear in the people.” Vinicus raises his voice, emphasizing each word: “Fear is a hammer of a tool for domination. People who live in fear can be controlled—you see?”

From its onset, the Brazilian state was developed in line with a military model of state, he explains. This has put its mark on the history of the country. The military dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985 was the last expression of this militaristic model. “With such great inequality as there is here—such a terribly uneven distribution of resources—it follows from the military logic that one needs to maintain control, right? The state is at the service of two million people and controls two hundred million people. And it does this through a militarized logic.” He pauses to catch his breath. “What, then, is this militarized logic?” he asks rhetorically. “The militarized logic is the logic of war! The logic of battle! With enemies to be crushed, territories to be occupied or pacified. Do you understand?”⁴

I ask him whether the term pacification does not imply a goal of making peace.⁵ “Peace, yes!” he answers bluntly: “Great, everybody wants peace. Then we must stop inventing wars! Not provoking new wars! Isn’t that easier? If we don’t invent the war, we don’t need to pacify, you know? It may seem like a crazy sentence, but that’s what it is, right? Who invents the war? Why do we pacify? If we are going to pacify something it is because that thing is in a state of war, isn’t it?” I nod. “What war? What is the war? War against drugs? That's it, it’s the local version of the famous war against drugs, isn’t it? And who is the traficante, […] what is the locus of the war against drugs here?” I wait for him to reply to his own question: “The favelas!”

Vinicius allows the sentence to sink in. “It’s curious, right? There’s only drug trafficking in the favela, right? Is that it? Isn’t there in Zonal Sul? Isn’t there in Rio Branco?” he says, referring to Rio’s financial district. “Ah, but there are weapons in the favela!” Vinicius makes himself his own conversation partner and critic. “Are there weapons, is there ammunition? There is ammunition, it’s true, that’s a problem, right? […] Now, the [real] question: Who is it that put those weapons, that ammunition in the hands of the […] traficante favelado, right?” He briefly pauses as if he's waiting for a response. “The corrupt military, the corrupt police!” He yells out the answer. “There are no weapons nor ammunition that gets in the hands of a trafficker in the favela, or of a car thief from the favela, or of a kidnapper from the favela, […] that [haven’t gotten there] by the hand of the military—I am talking about the armed forces as well—or from corrupt police officers.⁶ Are you getting why I’m saying what I’m saying? If we don’t invent war, we don’t need to pacify, right?” My Portuguese is still patchy, and I send a grateful glance at the voice-recorder. “It’s better not to invent. [I’ve got] nothing against the pacification! Pô, reduce the lethality… So, we arm the traficante from the favela, we provide [him] with ammunition regularly, sometimes we go there to wage war with him, against him. Isn’t it better not to arm [him], not to munition him?”

He laughs, before he changes his voice in objection to his own reasoning: “Ah, but the traficante is the owner of the favela. Is he the owner of the favela? The owner of the favela? He lives until he is maybe 24, at most, and then dies or goes to jail; he lives until he’s 24 at the most, dies or is imprisoned. There you have Nêm, Nêm from Rocinha, then it’s Dem, then comes Zem, and then comes Dum, Lum, Gum, right? Easily replaceable pieces. He is the owner. Short life: […] Either he dies at the hand of the police, or he dies at the hand of the traficante, or he goes to jail. […] He is the owner, ok, he is the owner, and he is obliged to pay arrego, right? You already know what arrego is, bribes to the police, weekly, every other week, right? Primarily for the MP (Military Police), right? If I'm the owner of something, do I have to pay someone else to stay in my place? How does that work, huh? [He] isn’t the owner of anything! That’s a lie, that’s an invention of the police, of the media, of the politicians, to increase the value: The value of the arrego.⁷ The drug trafficker is not the owner of anything. He is the tenant of the moment. He has rented that little spot, for as long as that lasts.”

Vinicius leans forward, lowering his voice, as if he’s about to let me in on a secret.

“But there I come: I invent the war, I arrange it, I arm, I bribe, I let myself be bribed, and afterwards…” He leaves the words hanging. “That’s why a lot of police officers go crazy. At some point they realize: Wait a minute, I’m just standing here drying ice. Have you heard that expression?” I nod. Drying ice, or enxugando gelo is a metaphor for useless work: As one layer of ice is dried up, the next layer is already melting. He senses my confusion and understands that he’s been rushing forward too quickly: “Listen, when you start working in the police, you are young and full of ideals. What do you want? You want to do good work: Investigate and solve crimes so that those responsible can be judged in the courts and punished according to the law. That’s how you create a safe society. But then you get inside the force and start to discover a lot of things you did not expect. You see that the people you work for answer to somebody higher up in the system, in the leadership of the police, in the State Secretary of Security, in the Governmental palace. Do you get me? Then it dawns on you that there is an established system for corruption that is controlled from the top, and if you try to step outside of that system, everything is blocked. You can’t do it: You will be persecuted [by your superiors]. At certain times, you might achieve it.” Then hell breaks loose: Your boss relocates you to another division, then another one. You lose access to the resources you need to do your work—they are taken away from you. With time, you start to understand how the system works, and your desire to change it grows.” Vinicius’ voice is serious.

“The people in the political system of course want things to stay the way they are. They just don’t say it. How else do you explain that the numbers of crime in the center of Barra da Tijuaca, Ipanema, Copacabana and Leblon,” he lists Rio’s wealthy districts, “are almost at Norwegian levels! Or Belgian, rather, because Norway is really an exception. But it’s like Belgia, right? If you look at the closed cases in the southern areas of Rio de Janeiro—Belgium—you see that most of them are solved.” There’s less crime and more solved cases there. But if you look at Zona Oeste, Norte, Baixada Fluminense—the poor suburbs—the crime rates rise to absurdly high levels, while the number of solved cases falls to absurdly low levels. “Why is it like that?” he asks rhetorically: “It’s very simple! Who lives there? One place is inhabited by us—mainly white, educated, middle and upper classes. Here, despite of how much we complain and protest the lack of security, there is little crime and a high rate of resolution. But when we look to the other areas, the numbers are of opposite proportions. There you’ll find inhabitants who haven’t finished elementary school, they are black, nordestinos, right? The lower classes.” Vinicius interrupts himself: “Belindia! Some use that term: Belindia, a mix of Belgium and India.⁸ To the south of Rio, you have Belgium and to the north and west lies India. We have both extremes within the same city. Why does the system work in one place, and not in the other?”

“The guy who sits there in the Guanabara-palace—the governmental palace—he knows all this. The diagnosis, the analysis, is clear. He knows what it takes! But here in Brazil we have elections every second year—local elections, governmental elections, and national elections—so there is one election after the other. That has some positive dimensions but negative ones as well. The police are constantly used for campaigning: To disciplining voters, to finance campaigns through corruption, and so on. This is a very common use of the police in our state. Here in the capital, we see less of it, but if you travel outside Rio’s city limits it becomes very obvious. In the suburbs, the power of the Commissioner (in the Civil Police) or Commander (in the Military Police) is very big. Of course: They control the guns and are used in politics and during elections, either to control the voters by force or to gather funds for the campaigns of the political parties. Do you understand?”

Vinicius stresses his point with an example: “Damn it, I remember one time—just so that you understand how this works in real life—one of the demands put forward by Hélio Luiz (the chief of the Civil Police during Marcelo Alencar’s period as governor in the nineties). He told the governor: Okay, I'll be your chief, but you’ll have to keep your mayors and members of Parliament in check. Why did he say this? Because the members of Parliament demanded to select the [civil] police Commissioners and [military police] Commanders of their respective areas!” “Why?” I ask with a puzzled look. “Why? To be able to control the voters by force! And to be able to use them as caixa dois!” Caixa dois or second cashier, is a euphemism for the cash that has been collected through bribes or extortions.⁹ “The governor had to gather all the Parliamentary deputies and all his mayors to tell them forget about the police, forget about the apparatus of security. Do you understand what this means, in practical terms? It means: Get your funds elsewhere, use and abuse the teachers, doctors, schools, hospitals, traffic departments, but not the police. The police can no longer be used. Am I explaining this in a way you can understand?” Vinicius ask. I nod slowly.

“Let me tell you another story,” he says. “When Anthony Garotinho was Governor (from 1999 to 2002) many cabinet members wanted me to have a role in his government. I said no, I don’t want to. Muito obrigado. Thanks for the invitation, but I’m going to the Legislative Assembly with Hélio Luiz”—the former chief of police had been elected by the people at that point. “So, then I stayed here for four years. Hélio Luiz didn’t want to keep on going. He quit, retired, and I returned to the police.” Garotinho’s government had been re-elected, but with Rosinha Garotinho, Anthony's wife, behind the wheel. Once again, Vinicius was asked to work in the government: “Rosinha invited me to a meeting at the palace. I thought, great, I’ll start working in the government, managing federal security politics, leading the police, the secretary of public security something like that. Then I said: Listen to me, it’s okay, I have nothing against that. I’ll work anywhere, because I’m a government employee in Rio de Janeiro, so I will do my work. But you know what you’re going to get: Everybody’s going to get a beating, whether they are crooks from the street or crooks wearing suits. It’s will not just be the traffickers from the favela who will get a beating. Oh no! We will give it to the traffickers in Zona Sul, we will give it to the bicheiros (people making money off illegal gambling) beatings to the militia, to corrupt mayors and members of the Legislative Assembly: We will hand out beatings to everyone. You know how I want it… Damn it, this was a meeting I had been invited to at the governmental palace! And this is how Garotinho answered me: Damn it, that won’t work! […] Damn it, we must pay the bills from the election last year, and next year is the local election! So I told Garotinho then I wish you good luck, because I’m out. Do you get it?”

Vinicius continues: “This means that a big part—maybe the biggest part—of the money from corruption within the police flows upwards in the system. It makes its way to the palaces, the political parties, to the campaigns. So, if this mechanism, in all honesty, works very efficiently, how can the police function so badly?” He raises his voice. “Mentira! Lies! The police functions damn well! The police were created to follow the actual orders being given, and they are very good at this.” Vinicius asks me another question: “My friend, have a look and tell me if the police aren’t offering protection to the Governor, to the elites? Tell me if they don’t function as caixa dois during elections? Tell me if they aren’t protecting the friends of ‘the king’ when they must, if they aren’t biting the enemies of the king when they must. Do you understand what I’m saying? The police aren’t doing a good job by the criteria of the Constitution and legal system, but all of that—even what’s in the Constitution—is rhetoric. It’s formalized rhetoric, but still very much rhetoric.”¹⁰

“The police are like Rex!” I look at Vinicius with confusion. “Rex, you know that dog…” It dawns on me that he is referring to the old German TV show about Rex the police dog. Yes, I remember Rex. “The dog bites his enemies and protects his friends. If he is well behaved,” Vinicius distorts his voice, “here’s another bone, some milk. Is he behaving badly? If so, he’ll be punished, won’t he? The police have no autonomy.¹¹ Everything depends on the government.” I'm still processing the information, it is far from how I have imagined the police's role, and Vinicius can tell: “Listen, the police in Rio like to say that they are the ones who kill the most and die the most, right? This is true—there is research that shows it. But do you know why they are the ones that kill the most in the world? Because they are ordered to kill!” I have heard this before but have a hard time understanding that state politicians in a democracy are ordering the police to kill criminals. “How can they do that?” I ask. “I mean, how are they giving the orders?” “You won’t see a Governor on TV saying kill all the bastards. The orders are given in the corridors of the palace. How, you ask? Through whoever the governor elects when he is inaugurated. You can tell it by their names: That Coronel kills, that Commissioner is corrupt. Just by looking at the names you can tell what music you’re supposed to dance to. The police officers know how to read these messages. The soldiers on the frontlines know how to read this. By reading the chain of command they know when they are allowed to kill more or to kill less, when there’s permissiveness for corruption and when they must be honest. And when the Governor want’s it he gives the orders in the palace corridors. But of course, nobody will state this publicly.”

“Take Sergio Cabral, for instance. He started his time as governor by sending the police out to kill: Pá, pá, pá, pá!” Vinicius imitates the sound of shooting. Cabral was instated as governor in 2007, and the first year he was in power was also the most violent year in the history of Rio’s police forces. “Today, he has implemented the UPPs, right? Isn’t that odd? Makes you ask yourself: Why is he doing this? It’s quite simply because the Governor palace asked for opinion polls to determine what most of society wants—what the opinion influencers want. Then they look at what the economic contributors to the election campaigns want, put it all together in a basket and decide what their response will be. Do you get it?” I nod. “So, what was the logic behind the UPPs?” I ask.

“I’ll tell you how the UPPs came to be: Cabral’s government was ruffling feathers […] sending the police to cause havoc, according to the logic that first you have to stress [the situation] in order to calm it down later—a mode of action similar to what they did in Colombia, in Cali, Medellín—they went there and copied that model. Just that here we had already been stressing [the situation] for decades: There’s no room to continue stressing [it], right? There’s over-stress here. What happened? The federal government, at the time Lula was President, had given all its support to Sergio Cabral (Governor in Rio from 2007 to 2014). The reason for this, honestly, was that they wanted to neutralize Garotinho, the former Governor, who was a threat to Lula on a national level.” Garotinho ended up in third place during the elections in 2002, when Lula came to power and tried to run again in 2006. “The problem was that the security politics of Lula’s national government were diametrically opposed to the politics of the State government of Rio de Janeiro. In the end, the Minister of Justice said that enough was enough: ‘Listen here, damn it, this won’t do. We have a program, we have a political platform, and you’re doing the opposite! Damn it, the President supports you, we send you money! Either you change course, or we’ll pull our support!’”

“The police leadership also put pressure on the Governor. There were people in the police that were saying ‘We can’t keep on like this, there's no use in this, Governor!’ The Governor answered: ‘Shut up, go to hell, kill the bastards!’” I must have been looking confused because Vinicius quickly adds: “I’m not making this up—this is exactly how it went down. Of course, in closed meetings.” He goes on: “Part of the civil society and the Human Rights-organizations were also putting pressure on them, right? But the real reason why Cabral’s government finally bent to the pressure, even if only rhetorically, were election politics. It wasn’t because he believed in the project, it was because he was forced to do it. And when he understood that he didn’t have a choice, he thought: ‘Now that I have to do this, I’ll use it for my own gain among the media and the voters.’ And he did gain from it! He was re-elected because of the pacification, because of that banner...”

Even if the UPPs successfully reduce police violence, the project won’t solve the public security challenges of Rio, Vinicius says: “Is the pacification a valid intervention?” he asks rhetorically. “Yes, but only in a limited time and space. And even then, it is only valid as a support while establishing other state and social institutions. We need kindergartens, schools, education for the youth, right? We must bring in health-clinics, civil society institutions, entrepreneurs, and so on. The police should only stay for as short as they possibly can, aiding the other institutions.” He stops: “None of this happened. And seeing as the politicians turned a legitimate, temporary, tactical police intervention into a permanent public security miracle solution which helped them win elections, the project ended up as an election campaign strategy. Everybody wanted the UPPs! And so, they had to establish new UPPs. Do we have enough police officers for that? Do we?” I have a guess at the answer. “No?” “We don’t!” Vinicius consents. “So, what do we do then? We make a furnace that spews out an endless supply of police officers. And thus, the training of the Military Police which was bad to begin with got even worse. The police training time was shortened, and the quality and content got worse. That makes for terrible police officers—like undercooked spaghetti, right?”

Vinicius’ words keep churning in my head. How can I make sense of all of this? The power play and political horse-trades he describes are far from what I have imagined, despite what I already know about the Brazilian police. They describe institutional dynamics that cannot be explained away as the doings of the banda podre da policia (the rotten group of the police)—of a few “rotten apples.” On the one hand, Brazil appears as a country undergoing a process of modernization. The pressure from the federal government, civil society, and leaders within the police attest to this. On the other, as an institution deeply entwined with a personalistic political culture, its practices generally respond to the private interests of the politicians in power. It seems like the UPPs are the hybrid result of various intersecting interests and that they cannot be defined according to a single logic.¹²

“This conversation that I’m having with you now, I also had ten years ago and twenty years ago,” Vinicius says. “Soon, I’ll retire. I’ve witnessed moments when things have gotten better and others when things have gotten worse. Normally, it gets worse rather than better. When things are really bad, the politicians are forced to alleviate some of the pressure and allow people to catch their breath. Then it gets a little better. Did things get a little better? Okay, back to how things were before… This is how it goes—we’re stuck with this: Bad times that last a long time, interspersed with short moments where we can catch some breath. Let’s put it like that. The police officers also understand this,” Vinicius says. And this is where the militia enters the picture: “The police officer understands that he is there to try to handle a situation while the reasons that cause the situation are not being addressed. He can’t understand all the connections we are discussing here, analyze them, draw historical continuities, see the whole, the different contributing factors, right? He can’t. But instinctively, he understands that what he is doing doesn’t serve PN. Have you heard what PN means?” I haven’t. “Porra nenhuma—fuck all, absolutely nothing. It doesn’t work at all. And then? What does the police officer do when he discovers that what he is trying to do doesn’t work? He earns very little but is in the middle of it all and must keep on patrolling. Correct?” I nod. “Great, then that’s his job. Then, suddenly, a pregnant woman walks up to him. She is about to give birth. Where does he take her? There is no delivery room where they are, and often he ends up helping her give birth on the street. You’ve heard about this, right? The policeman serving as midwife!” I have. Vinicius slaps his thighs laughing at the absurd image. “Then another woman, his grandmother, comes complaining: The garbage is covering the streets, my son. Can’t you help me getting the garbage removed? And so, the police officer is solving problems with the garbage. The children don’t have kindergartens to go to, so the officers organize activities to keep the children occupied while their mothers are at work… Do you get it?” I can see where Vinicius is going. “Then there is the problem of the power supply that must be solved. And this way, the guy ends up having to solve everything. He still only earns 2000 reais a month. What happens as time passes? Well, says the guy, if everything goes through me, let's make it so that EVERYTHING goes through me. And here, the militia enters the picture—do you get it? If he must solve all the problems anyway, then everything will damn well go through him! Now he is the state there!”¹³

Access

Gabriela works as a congressional reporter in Brasilia. She is responsible for writing reports on the activities of 42 congressional deputies. That might sound like a lot, but then again, the Brazilian Congress has 513 members and around 20 parties (varying according to congressional periods). Does it sound like a lot to keep track of? To complicate matters further, new parties are continually formed as old parties split up and new constellations are negotiated. Voters vote for candidates rather than parties, which are often organized around regional family dynasties or constituted as loosely organized electoral alliances. It is common for elected deputies to switch parties following elections to better position themselves. This structure leads to fragmentation, making it difficult to build stable coalitions, but it is perfect for horse-trades and for buying allegiance with positions or money (see Nobre 2020; Leira 2022).¹⁴ The fragmentation of politics leads to unlikely coalitions, like the one Vinicius described between Lula and Cabral, and state policies with many contradictions—like the pacification project.

Gabriela has come to Rio to visit her aunt, but she has only seen her a few times in the two weeks that she has been here, so I suspect the aunt is a pretext to spend some time alone at Rio’s beaches. She tells me that Rio has the reputation of having the country’s most corrupt and violent police forces but that it is the same all over Brazil, including Brasilia. The “work” that the police do is only a façade, she tells me. I ask her to explain. “For instance, if the police say they have confiscated 50 tons of drugs, they have in reality confiscated 100 tons, and sold half of it,” she says.¹⁵ “They do it for the money. The pay is bad, and the risk of being killed is high.” Instead of acting as professionals, the police tend to insult, humiliate, beat up, and kill suspects, if it strikes them as the easiest solution. “I was stopped with a half-smoked joint once. The policeman who stopped me was high on something. Judging from his breath it might have been cocaine, but he was drunk as well. He threatened me and offered me more marihuana if I slept with him. Then his colleague came over. He was drunk too, but not as drunk as the guy who stopped me, and eventually they let me go. I was lucky, but what would they have done with a sex-worker? Beaten her up? Raped her? The police should support the citizens, not produce fear, like they're doing now.” Her boyfriend lives in Brasilia. He is black and experiences a lot of racism. “One time we were sitting in our car outside the supermarket, discussing what to have for dinner. We were kissing when a lady drove up and parked next to us. When she saw us, she backed out and called the police. They arrived with the sirens wailing and ordered us to get out of the car. When they understood that we weren't doing anything wrong—that we weren’t having sex on the parking lot or smoking marihuana, and that I wasn’t being raped, they told us it was dangerous for us to be there [and asked us to leave].”

Gabriela thinks the event shows the high levels of racial prejudice in Brazil: “When a black man and a white woman are seen together, it’s viewed as a reason to call the cops. Isn’t that ridiculous?” she asks. I nod in agreement. “There is a lot of racism in society. Not just towards black people but towards the poor, the uneducated, the nordestinos, even towards the yellow-skinned.” “Yellow?” I ask, wanting to know what she means by that. “The difference between white and yellow skin is that white people turn red in the sun, whereas yellow people turn brown,” she says and adds: “I’m yellow.” “I turn red. Does that make me white?” I ask. “Yes, you are white.” I put my arm next to hers and protest: “But we are the same color!” “Well, yes, but now I’m not tan. You should see me when I’ve been in the sun. Then, I almost turn black.”

In the afternoon, Gabriela takes me to the beach. I’ve never been a beach enthusiast and still haven’t understood the appeal of the Rio beaches. To me, the beach is associated with the awful taste of seawater at the back of my throat, sandy ears, and itching salt drying on the skin. And of course, my white skin easily burns unless I apply sunscreen every time I’ve been in the water or sweated a little—which in Rio’s scorching heat means all the time. But Gabriela is in her element at the beach. Without a shred of shyness she calls out to the boys working at the beach stall: “Oi! I need two chairs and an umbrella!” We take one chair each and find a space close to the water. The beach is full of people. Some are lying on their towels getting tanned while others are swimming in the waves. A family has gathered around a cooler filled with snacks and cold beer. This part of the beach attracts a diverse crowd: Teenagers from the favelas, older couples, groups of gay men, and people of all colors; black, brown, yellow, and white. Rio might be segregated but the beach is perhaps the city’s most democratic space.

A group of boys are standing in a circle by the water. They are playing with a volleyball, using their feet, head, chest, and shoulders: All except their hands. They call it futevoley—footvolley. One of the guys stands out among the others. He is tall and black, built like a bodybuilder, and with the face of a model. He is the best-looking man at the beach by a long footvolley-kick. Gabriela and I occasionally glance at him while we drink beer and play a game of chess. Soon, the sun starts setting behind the mountains. “Oi!” Gabriela calls out to one of the boys and waves for him to come over, while she leans back in her folding chair with a newly opened bottle of beer in her hand. “I like your friend,” she says without blinking. Enough said. The guy gets the message and runs over to the model who’s been stealing our glances to pass it on. Moments later he is hunched down next to Gabriela, who still hasn’t left her chair. She clearly knows what she's doing, and when she offers to help me get in touch with the Military Police I am thrilled. At the hostel the next morning, we write a mail to the police’s communication offices. Carefully formulated in Portuguese, it reads as follows:

Good morning,

I am a student of social anthropology and public security in Norway and have started a project here in Rio de Janeiro concerning the State’s public security policies, with a special focus on the working conditions of the police officers, their rights and guarantees.

Several research projects have focused on surveying the perspective of the communities, the favelas, and the people who live there. My study seeks to focus on a different point of view: That of the police, focusing on their working conditions, their choice of profession, the challenges they face in the line of duty, and their views on the precarious and risky situations they are faced with to protect their fellow citizens. If possible, I would also like an opinion on the investments in the police made by Rio’s government.

The demonstration carried out in Copacabana on December 14th aroused my interest and solidarity with this part of the story that no research project or news report this far have made available to the public.

I await your contact, thank you for your time.

The answer comes quickly, almost immediately. I am asked to contact the secretary of the Chief of Staff by phone. She wants me to meet the Commander in Chief who must authorize my fieldwork. In the evening, Gabriela has dinner with the guy she met at the beach. He introduces her to his entire family, and before her vacation in Rio has ended, he proposes to her. She politely declines and returns to her boyfriend in Brasilia.

I’ve bought new clothes for my meeting with the Chief of Staff. When I arrived in Rio I had only brought some T-shirts, shorts, and Havaianas, knowing that summer temperatures in Rio rarely fall below 30 ℃. But now I'm dressed up like I'll be throughout all my fieldwork: In blue jeans and a simple, long-sleeved, formal shirt. Below the shirt, I wear a sleeveless undershirt, hoping it will absorb some of the sweat. I'd rather not walk around in a puddle. This excessive formality might be overdoing it, but the long-sleeved shirt is meant to hide a small peace sign that I tattooed on my left wrist a few of years ago. Lady Gaga has an identical one in the same place but I got mine first. At the time, I wanted an uncontroversial tattoo since it would always be visible. Who could react negatively to a peace sign?, I thought then. Now I was paying for my decision: Six months in tropical weather wearing jeans and long-sleeved shirts. At least the police would not mistake me for a peace-loving, marihuana-smoking hippie the way I was dressed.

This orchestration makes me feel like an actor sacrificing everything to give a convincing performance and strengthens my commitment to the fieldwork: I’m ready to offer my blood, sweat, and tears! It might have been unnecessary to give so much importance to a tattoo, but the strategy works. Towards the end of my fieldwork, a police officer says that my clothing made me look like a Mormon. I can’t help laughing and tell him that has been my intention—to look as straight as I possibly can. So, ahead of my first meeting with the police, I have discovered the Mormon in me, hoping to appear benign, and perhaps a little naive. I puff my chest and walk straight up to the armed police officer guarding the entrance to the Military Police’s headquarters in the city center. It's in a large, white, colonial building, with windowsills painted in the azure-blue of the police. The face of the officer is contorted in a grimace that I assume is meant to inspire fear and respect, but I'm learning to shake off the nervousness that the police instill as their faces generally dissolve into a friendly Brazilian smile when I, the Mormon, greet them.

I’m excited. My project hinges on this meeting. I don’t know whether I’ll gain access or what kind of access I’ll be able to gain. I might have to tone down my ambitions and come prepared for a cross-examination, carefully planning my argument: I want to research the working conditions of the police, their motivation to work in the police, and their take on pacification. The uncertainty I'm feeling might be reasonable—it seems unlikely that an institution with such a poor reputation and so many challenges would welcome prying eyes. But my concerns evaporate with the warm welcome I receive from the Chief of Staff. After all that I have heard and read about the Military Police, he is everything I did not expect one of the leaders of the Military Police to be: Smiling, friendly, welcoming, and charismatic, with a master’s degree in Anthropology from a public university. He greets me with warmth and attention and after a short and polite conversation (Oh, so you are from Norway, huh? I know some police officers from the Norwegian police. I met them at a public security conference in Barcelona), he quickly assures me that he will personally facilitate access to whatever part of the institution I want to study. “By the way, what was it you wanted to study?” he asks after offering me his help. As it seems, those details were not forwarded to him. I am sitting in the middle of his huge office. On the walls there are large portraits of serious men, and in front of me a massive mahogany desk. The Colonel sitting behind it has just authorized me to do whatever I please. Have we misunderstood each other? I make it clear to the Colonel that I want to do ethnographic (I emphasize the word) fieldwork. That is, I want to follow the police at work, over time. Again, making sure to stress the particularities of participant observation. Six months, to be accurate. Yes, yes, he is, after all, trained in anthropology, he repeats, so he knows what fieldwork entails. It’s not a problem. “You can sort out the details with my secretary,” he says, before adding his condition: I must send him a copy of my finished work.

The secretary takes me into a separate room. Perplexed by the ease with which I have gained access I am expecting her to start listing the exceptions, but there are none. “What would you like to do?” she asks, repeating the Colonel’s question. What do I want to do? I have never thought about it that way. I have thought about what might be feasible, or what I might be allowed to do—where the police might allow an outsider in. I expected having to negotiate access. Police ethnographers often report long and cumbersome processes to gain institutional approval for their research (see, i.e. Fassin 2013). But the ease with which I gain the Colonel’s support is an example of how the different interests that permeate the police materialize. Apparently, the Chief of Staff wants me to write about the police and critically examine the institution. I look over at the secretary and discreetly test the terrain: “Well… what options do I have?” I had at best hoped that I would be allowed to follow police officers at Santa Marta, the first favela to be pacified, which is viewed as an unambiguous success.

“It would be good if you could compare the situation at different UPPs,” the secretary swiftly answers. She suggests that I might start with Santa Marta, where the police have successfully implemented the paradigm of proximity policing that the UPPs rest on. Then I could look at Mangueira, where they have been partly successful but are facing increasing resistance from traffickers. Finally, she suggests that I could add Alemão to the list. The UPP at Alemão has experienced an explosive increase in violence during the last month and is the area where the police have been met with the most resistance. Alemão? I’m immediately filled with excitement. The favela lies in the vast northern area of Rio and is on everybody’s lips. I recall Paulo’s words—very few people know what is going on there: Of course, I’ll do fieldwork in Alemão.

Conclusion: Modernizing the Police

The Chief of Staff of Rio’s Military Police is one of the conundrums that I tried to grapple with during my time in Rio. How could such a “modern” and seemingly progressive man lead an institution responsible for so many human rights violations and executions that some scholars have deemed as genocidal (Alves and Silva 2017; Cardoso 2018; Vargas 2023)? Why was he not worried that I might write something that could hurt the police? While I partly attribute my surprise to my own biases and blind spots concerning the violence that is perpetrated in the name of progress, I still believe that I stumbled across a fundamental tension within the institution. As my familiarity with the Military Police improved, I got a better grasp of the institutional politics that made my fieldwork at the UPPs possible. Again, I found the notion of war machine and state dynamics helpful in untangling these apparent contradictions, coming to understand the process of modernizing the police as an example of capturing or taming the war-machine dynamics within the institution (I will explore the micro-dynamics of this process in Chapter 7: Modernizing Warriors). That is, the pacification was both an attempt to tame the favelas, and an attempt to tame the police: An attack on the illiberal grammars of violent sociability and an attempt to forge a “new police”; a citizen police; a modern police force—respectful of human rights and operating according to the rule of law (see Henrique and Ramos 2011; Saborio 2015; Pires and Albernaz 2022).

While partial and simplifying, Vinicius George’s account of the political backdrop to the pacification shows how the modernization was driven forwards by different agents across different levels. There were federal incentives to revise Rio’s public security policies and Lula’s government encouraged the reform (see D’Araujo 2014; Alves and Evanson 2013). There was also pressure from below: From human rights organizations and civil society leaders demanding the end of aggressive and confrontational practices of policing, characteristic of Brazil’s democratic period (Magaloni et al. 2015). But importantly, there were also officers within the police who were critical of the state’s public security policies. They saw existing practices of policing as producing more violence, not less. Some of these officers, like Coronel Robson, had been exposed to critical perspectives on policing through local university programs, they had traveled to international conferences; published in academic journals, or in other ways worked with the scientific community. Reform-oriented leaders like Robson were aware of the challenges within their institutions (in Chapter 7: Modernizing Warriors I also return to this point).

One of my central claims in this book is that by attending to the friction between attempts to modernize the police and the violent and informal police practices described by Vinicius George, we can get a better grasp of the ongoing state transformations in Brazil. By bringing attention to the tensions between liberalism and illiberalism within the police, we can gain a better understanding of how and why institutional processes of reform fail as well as the police's role in the emergence and formation of authoritarian or illiberal state projects. As I’ve already noted, modernization is not to be confused with demilitarization (although calls for demilitarization are generally “modern” in their approach to policing): Rather, the neoliberal militarization (see, e.g. Wacquant 2008) that the pacification can be encompassed within is characterized by political and institutional attempts to channel, control, and redirect violence according to specific aims and objectives that might not coincide with the aims and objectives of agents positioned at different levels of the institutional hierarchy. The extent to which agents within the police operate according to extra-official interests within the police is indicative of the war machine and state dynamics at play.

Here we arrive at an important characteristic of the Deleuzian framework that is necessarily lost when war machine and state dynamics are treated as two separate dynamics rather than an integrated and synchronic process: The transgression of one normative order simultaneously produces an alternative order—deterritorializations are followed by reterritorializations. Michel Misse (2010: 35) describes this process as one whereby “systemic illegitimacies” gain legitimacy in certain social segments until they are transformed into a legitimate order, parallel to the dominant order. In its original, reform-oriented form, pacification appeared as an expression of an ongoing transformation of the Brazilian state and an economic restructuring according to the logics of globalization, while resistance to the reform within the police can be seen as a kind of regionalism based on such a parallel order or divergent cosmology (see also Muñiz and Albernaz 2015). Eventually, the pacification would become engulfed by this resistance, but as a modernizing reform attempt, it drew on globally circulating ideas about democratic policing and human rights. In the following chapters, I will take a closer look at the normative orders in dispute, but I will primarily focus on what the police’s regionalism brings into being.

This is a partial approach. As Vinicius George’s account clearly showed, the pacification was many things. It was a complex public security initiative shaped by different interests and objectives across multiple levels of scale: Global, national, local (city and neighborhoods), and institutional levels shaped by divergent political interests and personal dynamics. It was also a racialized public security intervention targeting favela spaces and subjectivities, and an example of how the “civilizing dynamics” of colonization must be seen as ongoing, contemporary processes; the result of a political horse trade between local and national governments; part of a electoral campaign strategy due to its initially massive public support; an ad-hoc solution to failed security policies; a police intervention that sought to address security concerns ahead of the Olympics; an intensification of pre-existing dynamics of militarization of public security in Rio; and integral to the restructuring of (il)legal markets through the logics of neoliberal urbanism and predation (see, e.g. Fleury 2012; Freeman 2012; Alves and Evanson 2013; Menezes 2013; Saborio 2015; Steinbrink 2013; D’Araujo 2014; Hirata and Grillo 2017; Grillo 2019; Manso 2020). In this conclusion, however, I have focused on the pacification as an attempted capture of the war machine dynamics operating across Rio’s urban landscape—that is, as a modernizing project that sought to expand bureaucratic state control both within the Military Police as well as in the favelas, in relation to the traffickers operating there (see Salem and Bertelsen 2020; Salem and Larkins 2021).