The paradox of police violence

The paradox of police violence in democratic Brazil, ein Aufsatz von Teresa P.R. Caldeira, online verfügbar in: Ethnography 2002 3:235, analysiert die öffentliche Unterstützung polizeilicher Gewalttätigkeit:

The article analyses the sources and logic of popular support for a ‘violent police’, which coexists with a negative evaluation of the police and a high victimization of working-class people. It argues that the roots of this paradox are found in a long history of state disrespect for civil rights, in particular poor people’s rights, and in a deep disbelief in the fairness of the justice system and its ability to function without bias. Controlling police abuses and increasing the respect for citizens’ rights are major issues for democracies, old and new. But as the case of Brazil demonstrates, in new democracies with a long history of authoritarianism, and in which the police are accustomed to act outside the boundaries of legality, the problems of controlling police violence and enforcing police accountability can be especially complicated.

Although the democratic regime is now almost 20 years old, reforms of the police and of the prison system have been slow and mostly unsuccessful. Both the federal government (under Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s presidency) and São Paulo state administrations (under Franco Montoro, Mário Covas and Geraldo Alckmin) have tried to control police violence and corruption and to make the police abide by democratic principles. These attempts have been resisted in many ways by the police forces and their lobbies. Resistance runs from police strikes to the blocking of proposals in the national assembly. The most dramatic indication of the failure to control police violence is the shockingly high number of civilians who continue to be killed by the Brazilian police. This finds no equivalent in any other country of the Americas (Chevigny, 1995). In some years, the police have killed more than 1000 civilians just in the metropolitan region of São Paulo. In the last 20 years of democratic consolidation, the police of the state of São Paulo have killed at least 11,692 people. In other metropolitan regions the numbers are equally elevated. Most of these deaths are never accounted for and only rarely is a policeman punished for slaying a civilian.

• Review of Teresa Caldeira's City of Walls