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National Institute of Science and Technology “Violence, democracy and public security” Annual Activity Report, 2009
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Overview 5
The Network 7
Theoretical Framework 17
Research Findings 27
Extension Projects 59
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OVERVIEW
The National Institute of Science and Technology “Violence, democracy and
public security” is a research network composed by seven researches centers –
six of them from federal and state Universities plus a National Forum on Public
Security, covering four of the five regions of Brazil. The network brings together
researchers from the fields of Social Science, Law, Public Health and Social
Psychology, providing a multidisciplinary approach.
The Institute has as its main objective the study of democracy from the
perspective of Rule of Law, understood as the universal access to the protection
of the law and to human rights guarantees, free from violence‐ in particular
results from law enforcement agents as well as from organized crime, which
constitute serious threats to public security and to democratic governance.
Read this document through and find out how the different research
groups are working to provide answers, to some of the important challenges of
our times.
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etwork
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THE INSTITUTE HEADQUARTERS
NÚCLEO DE ESTUDOS DA VIOLÊNCIA
Centre for the Study of Violence of the University of São Paulo (NEV‐USP)
São Paulo
Foundation year: 1987
Department/ Institution: Pro‐Rectorship
of Research / Universidade de São
Paulo (USP)
Overview: Created during the transition
to democracy in 1987, the Centre for
the Study of Violence has as one of its
main features, a multidisciplinary
approach to research. The focus of
research at the NEV has been on the persistence of gross human rights violations
throughout the process of democratic consolidation. Besides research, NEV has
extension courses and activities that seek to promote and protect human rights.
PROJECT COORDINATOR Prof. Dr. Sergio Adorno
Doctorate in Sociology, 1984, University of São Paulo;
Postdoctorate, 1995, Centre de Recherches
Sociologiques sur le Droit et les Instituitions Pénales –
France; Professor of Sociology, at University of São Paulo,
Researcher level I‐B CNPq, coordinator of the Center for
the Study of Violence, Chair of the UNESCO de Educação
para a Paz, Direitos Humanos, Democracia e Tolerância, at the Institute of Advanced
Studies (IEA)‐USP.
Luciana Yoshime
Revista E
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PROJECT VICE-COORDINATORS
Prof. Dr. Paulo Sergio Pinheiro
Doctorate in Political Studies, 1971, Université de Paris
I, Sorbonne; Professor of Political Science (retired),
Researcher level 1‐A CNPq, Associated Researcher at
NEV‐USP, Independent Expert to the UN Secretary Kofi
Annan on violence against children, Ex‐Rapporteur on
Human Rights for Burundi and Myanmar.
Profa. Dra. Nancy Cardia
Ph.D in Social Psychology, 1987, London School of
Economics and Political Sciences. Masters degree in
Psychology from the University of São Paulo.
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PARTNER INSTITUTIONS AND COORDINATORS
NÚCLEO DE ESTUDOS DA CIDADANIA, CONFLITO E VIOLÊNCIA URBANA
Center for the Study of Citizenship, Conflict and Urban Violence at Federal
University of Rio de Janeiro (NECVU‐UFRJ)
Rio de Janeiro
Foundation year: 1999
Department/Institution: Instituto de
Filosofia e Ciências Sociais/
Universidade Federal do Rio de
Janeiro (UFRJ)
Overview: Created by professors and
post‐graduated students at UFRJ with
the goal to study contemporary urban
issues from the perspective of Social
Sciences. Since, Later the NEVU‐UFRJ also attracted the interest from under
graduation students with science initiation projects, as well as that of Visiting
Researchers.
COORDINATOR
Prof. Dr. Michel Misse
Doctorate in Sociology from the Instituto Universitário
de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro (1999); Professor of
Sociology at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
André Costa
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NÚCLEO DE ESTUDOS DE VIOLÊNCIA E CIDADANIA
Center for the Study of Violence and Citizenship
Rio Grande do Sul
Foundation year: 1997
Department/Institution: Instituto de
Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
(IFCH)/Universidade Federal do Rio
Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
Overview: The Center was formed with
the objective to study globalization
processes and their connections with the
expansion of violence in contemporary society.
COORDINATOR
Prof. Dr. José Vicente Tavares dos Santos
Ph.D. (Docteur d´Etat), at Université of Paris X, Nanterre
(1987), Visiting Fellow at University of Cambridge, UK
(2008); University of Coimbra, Portugal; EHESS, Paris;
University of Republica, Uruguay. Professor of Sociology
at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.
Cadinho Andrade
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NÚCLEO DE ESTUDOS SOBRE VIOLÊNCIA E SEGURANÇA
Center for the Study of Violence and Security (NEVIS‐UnB)
Brasília
Foundation year: 2007
Department/Institution: Centro de
Estudos Avançados Multidisciplinares
– CEAM / Universidade de Brasília ‐
UnB
Overview: NEVIS‐UnB focus research
on questions about the roots of
violence and their manifestation and
searches for alternatives to violence,
while avoiding a dualist approach. Key issues being studied are: public security
polices, social identity of police officers and governance.
COORDINATOR
Profa. Dra. Maria Stela Grossi Porto
Doctorate in Sociology (1987) at Universite de Montreal,
Canadá, Postdoctorate at Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, CNRS, (1996), France. Professor of Sociology
at the Universidade de Brasilia
Francisco Neto
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CENTRO LATINO-AMERICANO DE ESTUDOS DE VIOLÊNCIA E SAÚDE
Latin‐American Center for Studies on Health and Violence, at Oswaldo Cruz
Foundation (CLAVES–FIOCRUZ)
Rio de Janeiro
Foundation year: 1989
Department/Institution: Escola Nacional
de Saúde Pública (ENSP) da Fundação
Oswaldo Cruz (FioCruz)
Overview: CLAVES is a research, teaching
and consulting center formed with the
objective to investigate the impact of
violence on health of Brazilian and Latin‐
American people. Working in partnership with various institutions, brings to INCT
great expertise in terms of network research and multidisciplinary approaches..
COORDINATOR
Profa. Dra. Maria Cecília de Souza Minayo
Doctorate in Collective Health from Fundação
Oswaldo Cruz (1989). and Master of Anthropology
from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (1985).
André Costa
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LABORATÓRIO DE ESTUDOS DA VIOLÊNCIA
Laboratory for the Study of Violence (LEV‐UFC)
Ceará
Foundation year: 1993
Department/Institution: Universidade
Federal do Ceará
Overview: LEV brings together
students and teachers also from other
state universities from the city of
Fortaleza, as well as from smaller
towns in the state of Ceará. Research
focus on issues such as conflict,
violence in urban traffic, violence against children, youth and violence and public
security policies.
COORDINATOR
Prof. Dr. César Barreira
Doctorate in Sociology, 1987, University of São Paulo.
(1987) , post doctorate degree from École des Hautes
Études en Sciences Sociales (1990) and from the
University of Lisbon (2008) . Professor of Sociology at the
Federal University of Ceará.
Alexandre Ruoso
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FÓRUM BRASILEIRO DE SEGURANÇA PÚBLICA
Brazilian Forum on Public Security (FBSP)
São Paulo
Foundation year: 2006
Overview: FBSP is Non‐Governmental
Organization that has as its mission to
promote knowledge exchange and
technical cooperation to contribute to:
improve police forces activities and
public security management in Brazil,
while improve communications with
NGOs.
COORDINATOR Dr. Renato Sérgio de Lima
Doctorate in Sociology, 2005, University of São Paulo
and has a post doctorate degree from the Institute of
Economics at the Estate’s University of Campinas –
UNICAMP.
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THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The Institute has as its main objective the study of democracy from the
perspective of Rule of Law, understood as the universal access to the protection of
the law and to human rights guarantees, free from violence ‐ in particular that
which results from actions by state agents and organized crime, which constitute
serious threats to public security and to democratic governance.
An incomplete democracy
Brazil has been described as a “delegative” democracy meaning a democracy
in which there is very weak horizontal accountability, and weak vertical
accountability. This is partly derived from “a severe incompleteness of the state,
especially its legal dimension. Sadly in many cases in Latin America countries and
elsewhere, this incompleteness has increased during democratization” (O’Donnell,
2004 p.41) and un‐rule of law (Pinheiro, 2000) has prevailed.
The question is: what kind of democracy prospers in an environment of
continued violation of human rights, or alternatively, how can change take place so
that a ‘good’ democracy can develop? Continued human rights violations, though
no longer a state policy, result from the endemic omission of the State to prosecute
and punish state agents involved in such violations, and to effectively implement
social and economic rights. Gross human rights violations, combined with the
violation of social, economic and cultural rights in a climate of freedom of
information have fostered the powerlessness of citizens in relation to the state, and
this in turn, challenged their trust in the efficacy of democracy moreover in their
beliefs about human rights as universal rights. The continued presence of gross
human rights violations and of profound inequalities in the access to rights has
prevented cooperation and solidarity among the most needy sectors of the society
and generated powerful obstacles for the re‐socialization of authoritarian beliefs
and values into democratic ones.
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Democracy: A work in progress
A human rights culture is one in which: people value human rights, are willing
to guard them against intrusions and unwilling to sacrifice these under most
circumstances. So, another important question to this research project is that of the
role that rule of law plays in the development of a human rights culture, a process
that can be called civilizing (Elias, 1994). What is societal support for rule of law?
Though we still cannot answer this, the underlying assumption is that for rule of law
to be enforced citizens must hold values conducive to this enforcement. The
development of a human rights culture, in this perspective, would provide a
powerful obstacle for the return of repressive measures.
In contemporary society human rights present a new standard of civilization
as they “rest on a morally attractive vision of a life of equality and autonomy and
present a relatively effective response to several major threats to human dignity
posed by modern markets and states” (Donnelly, 1998).
Democracy and human rights regimes are “works in progress” (Morlino, 2004;
Beetham, 2002, and Montgomery, 1999) at national and international level
(Montgomery, 1999). In how far are the two processes related? It is evident that
democracy and human rights are inseparable (Bobbio, 1990). For democracy to
prosper human rights must be implemented, citizens must feel protected not only
from arbitrary behavior by powerful groups in society (right to physical integrity)
but must also share in the wealth that is generated in this society (social, economic
and cultural rights). This perspective demands that at the same time that we assess
the development of a transitional democracy, that sound research in the field of
human rights is produced.
There is a need to better understand how countries perform in terms of
respect for human rights. Nowadays how citizens perceive their governments
human rights’ record is often being used to measure the progress of democracy in
transitional countries. But this is new field. Not only there is a lack of systematic
studies in this filed but existing studies have ignored how rule of law is
implemented in each of the conditions examined. (Anderson et al, 2004; Altman
and Peréz‐Liñán, 2002; Hofferbert and Klingmann, 1999).
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Democracy demands popular control and political equality. Translated into
rights it means the right to express opinions, to be informed, to freely associate, to
freely move inside and between countries. Moreover these rights can only be
exercised if persons feel free and secure, and if due process prevails. Access to
economic, social and cultural rights are being increasingly interpreted as key
elements for the exercise of democratic rights since if persons lack access to health
and education and of secure livelihood they cannot enjoy their civil and political
rights (Beetham, 2002).
Democracy and respect for human rights
A consistent finding of the different studies reviewed, regardless of whether
they refer to Central and Eastern European countries, to Latin America, to Africa or
to Asia (the countries that represent the “third wave” of democratization
(Huntington, 1991), is that in democratic regimes there are less human rights
violations, in terms of less violation to the right to physical integrity carried out by
state officials1.
The respect for human rights, though essential for democracy to prosper,
does not seem to be a mandatory result from the process of democratization. In
fact the process seems to be more complex involving both internal and external
sources of pressure2. Incomplete democracies, such as Brazil, contrast with the
“good” democracy ‐ the ideal that is to be pursued ‐ defined as presenting “a stable
institutional structure that realizes the liberty and equality of citizens through the
legitimate and correct functioning of its institutions and mechanisms” (Morlino,
2004; p.12).
1 Davenport and Armstrong (2004) analyzed the records of 147 countries over a 30 years period (1976 to 1996) and concluded that political bans, censorship, torture, disappearances and mass killings decrease as democracy progresses in the countries studied. The key element in reducing state violence seems to be the degree of democracy that has been achieved, in particular when rulers can be made accountable for their acts. 2 Moravcsik (2000), for instance, analyzing the progress of human rights regimes in Postwar Europe concluded that the success of the European Court of Human Rights was not the result of efforts by consolidated European democracies but of the new or re‐established democracies strategically employing international commitments to consolidate democracy at the domestic level.
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Democracies can be evaluated in terms of the results (the level of legitimacy it
has vis a vis citizens) in terms of content (the amount of freedom and liberty
citizens, communities and organizations enjoy) and in terms of procedures: in how
far citizens can check and evaluate the application of laws. Democracies can be
assessed by how far they implement rule of law, accountability, responsiveness to
civil society and citizens’ demands, the full respect for rights and greater political,
social and economic equality.
Though all aspects are relevant, the capacity of authorities to enforce the laws
that are “nonretroactive, and in public knowledge universal, stable, predictable and
non‐ambiguous” or rule of law is considered to be a pre‐requisite for all the other
dimensions. Still even if the rule of law is respected, the “critical features” for good
democracy need to be analyzed and these refer to how universally and
independently laws are applied: the integral application of the legal system, also at
the supra‐national level, guaranteeing the rights and equality of citizens; the
absence of areas dominated by organized crime and of corruption in the political,
administrative, and judicial branches; the existence of a local and centralized civil
bureaucracy that competently, and universally applies the law and assumes
responsibility in the event of error; the existence of an efficient police force that
respects the rights and freedoms guaranteed by law; equal, unhindered access of
citizens to the legal system in the case of lawsuits either between private citizens or
between private citizens and public institutions‐ this also implies that citizens know
their rights and can obtain representation; reasonably swift resolution of criminal
inquiries and of civil and administrative lawsuits; the complete independence of the
judiciary from any political influence (Morlino, 2004).
What changes with democracy and what does not change? Do changes
brought by transitional democracy lead to the pre‐conditions for the “good”
democracy or do they produce more mixed results? The pre‐conditions for the
“good” democracy have been studied either from the perspective of the analysis of
transitional democracies or of the expansion of human rights‐ but not from the
perspective of how laws actually operate or of changes in values and beliefs of
those in charge of implementing the laws.
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To unravel the complex relations between democracy and human rights, not
only in transitional contexts but also in democracies undergoing crisis (the
“dissatisfied” democracies) where the public’s confidence in institutions, in
particular in political parties, has declined, it seems vital to explore various themes:
rule of law, state accountability, state responsiveness, implementation of human
rights, democratic values and re‐socialization, culture, change and permanence or
recurrence, not to speak of active resistance to change.
In the case of Brazil the question is why changes that did occur in this period
were not enough to break institutional patterns and cultures, especially those of the
political and justice systems? It is our purpose to analyze the obstacles to the
implementation of democratic rule of law, identifying what has changed as well as
what has not both in society and in the justice system in the realm of ideas, values
and norms towards human rights, law, justice and the institutions that should
enforce them as well as in their actual experience with institutions in order to
unravel the connections between permanence and change in an historically
authoritarian culture.
Brazil provides support to the conclusion that “the adoption of some
democratic elements will not automatically decrease repressive activity, something
implied within the majority of research within this area” (Davenport and Armstrong,
2004). The fulfillment of minimalist definition of democracy may not be enough to
ensure human rights violations will decrease because it is not sufficient to ensure
democratic rule of law. A higher level of democracy requires more responsiveness
by authorities to societal demands. Without accountability there is no
responsiveness. Thus stronger democracy, in the sense of more controls over
authorities, maybe necessary for human rights abuses to be reduced (Davenport
and Armstrong, 2004).
Recent history has shown that it is easier to change laws than it is to change
practices. This is not a privilege of Brazil, it has been found in other transitional
democracies in Latin America (Lutz and Sikkink, 2000), and one reason may lie in the
distance between lawmakers and those who have to implement the laws and thus
the exercise of control.
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The paradox of change with authoritarian continuity
This new research program proposes to explore the paradox of this unstable
combination of changes and authoritarian continuities. At the broader level we seek
to contribute to answer the question about what kind of democracy can develop in
such complex contexts such as Brazil. This implies the study of the actual process of
governance to identify in how far basic tenets of democracy are being respected.
The focus will be on public security but we will also continue to monitor human
rights in its full meaning giving at first priority to the right to physical integrity: to be
protected from violence either by agents of the state or by others as key element to
enjoy other rights. Governance is to be evaluated both by the actual results it
produces in public security but also as how this performance is evaluated by the
public and its effects on the development of a human rights culture and in the
support for Rule of Law.
The way forward
The questions we seek to answer are set against the hypothesis about the
civilizing process that evolved in a context of suspension of laws (the temporarily
“failed states”), non‐universal law enforcement, fear, insecurity and low trust in
institutions among the population. This process takes place amidst other
contradictions such as that of the paradoxical drop in homicide combined with the
growth of organized crime, continued human rights violations (including gross
human rights violations) and institutional resistance to change‐ in particular to the
implementation of democratic Rule of Law.
A key issue: police reform
In the latter priority is given, initially, to study the police and how the police
forces have adapted to democracy as “police activities are a barometer of the
character of a regime, a government that calls itself democratic can scarcely go
unchallenged if policing is regularly characterised by the employment of
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intimidation and excessive resort to physical abuse of citizens.” (Bayley 1969,
quoted in Tankebe, 2008 p.82). Democratization studies have given emphasis to the
study of political and economic reforms as well as that of legal (courts) institutions,
neglecting the study about how police forces reform, adjust, change or resist
changes in the process of consolidating democracy, and how this in turn affects the
quality of the democracy that evolves. The high point of the transition to
democracy, and the one that signals that consolidation has started, is the
enactment of a new Constitution. A key actor in the implementation of the new
Constitution, expected to be the result of collective will, is the police: “The police
are the most visible representation of state a regime power. They are part of the
formal system of social control in a society” (Cao and Zhao, 2005). It is expected
that the police, being a key actor, will undergo a process of conversion from having
served in the previous regime “as a long arm of draconian government” that could
“be mobilized as an oppressive force heedless of lawful restraint.” (Cao and Zhao,
2005) to a police now expected to “respect fundamental human rights, free
association, free speech and general security“ (Bayley, 1995). Moreover, it is
expected that this police will respond to popular demands, and make true what is
written in the laws. The police are thus a link between citizens and government. But
this is a very difficult task for “democracy is always hard on the police (Berkeley,
1969, 1. ) they represent a legitimate force of government to compel citizens, if
necessary, to obey laws that the majority of citizens, at least theoretically, have
participated in creating” (Haberfeld, 1997). Such changes are very difficult to
achieve, as some international studies are beginning to reveal:
A. in Ghana, Tebeke (2008) concluded that the return to democracy has not ensured that police reforms resulted in a
democratic police: constitutional guarantees are still ignored by the
police, arbitrary arrests, beatings and corruption plague the police
forces, and police accountability “as a hallmark of democratic policing
remains official rhetoric with no real adequate specific mechanisms to
ensure that police violations and human rights are checked”.
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B. in Russia, Gerber and Mendelson (2008) concluded that
despite progress in others areas, the police forces have developed
practices that qualify these as a “predatory police” force, more
concerned with their survival as a corporation than in ensuring the
security of the people. The frequency and types of police misbehavior
are such that in their assessment this type of “police misconduct
undermines democracy”. A predatory form of policing is then is a risk
for democracy itself as “an undemocratic police force is a potential
source of instability and an ineffective ally in the struggle against
global organized crime and terrorist networks”. (p.3)
C. in Latin America, Cao and Zhao (2005) analyzed data from the
World Values Surveys and concluded that, though the rule of law is a
core trait of democratic policies, this becomes reality, or not, depends
on how law enforcement agents behave: “what agents of the state,
most fundamentally, the police, do or fail to do in their work and in
their encounters with citizens. The police link state and civil society
and thus police behavior helps illuminate the character of the regime.”
The data from the different waves of World Values Survey reveal that,
in Latin America, these promises have not been fulfilled (exactly)
“where it mattered most ‐ the relationship between the police and the
public.”
The study of the performance of the police forces, as well of attempts to
introduce police reform, either by changing policing practices or, reforming training
practices, or in the social representations or image of the institutions are providing
key elements to measure the quality of democracy in Brazil.
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RESEARCH FINDINGS
Democracy, Violence and Human Rights in contemporary Brazil
Lasa Forum spring/summer 2009 : volume xl : issue 2 and 3: 23‐25
Sérgio Adorno
Nancy Cardia
Two decades after
democratization, what kind of democracy is in place in Brazil? The paper searches for answers to this question exploring Brazilian democracy from the perspective of the quality of democracy. One of the indicators of the quality of democracy is the extent in which the democratic regime implements: rule of law, accountability, responsiveness to civil society and citizens’ demands, the full
respect for rights and greater political, social and economic equality. The paper examines the role that the growth of criminal violence during the consolidation of democracy as well as the role that law enforcement agencies have played in the development of a culture of respect for human rights.
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Gross violation of human rights and inequality in São Paulo, Brazil
Rev Saúde Pública 2009; 43(3)
Caren Ruotti
Taís Viudes de Freitas
Juliana Feliciano de Almeida
Maria Fernanda Tourinho Peres
Introduction
Fatal violence is one of the most serious problems affecting the daily life of the population. Besides being a preventable cause of death it fosters insecurity and fear.2 High mortality rates due to homicide are more frequently found in urbanized areas of Brazil3,10, and are a poignant indicator of the violation of a fundamental right of any citizen: the right to life.
The State is often directly or indirectly, responsible for the violation of this right. Despite the democratic context, gross human rights violations (GHRV) still persist. These GHRV represent a threat to the right to life and are either perpetrated by the State or are a consequence of the omission of the State, as in the case of lynching mobs.
Violations occured in the context of the growth of violent crime rates starting in the 1980s, due to the ineffectiveness of public safety policies and of the criminal justice system in Brazil.1 The absence of the State in solving conflicts, promoting justice and its failure to ensure public safety, encouraging actions that
resulted in violence and exclusion on the part of citizens and government agents.2,7 In addition, high levels of impunity contribute to the maintenance of gross human rights violations.4
The poor are more often victims of violence, another expression of the social and economic inequality in Brazil: research on homicide reveal that victims of homicide have the profile of the population that is more victimized by violent crime: young males living in the poorer areas of large cities.5,6,10 Less is known about the number and profile of victims of vigilante groups, lethal force by the police or lynching. This is due to the lack of standard procedures to report this type of victimization.
The hypothesis tested in this paper is that GHRV are associated to the violation of social and economic rights.3 The goal is to examine the profile of GHRV and the socioeconomic and demographic profile of the locations were the violations took place.
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Methods
Cross‐sectional ecological study of 96 census districts of the city of São Paulo in the year 2000. The data used came from the gross human rights violations database maintained by the Center for the Study of Violence at the University of São Paulo. This database contains information on all the cases of summary executions, lynching and police use of force reported on the printed press. Socioeconomic and demographic data were obtained from the 2000 Census carried out by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. A descriptive analysis of the data was carried out, and the association between the dependent variable – GHRV (number of police violence victims, lynching episodes and summary executions) –, and different socioeconomic and demographic variables were tested. In order to test this association the Spearman’s correlation test was used.
Results
In 2000, there were 2 248 GHRV victims in the city of São Paulo: 80.9% due to summary executions; 18.2%
due to police use of force; and 0.8% due to lynching. There was a high mortality and victimization rate among the young population. For summary executions, 84.5% (n=1,537) of the victims were fatal. The profile of victims revealed that 42.8% (n=779) were young (15 to 24 years of age). Reported cases of police use of force indicated that, 41.0% (n=168) of the cases resulted in deaths and 32.7% (n=134) of the victims were young. For lynching cases, 10.5% were fatal and 42.1% of the victims were young.
Correlations between GHRV and socioeconomic and demographic variables revealed that districts with worst living conditions presented higher frequencies of GHRV. Except for urbanization rate and hospital beds per residents, all the other correlations were statistically significant. The strongest correlations were found between GHRV cases and: population size (r=0,693), proportion of youths between 15 to 24 years (r=0,621), and proportion of heads of household with no education or with up to 3 years of schooling (r=0,590) (Table 1).
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Table 1. Spearman’s correlation (r) between gross human rights violations and socioeconomic indicators. São Paulo, SP, 2000
Indicators GHRV
(total) GHRV (fatal)
GHRV (young)
Size of the population r 0.693 0.725 0.704 p 0 0 0
Proportion of youth between 15 and 24 of age r 0.621 0.685 0.632 p 0 0 0
Urbanization rate r ‐0.142 ‐0.139 ‐0.173 p 0.168 0.176 0.093
Number of people per household r 0.507 0.601 0.531 p 0 0 0
Proportion of houses connected to sewage r ‐0.497 ‐0.577 ‐0.507 p 0 0 0
Proportion of the population living in favelas or in sub‐housing conditions
r 0.516 0.583 0.522 p 0 0 0
Illiteracy rate among population 15 years and older r 0.589 0.637 0.591 p 0 0 0
Proportion of heads of households with no education or with up to three years of education
r 0.590 0.644 0.609 p 0 0 0
Mean income of the head of the household r ‐0.574 ‐0.611 ‐0.593 p 0 0 0
Proportion of heads of households with income between 0 to 3 minimum wages
r 0.572 0.621 0.591 p 0 0 0
Child mortality rate/1 000 LB r 0.368 0.379 0.419 p 0 0 0
Hospital beds/1 000 resident r ‐0.153 ‐0.207 ‐0.178 p 0.136 0.043 0
Teenage mothers between 15 and 19 years/100LB r 0.548 0.592 0.539 p 0 0 0
LB: Live births.
Discussion
Results show that GHRV persisted in the city of São Paulo and that they overlap with lack of access to rights. Although human rights are enshrined in the Brazilian 1988 Constitution (according to the main international documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), which legally established a transition in Brazilian government from a dictatorial into a Democratic regime.2,4,8 In the case of the city of
São Paulo, the perpetuation of the cycle of violent and social and economic inequalities seems to be fostered by difficulties in effectively promoting effective citizenship.
It was seen, that GHRV seem to be closely tied to socioeconomic disadvantages, and that GHRV occur more frequently in neighborhoods where the state is deficient. The association between overlapping
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deprivations and GHRV shapes a social framework of extreme violence. As pointed out by Caldeira2 (2000), this violence can only be understood when one takes into account the connection between different processes, such as “the violent pattern of police action; disbelief in the justice system as a public and lawful conflict‐solving mediator and provider of just reparation; violent and private respondents to crime; and the feeble perception of individual rights, and the support of violent forms of punishment by the population” (p. 101).
In sum, results suggest that the enforcement of the right to life is
weakened when other kinds of rights are threatened. The indivisibility principle – i.e., the interdependence among the set of political, social, economical and civil rights8 – is highlighted in the context of the GHRV addressed in this study. The high correlation between GHRV and the number of socioeconomic and demographic indicators used in this study show, once again, that, in Brazil, there are areas where there is “no rule of law” or where there is “democracy without citizenship”.9 This seems to be the greatest obstacle to fighting violence and protecting life.
References
1. Adorno S. Insegurança versus direitos humanos entre a lei e ordem. Tempo Soc. 2000; 11(2): 129‐153.
2. Caldeira TPR. Cidade de muros: crime, segregação e cidadania em São Paulo. São Paulo: Edusp; 2000.
3. Cardia N, Adorno S, Poleto F. Homicídio e violação de direitos humanos em São Paulo. Estudos Avançados 2003; 17(47): 43‐73.
4. Dellasoppa E, Bercovich AM, Arriaga E. Violência, direitos civis e democracia no Brasil na década de 80: o caso da área metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro. Rev. Bras. Ci. Soc. 1999; 14(39): 155‐176.
5. Mesquita Neto P. Violência policial no Brasil: abordagens teóricas e práticas de controle. In: Pandolfi D et al. (org). Cidadania, justiça e violência. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Fundação Getulio Vargas; 1999. p.130‐148.
6. Nunes M, Paim JS. Um estudo etno‐epidemiológico da violência urbana na cidade de Salvador, Bahia, Brasil: os atos de extermínio com o objeto de análise. Cad. Saúde Pública 2005; 21(2): 459‐468.
7. Peres MFT, Santos PC. Mortalidade por homicídios no Brasil na década de 90: o papel das armas de fogo. Rev. Saúde Pública 2005; 39(1): 58‐66.
8. Pinheiro PS. O passado não está morto: nem passado é ainda. In: Dimenstein G. Democracia em pedaços: direitos humanos no Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras; 1996.
9. Pinheiro PS. O Estado de Direito e os não‐privilegiados na América Latina. In: Mendez JM, O’Donnell G, Pinheiro PS. Democracia, violência e injustiça: o não‐estado de direito na América Latina. São Paulo: Paz e Terra; 2000. p.11‐29.
10. Souza ER, Lima MLC. Panorama da violência urbana no Brasil e suas capitais. Ciênc. Saúde Coletiva 2006; 11(2): 363‐373.
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The 4th National Human Rights Report: Sixteen Years of Consolidation of State Policy on Human Rights and
Human Rights Monitoring This text is an abstract of the article that introduces the 4th National Report on Human Rights in Brazil, published by the Center for the Study of Violence of the
University of São Paulo, 2010
Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro
The 4th National Human Rights
Report is an independent and objective tool for monitoring human rights in Brazil. Since the first report, released in 1999, efforts have been made to improve the monitoring methodology, expanding and diversifying the sources of information. Historical series have been produced allowing an overview, of human rights over time, both nationally, but also by regions and states of Brazil.
The report offers an assessment on the situation of human rights in each state of the federation allowing comparisons across the country as well as with previous reports. Thus the results provide local governments and civil society organizations with a road map of what needs to be done to ensure that substantive progress is made in implementing human rights.
Since the 3rd National Human Rights Report, the Center for the Study of Violence at the University of São Paulo (NEV/USP), with the Teotonio Vilela Commission on Human Rights, (CTV) have sought, besides monitoring the civil and political rights, to broaden the information on economic, social and cultural rights. Part of this effort was
only possible due to the improvement and expansion of available data on these rights, considering each state of the federation separately.
The research teams of the NEV and the CTV and of the Teotonio Vilela Commission (CTV) sought data from federal agencies, state governments and civil society organizations about human rights as well as on specific topics. It should be mentioned that the data provided by those agencies were very limited. However, it is necessary to highlight that at each report there has been an increase in data from government agencies and from society, especially nationwide data, as well as an increase in accessibility, mainly by electronic means ‐ even though we are far from having such data regularly produced with quality over time. Information for the 4th Report was collected mainly during 2008 and studied for the production of this report during the year 2009.
In this report it is clear once again, the contradictory situation of human rights in the country. Despite substantive progress in legislation, in the institutionalization of public policies, in the development and implementation of programs by
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different levels of government as well as an increased engagement of civil society organizations, wide restrictions and violations of human rights persist in various areas of Brazil.
The country continues to have one of the highest rates of inequality in the world, though much progress has been made in reducing poverty and some improved achieved in income distribution. According to the World Bank indicators, the poverty rate in Brazil fell from 41% in the early 1990’s to between 33% and 34% in 1995. After maintaining this level until 2003, the poverty rate declined steadily, dropping to 25.6% in 2006. The reduction of people living in poverty was followed by a decline in income inequality. Also infant mortality rate fell from 56 to 22 per thousand between 1990 and 2008; there has also been a rapid reduction in rates of child labor and increased levels of school attendance ; the number of people registered in literacy programs increased by 12%.
There were also investments and concrete efforts in areas under direct responsibility of the Special Secretariat for Human Rights of the Presidency, such as, for example, the right to memory and truth, the fight against trafficking on persons, rights of children and adolescents, the fight against torture, and the work of several boards of rights.
Much of the continuing violations of human rights is due to the difficulties of the federal government to ensure, in each state,
the rights guaranteed by international agreements ratified by Brazil, as well as by national laws. Basic rights such as the right to life and the rights of victims, even though homicide rates in recent years have experienced a sharp fall are still not ensured. It can be said that the Brazilian state does not control some areas, dominated by organized crime, as are some favelas of Rio de Janeiro, peripheral areas of São Paulo as well as Brazilian borders in the Central West and North dominated by drug traffickers as result of the corruption of state agents.
State governments have implemented some positive initiatives. Despite the persistence of gross human rights violations, serious efforts have been made to eradicate impunity, but the administration of justice in the investigation and processing of cases of human rights violations, continues to be precarious in many states of the federation.
In this 4th Report, the picture that emerges of human rights in Brazil highlights is one in which long standing deficits continue to haunt us: income distribution, the operation of the justice system, violence, the prison system, youth offenders, violence against women and racial discrimination of people of African‐descent and indigenous peoples. Despite effective progress in the protection of many human rights in the last sixteen years, Brazilian society, as one of the large world industrial economies, continues to have significant gaps in fulfilling
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fundamental rights to large sectors of the population, particularly the poor, people of African‐ descent , indigenous people, women, children and adolescents, as has been highlighted for over twenty years by the research at the Center for the Study of Violence and the advocacy of the Commission Teotonio Vilela.
The information presented in this 4th Report demonstrates unequivocally that greater efforts continue to be necessary to tackle the serious social inequalities that hold significant portions of the population living in subhuman conditionsIn several sub‐regions and states, favorable economic conditions and policies of cash transfer to 11 million families have helped millions of people to leave poverty, policies that we support and believe that are
fully justified by the emergency nature of the living conditions of extreme poverty in Brazil. However, the figures for the gains in household income, taking into account the Gini coefficient, continue to show that it is still a huge gap between rich and poor in the country, particularly if we consider the dramatic contrasts between the conditions of life, income and access to rights of the white population in contrast with people of African‐descent, indigenous people . Similarly, as evidenced in the 4th Report, many Brazilian states have considerable deficits in policies concerning people’s health and education, with little access to justice, where gross human rights violations continued to be routinely practiced in police actions and arrests.
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“Hit men” in the setting of interpersonal conflicts: Rethinking old practices
in Cahiers Internationaux de sociologie, vol. CXXVII, Juillet‐Décembre, 2009
César Barreira
A two‐axis analysis will be presented on a research that has been conducted in the past years, which intersect with the understanding of a diverse [social configuration] picture of violent practices in contemporary society.
1. One axis would be the study of the ‘hit man's crimes’, which restore the scene of a historical character from the agrarian social era of the Brazilian society: the hit man or hired killer.
2. The other axis examines various settings of social conflicts and varied scenarios of coping with interpersonal conflict management.
What catches one’s attention is the relationship between “hit men” practices and the resolution of urban interpersonal conflicts. Homicides by “hit men” appear in various situations: political disputes, crimes of passion, family disputes, "unwanted neighbors," and disputes between strangers. The public sanction is, in large part, limited, making it clear that there is a relative acceptance or recognition of violence, which is, however, associated to another dimension of social meanings, such as courage, bravery, revenge, and honor. For part of the population, “hit men”
actions, especially when they present themselves as righteous avengers, are not totally condemned. In some cases, they are even justifiable, denying bipolar attitudes between what is good or bad, right or wrong, good or evil, legal or illegal.
In this report, I will focus on changes and continuities in the new social context that characterizes the ”hit man” system, trying to understand the fundamental changes that have occurred in the system of social agents or in hired crimes over the past decades. It is important to highlight the current practice of hiring of a” hit man” to resolve a wide range of social conflicts involving neighbors, spouses, relatives and friends. The justifications given by the media and the common sense opinion about these crimes are varied, including "petty or trivial reasons." Every murder triggers speculation about the motives of the criminal activity, with a wide range of possibilities.
With some frequency and repetition, some homicides are defined in the media as a crime with the features of a hit man that retains, in principle, some particular aspects:
1. Homicides are committed using the practice of ambush, in which the victim is caught
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off guard and several shots are fired.
2. Actions that usually take place in public locations: restaurants, streets or squares.
3. The perpetrator of the crime does not belong to the social network of the victim.
4. Finally, a motorcycle is the vehicle used in the getaway after the killing is performed. Usually, two people are on the motorcycle. The driver of the motorcycle appears as the accomplice of the action whereas the passenger fires the shots.
Up to the first half of the twentieth century killings by “hit men” were largely limited to disputes over political representation and to questions of land, usually mediated by "family disputes". Land and politics appeared as the major ingredients or as the defining elements for the use of hired killers.
The characters, “hit men” or perpetrators, gained notoriety in the rural areas from their "work" performed at the request of rich landowners, to resolve disputes between families and "issues" within households and between farmers as well as political disputes.
The professionalization of the “hit man”, the urbanization, and the growth or diversity of these actions are aspects that cause some new configurations of the practices of “hit man” – his trajectory is now establishing itself, especially within less personal boundaries, and
reaching other states or regions of the country. The incorporation of "urban values" generated by the life experience in big cities adds prominence to their careers.
This professionalization is currently one of its main features – “hit man” move away from economic activities, mainly agricultural ones, and lose their ties to a boss, so that large farms are no longer the main place of residence and refuge of “hit men”, who now live and protect themselves especially in the suburbs of large cities or in "bedroom communities".
The loss of a tie with a particular landowner, boss and protector, along with the spatial dispersion of the activity and its proliferation, eliminated his spatial boundaries. The hiring of his “services” can either be performed directly by the person who wishes to commission a killing , or can be mediated by someone else. Nowadays, if someone needs to hire a killing, he will talk to a person known as the "broker of death" who is in charge of setting up everything.
The spatial dispersion of the hit man also provides, more and more functions to the middleman, who now occupies a ‘key place' in establishing a complex network of roles and functions.
“Hit men” appear and expand their activities without constraints in the fissures of a disordered monopoly of violence, where interpersonal conflict management, and political and economic problems transcend the institutional practice.
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Over the past decades, the profile of the person who commissions the killing changed. While before they were mostly powerful people ‐ upper class landowners, politicians and businessmen at present they include a much wider range of people besides landowners and politicians, they include jealous husbands, competing businessmen and traders. Another new element is the emergence of women commissioning killings‐ in this case the primary target is their husbands.
Love disputes or domestic conflicts are the most recent areas of performance of “hit men”. The main changes in the “hit man” system is shown in the following perspective:
1. Currently, the practice of the “hit man” is being professionalized; they no longer maintain relations of dependence or subjection to rich landowners.
2. the “hit man”´s secret life and the way he performs the "services" disqualify him SOCIALLY from enjoying some recognition.
3. this disqualification is directly proportional to the proliferation
4. of their actions and motives stemming from the variety of demands for hired killers.
This research has revealed that the high incidence of this practice is no longer restricted to rural areas, but is occurring mainly in large cities. It has also led to the identification of new configurations of the actions by the hired killers at the core of conflicting relations. In conclusion we can say the role of hit man emerged as the one of an avenger and restorer of justice through violent solutions. Also, that these killings were made possible because the killers acted mainly within the “field of honor” with a strong brand of revenge.
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The Dialogue between Criminology and the South’s Sociology of Violence: the policing crisis and alternatives
In BURAWOY, Michael; MAU‐KUEI, Chang; FEI‐YU HSIEH, Michelle (Editors). Facing an Unequal World: Challenges for a Global Sociology. Taiwan, International
Sociological Association, Council of National Associations and The Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, volume I, p. 105‐125.
José‐Vicente Tavares‐dos‐Santos
1. Late modernity, crime, and violence
Since the 1980s, the structural changes of the capitalist mode of production have produced a metamorphosis of crime, the internationalization of criminal organizations, and the social fabrication of violence. After the “Age of Extremes” (Hobsbawm 1994), we might define the first period of the twenty‐first century, beginning in 1991, as the period of the Worldization Process. It can be characterized by an expansion of capitalistic activities, global crisis, and the culture of post‐modernity. This new period can be summed up as the age of late modernity.
A worldwide landscape of insecurity emerges: “vertigo is the malaise of late modernity: a sense of insecurity, of insubstantiality, and of uncertainty, a whiff of chaos and a fear of falling” (Young 2007: 12). Consequently, late modern societies produce transformations in crime and in forms of violence. The phenomena of diffuse violence acquire new contours and spread throughout society. The multiplicity of forms of diffuse violence in contemporary
societies, such as violent crime, social exclusion, gender violence, acts of racism, and school violence, is expressed in a microphysics of violence (Tavares dos Santos 2009).
2. Neoliberalism and administrative criminology
In a political context where the influence of the USA and the UK, neoliberal economics, and neoconservative politics is strong, the neoliberal model of coping with crime has created what we call “administrative criminology.” This model “wanted to hold out deterrent penalties that would be rigorously enforced and tough enough to act as real disincentives to potentials offenders. Better, more vigorous policing and harsher, more certain punishments were his preferred solution: more deterrence and control, not more welfare” (Garland 2001: 59).
This orientation was compound by several elements. The right realist approach has two dimensions: “first, it tends to take an individualized view of crime, looking for explanations in individual choices rather than in broader social or structural
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conditions; second, right realist responses to the crime problem tend to be coached in terms of greater controls and enhanced punishments” (Newburn 2007: 271). The right realist position takes conventional legal definitions of crime for granted, ignores the importance of the socioeconomic context in explaining crime, even translating its principles into genetic and individualists theories, and proposes that crime is caused by a lack of self‐control. It overemphasizes control and containment, accepts fear of crime as rational, and prioritizes order through deterrent and retributive means of crime control.
The administrative criminology of neoliberalism period built up, during the Reagan’s rule in the US (1981‐1988) and the Thatcher mandate (1979‐1990) in the UK, a consensus about crime control with five core elements: crime is public enemy number 1; there is an individual but not a social responsibility for crime; victims are more important than offenders; crime control works; and a high crime society is normal” (cf. REINER 2008: 124‐129). Since the 1980s, this “culture of control” has been exported around the world (GARLAND 2001).
3. The “broken windows” policing model in Latin America
During the 1990s, the international transfer of information concerning policing models from the
US to Latin America had many forms of influence. Most notably, consultancy security firms were created and projects financed by the US government were implemented. We shall discuss each of these in the following sections.
Consultancy Security Firms
The beginning was the Manhattan Institute created in 1978 as a think‐tank organization. Today, the main noticeable consultancy security firms are The Bratton Group L.L.C., an international police‐management consulting firm created in 1996, and the Giuliani Partners L.L.C., founded in January 2002. These organizations are global security consulting firms that originated from the New York City Police Department when Major Giuliani chose William J. Bratton as New York City Police Commissioner (1994‐1996).
The main orientation of these consulting security firms is to propose “the policies and practices through which American interests and priorities are exported around the globe.” But, “the fact that several of the most prominent of these firms so aggressively promote the ‘New York Police Department model’ is also controversial. This model is the approach to crime and disorder taken in New York City under Mayor Giuliani based on a particular interpretation of ‘broken windows policing.’ This model justified especially aggressive law enforcement approach to a number of urban social problems. It is this law enforcement approach that has been
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exported by leading transnational security consulting firms (Mitchell and Beckett 2008). In fact, these firms have advised many big cities in Latin America, including Mexico City (Mexico), Caracas (Venezuela), Fortaleza (in Ceará, Brazil) and in Santiago (Chile).
The United States Government International Programs
The relationship between the US’s main political agenda and the build up of policing in Latin America has been well documented since the late twentieth century (Huggins 1998). However, over the last three decades, it is relevant to note the application of US political interests in distinct levels of regional power, not necessarily due to the political demands of the foreign country receiving these programs (Bayley 2006). There is bilateral cooperation over the “Drug War,” specifically Plan Colombia (since 2002) and the Merida Plan (since 2008). In addition, policing schools have been established abroad, a strategy that merits detailed discussion here.
The International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) was created in 1995, by the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC), an interagency law enforcement training organization that has serviced over 87 US federal agencies since 1970, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) since 2003 (“Federal Law”). Several academies have been established around the world including in Budapest (Hungary)
in 1995, in Bangkok, (Thailand) in 1999), in Gaborone, (Botswana) in 2001, in San Salvador, (El Salvador) in 2005, and a Regional Training Center in Lima, (Peru) also in 2005.
4. Structural violence in Latin America: How to overcome administrative criminology
Latin American societies show an increasing structural form of violence that demands a new framework for the sociology of violence and policing. The globalization process, particularly neoliberal policies has led to the creation of social structures determined by exclusion, and has provoked new social conflicts and sometimes posed constraints on the consolidation of democracy in this part of the periphery of the capitalist world system (Tavares dos Santos 2002: 123).
5. The paradox of abstract criminological models and empiric chaos: the policing crisis in late modernity
The crisis of policing is configured analytically by a series of theoretical and political insufficiencies, and constitutes one of the new global social issues that have manifested itself in several geographic zones. In the U.S., the crisis of legitimacy began in the 1970s.
We could then think about the construction of a world citizenship, oriented to the prevention and eradication of forms of diffuse violence and the construction of
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another ideal type of police, the Citizenship Police. The feature of the reform being discussed includes accountability to the community, proximity, social conflict mediation, and shapes the field of a democratic social control. This is a social field in which different agents of social control participate (police officers, judges, lawyers, prison managers, social scientists, and journalists). They share their theoretical, technical, and political stands in order to develop the practices, the forms of police organizations, and the right to security in the new century (Tavares dos Santos 2004: 89‐106).
6. The sociology of violence and the alternatives of policing
“The crisis in criminology is a crisis of modernity” (Young 1999: 32), derived from five majors challenges: “the rise in the crime rate; the revelation of hitherto invisible victims; the problems of what is crime nowadays; the growing awareness of the universality of crime and the selectivity of justice; and the problematization of punishment and culpability” (34).
Arguably, there has been a change in contemporary sociological thought which aims to provide explanations for and solve social problems of our times. Such a trend is particularly notable in the sociology of violence in France (Wieviorka 2004), the US (Collins 2008), and strongly in Latin America (Adorno 1999; Zaluar 2004; Misse 2006; Grossi Porto 2006; Barreira 2008; Tavares dos Santos
2009). These sociological traditions combine empirical research, theoretical explanations, and social commitment.
This heritage is an intellectual work about modes of domination, social control, social conflicts, and about the invention of new social institutions. Consequently, we would like to contribute to the sociology of violence, while also fostering a critical approach that could help to go beyond the fears of late modernity. In other words, in the worldization framework, the emergence of the concept of citizen security assumes the social construction of a democratic, nonviolent, and transcultural police organization, which returns to the objective of policing as part of a democratic governance. There is a visibility to and a conceptualization of the importance of social struggles against the worldization of injustice, as a form of resistance. These small scale and plural struggles also have a positive dimension as well, for they are negations of the forms of exercise of domination. We find new agents of resistance; the social movements confront the centrality of state power over social space‐time, but in doing so, these movements affirm the cartography of small experiences in search of a rearrangement of the social world. As IX World Social Forum stated in Belem do Para, Brazil, February 2009: “another world is possible” for a “good living.”
So, Latin American societies should implement a policing that is
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concerned with the practices of emancipation, and that communicates, in everyday life, with the practices of social groups, of all genders, ethnic origins, and ages. The noteworthy theme is to include the collective security of citizens in a complex of civil, political, and social rights. The emergence of a notion of
citizenship police, within the perspective of worldization, entails the social construction of a policing oriented to human dignity and equity, on a worldwide scale. Citizenship policing could be a mode of participation in the collective fabric of the sociological imagination about violence and policing in the future
References
ADORNO, Sérgio. “Violência e Civilização”. In: TAVARES‐DOS‐SANTOS, José Vicente & GUGLIANO, Alfredo. A Sociologia para o Século XXI. Pelotas, EDUCAT, 1999, p. 77‐106.
BARREIRA, César. Cotidiano Despedaçado: cenas de uma violência difusa. São Paulo, Pontes, 2008.
BAYLEY, David H. Changing the Guard (Developing Democratic Police Abroad). New York, Oxford University Press, 2006.
COLLINS, Randall. Violence (a micro sociological theory). Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008.
GARLAND, David. The Culture of Control. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001.
GROSSI PORTO, Maria Stela. "Elementos para uma reflexão sobre violência no Brasil dos Anos 90". In: Educação e Sociedade. Campinas, XV, nº 48, p. 326‐337, 2006.
HOBSBAWM, Eric. The Age of Extremes: a History of the World, 1914‐1991. New York, Pantheon Books, 1994.
HUGGINS, Martha K. Polícia e Política: relações Estados Unidos /América Latina. SP, Cortez, 1998.
MISSE, Michel. Crime e violência no Brasil Contemporâneo. Rio de Janeiro, Lumen Juris, 2006.
MITCHELL, Katharine & BECKETT, Katherine. Securing the global city: crime, consulting, risk, and ratings in the production of urban space. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 2008. Indiana University Press. Date: 01‐jan‐2008. Source:http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_028635169642ITM
NEWBURN, Tim. Criminology. Willan, Devon, 2007.
REINER, Robert. Law and Order. Cambridge, Polity, 2008.
TAVARES‐DOS‐SANTOS, José Vicente. Violências e Conflitualidades. Porto Alegre, TOMO, 2009
TAVARES‐DOS‐SANTOS, José Vicente. “The Worldization of Violence and Injustice”. In: Current Sociology. International Sociological Association/SAGE. . Londres, 2002:123‐134.
TAVARES‐DOS‐SANTOS, José Vicente. “The World Police Crisis and the Construction of Democratic Policing”. In: International Review of Sociology. London, 2004, v. 14:89‐106.
WIEVIORKA, Michel. La violence. Paris, Balland, 2004.
YOUNG, Jock. The Exclusive Society. London, Sage, 1999.
YOUNG, Jock. The Vertigo of Late Modernity. London, Sage, 2007.
ZALUAR, Alba. Integração Perversa: pobreza e tráfico de drogas. Rio de Janeiro, FGV, 2004.
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Quality of Democracy and Police Forces in Brazil
in: Lima, Renato Sérgio de "Between Words and Numbers" VDM Verlag, 2010
Renato Sérgio de Lima
Jacqueline Sinhoretto
The police forces in Brazil want
and envisage, that mandates be granted to them as well as that directives be given as to how they can be governed. These are issues which bring to light an intense debate on the paths of democracy and contemporary social control. The process of political democratization at the end of the 1980s represents a landmark because of the changes in the relationship between police and society brought about by the construction of democracy and by social pressures for new political and police models. However, the process is equally marked for the continuity of practices, knowledge and theories which have led to the observation that, in many aspects, the democratic State is confined to mirroring relationships that served the dictatorial government and, over a longer historical time frame, also served the Empire, as exemplified by the police inquest created in 1871.
Our main argument is that democracy, despite the persistence of violent and authoritarian practices (both inside and outside the police forces), has introduced tensions into the area of public safety that, although not going as far as reaching minimum consensus on the transformations in the existing institutional model, do foster debate
on a model of public order based on citizenship, guarantee of rights and access to justice. Thus, these tensions seem to induce, not without contradictions and resistance, changes in the repertoire and formulation of new political enouncements, in which mechanisms of accountability and governance are taken as instruments of democratic efficiency linking respect to Human Rights and the operational practices of the police in preventing violence and combating crime.
The normative landmark of the Brazilian democratization process is the enactment of the 1988 Constitution, which was the first to define the concept of public safety as distinct to that of national security, whilst previous Constitutions had the joint role of governing the activities of combating crime and violence. The political context of the transition offered constituents the desire and the opportunity of overcoming the paradigm of national security and also armed the police to ‘combat the enemies’ of the dictatorship installed in 1964, which militarized the system of police philosophy and practices.
The question of institutional reforms reemerged from 2000, when it featured in the manifesto of the presidential election campaigns and triggered the enactment of three
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national public safety plans – the National Public Safety Plan (in Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s second term, in 2001); National Public Safety Plan II (the Lula government’s first term, in 2003) and the National Public Safety Plan with Citizenship – known as Pronasci (the Lula government’s second term, in 2007) and the adoption of policies for integrating management of police forces in some Brazilian states such as Pará, Espírito Santo, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais.
The debate on violence in the 1970s involved concerns over the political rights of those who opposed the authoritarian regime and who were brutally repressed. Following the demise of the dictatorship in the 1980s, pro‐human rights movements concentrated their efforts on blowing the whistle on police violence and the countless acts of widespread violence that seemed to affect all strands of society. In the academic arena, studies on the subject in the 1990s sought to characterize the changes in the architecture of cities as well as the landscape and behavior of individuals in response to the surge in urban crime (Caldeira, 2000). At the same time, these studies looked to discuss the aspects of legitimacy and recognition of the police and courts as adequate forums for mediating and resolving social conflicts (Tavares dos Santos and Tirelli, 1999).
This was set against a social and economic environment in which, the economic stabilization process initiated during the Itamar Franco
government (1992‐1993) was raising neoliberal concerns over fiscal adjustment instruments and the restructuring of the State, both from a functional and managerial standpoint. This process was ongoing and during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government (1994‐2002), Brazil started to witness major changes in public policy handling, especially in health, education, environment and consumer sectors. Sophisticated control mechanisms (municipal education and health councils, greater importance attributed to the work of the Department of Justice, etc.) led to these areas gaining relevance and democratic dynamism (Lima, 2008).
Consequently, the human rights agenda in Brazil was consolidated under the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, with the view that this agenda would only be implementable if the grave violations of economic, social and political rights were tactically and vigorously tackled. Notwithstanding this diagnosis, the fiscal execution of the public budget components concerned with the human rights agenda fell well short of what was originally envisaged. The defense of natural rights (human, environmental, cultural and consumer rights) gradually became the catalyst of change in Brazil’s social and political scenario, and also served to boost the growth in the so‐called Third Sector and in a new public space, returning civil rights to the political agenda. However, the discussion on these rights involves other pivotal and delicate factors in
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the production of violence (impunity, corruption of those running the criminal justice system, police violence and disrespect of Human Rights, prison overcrowding, abuse and torture in prisons and in child reform institutions in conflict with the law, dearth of permanent programs valuing professionals from the area). These elements have contributed to the current climate of insecurity in Brazil, what prompted the Brazilian government to rethink how it formulated and executed its public policies.
Despite this tug of war between powers and the lose‐lose game being played out, it is the rhetoric constructed around the agenda of human rights formulated during the 1970s and 1980s that transformed the politico‐ideological scenario of the time and laid the foundations for the emergence of the democratic prerequisites of transparency and public control of power. The problem is that, upon implementation, many of these policies faced technical and organizational resistance, rendering them toothless while serving to maintain the status quo to the detriment of change.
We point to the importance of professional networks in receiving or rejecting projects of change and in the possibility of politicizing police work for the defense of civil rights via the networks themselves. However, it would be more fitting in the case of the police, to speak in terms of corporate networks, since the professionalization of police work, in
the sense of self‐definition of a field of knowledge and practices that determines what good police work is and which practices are deemed unacceptable or unprofessional, is still in its infancy in Brazil (Costa, 2003).
The police is the most visible point manifesting the contradiction of a society reluctant to strengthen its democracy and which places barriers to the process of extending civil rights to encompass all social groups. The activity of governing the police exposes the limits of the government and also leads to the observation that political will alone is not enough to coordinate this task. The challenge is eminently one of political management of knowledge. Behind this apparently settled discussion lies one of the toughest battles in terms of how to manage conflicts and consequently define categories that facilitate the combating of violence and criminal practices. And, thus, it is our responsibility to clarify that management without politics is technocracy, whereas politics without transparency prevents democratic progress*.
However, if the institutional agendas of the area of public safety policies are, as we have seen,
* The banner of transparency is one of the founding principles behind the creation, in 2006, of the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety (FBSP), an entity aimed at forging ties with police officers, researchers and representatives of civil society – bringing all these parties together in a project to technically qualify the debate on police and public safety in Brazil. The mission of the FBSP is to disseminate technical references based on respect of Human Rights and Democracy.
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influenced, albeit it in a limited fashion, by a new grammar of rights through which the police and citizens expand the legitimacy of the enouncements of Human Rights and of efficient management of social conflicts, then they are also impregnated by institutional practices that tend to reduce the impact of this new grammar and place greater emphasis on authoritarian tradition.
What is contested in the governance of police and consequently in the management of its knowledge, are interests that dispute legitimacy on the definition of the meaning of law, order, liberty and equality in Brazilian society. Democracy, as a process, still has a long way to go in Brazil
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The media, public security and social representations *
Tempo Social, vol. 21, no. 2, 2009
Maria Stela Grossi Porto
Starting from the sociological perspective of the study of the role of the media plays in the definition of public security policies and, limiting my observations and examples to the Distrito Federal (DF), I propose the following : in modern democracies, the media represent one of the main producers of social representations which, apart from their content being true or false, have a pragmatic function as drivers of behavior. It thus makes sense to argue that the theme is relevant to the formulation of policies, not because these are true representations but because they constitute special vehicles of beliefs and values of different sectors of society.
The media not only present but also represent the reality they deal with. Persevering with such a line of argument means attributing to the theory of representations explanatory value as regards to understanding the media and of the way in which it constructs, reconstructs and selects social facts via narratives, thereby presenting these same facts as events/occurrences which, due to the meanings which are attributed to them, reach society in the form of news.
The article establishes the pairing media/security as the object of analysis, reflecting on the fact that the poles of this pairing construct
social reality via the meanings and narratives through which they represent the “reality” of violence and violence as reality. It advances the idea that the form in which reality is constructed, presented, represented via narratives and images, has an impact on the behavior of social actors.
The nature of media/public security relations is complex, being at times tense and contradictory, and at other times consensual and complementary. These relations, by adhering to different discursive formations, are incomplete realities in themselves and adapt to a terrain in constant state of tension and crisis. Placed face to face, the media and public security share affinities and, at the same time, are very distant from one another.
In this plural, fragmented and unequal world, characteristic of modernity, individuals do not possess in equal measure the capacity to produce meanings and explanations of the world in the form of social representations. Only a few individuals, groups or sectors in society present themselves as protagonists in this process. Yet, few would deny that the media, in their various forms and with a clear domination over television content, have increasingly been fulfilling this pragmatic function of ‘explaining the
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world’ and giving meaning to the facts and occurrences via the form of social representations. By selecting a given topic, the media, whilst presenting and representing certain occurrences guided by their version of the facts, also exclude others. Before reaching the conclusion that the media have Machiavellian intentions, it is worth highlighting that ‘evident effects’ which construct news as reality are just as relevant as the fact that the media constitute a terrain of struggles, conflicts, interests, competition, where positions are sought after and hegemony is fought over .
And in the power struggle on this terrain permeated by tensions and agreements in which the different media compete for media space and construct their specificities (they seek to make the difference), it is only what has already been displayed as news which gains relevance in the media and to this end, there exists a whole apparatus of language, productive routines of journalism, time management, of space and images, in order for a fact to be promoted to the state of occurrence and receive media attention .
Understanding why the media produce certain representations of violence or public security could turn out to be more important than being concerned about contradicting or confirming a given representation. The article points to the fact that news is a commodity like any other, as is violence. Being so much in‐demand in the information market, the latter
is transformed into an object of consumption and begins to figure in the daily lives of those who have never encountered it directly. In accordance with research data on Social Representations of Violence in the Distrito Federal, 86.7% of those who responded to the questionnaires agreed that : “news on violence helps to sell newspapers”, while less than 9.0% believed the contrary.
The research also deals with the question of impunity and of the treatment it is given by the media. Among the various forms of impunity mentioned in news bulletins, the one which attracts the most attention concerns police violence.
Although the police is regarded as a source of behavior that is violent and which contravenes human rights, it is also pressed to act more effectively, which includes the use of violence, thereby highlighting contexts which appear to provoke a perverse reciprocity between civil society and police organizations, according to which policemen tend to behave in a violent way based on the premise that society expects him to be responsible for law and order.
This logic, which is not free of ambiguities, encourages society, motivated by fear and insecurity, always to demand more and more speed and efficiency of the police, making a hero of them when society deems that their role as the guarantor of order is fulfilled successfully, and gangsters in case of failure.
In this paper, it is shown how respondents to the questionnaire
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overlook possible mediations that might exist and point to a direct, causal relationship between exposure to violence and increased criminality, when reflecting upon the relations between the causes and effects of violence: for 78.6% of them, media coverage of violence helps to increase criminality, with a few nuances to be made when taking into account the age of the respondents.
Such condemnation of the media would appear to be consistent with demonizing their role, downplaying the fact that the consumption of these commodities provides substance to the content offered to the population. Although the media are judged and condemned, they also judge: it is universally accepted that the media function as a ‘jury at trial’ anticipating or setting the tone regarding the conviction or acquittal of a defendant: for 86.1% of the respondents, the means of mass communication influence the public’s opinion on the trial of the perpetrator of a given crime.
From the point of view of investigative journalism, the tensions involving journalism, crime and the media are huge. In this context, the article refers to emblematic cases of journalists murdered during their investigations, which amount to media censorship.
And what happens when public security itself becomes a media device? This has been happening in certain branches of the police. In the
DF for example, in search of increased credibility, the police produced a newspaper which, unlike the front covers of the top‐selling press publications (which avoid displaying shocking images of violence), featured cruel images on its front pages. Are such headlines and scoops not in line with the representations of public security according to which: “a good gangster is a dead gangster”?
A possible way to understand these phenomena, proposed more as an object of reflection than a vector for reaching conclusions, may reside in the fact that since social representations are not
[...] objective versions, nor imaginary constructions, they express a practice, organizing it. In doing so, they also express the ambiguities, conflicts and oppositions which manifest themselves at the level of reality itself and not as a consequence of the inversion of the real and the symbolic. Thus, considering what representations express could lead to shortening the distance between the police and society; between public security policies and plans; and between expectations and social representations.
* The analysis presented is new and was developed under the theoretical framework of the INCT. However, data used in this text were collected in 1998 for the research Social Representations of Violence, coordinated by me. The question sheet had 52 questions on eight different axels, including media and violence, applied to 425 people.
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Six characteristics of violent death in Brazil Revista Brasileira de Estudos de População, v. 26, p. 135‐140, 2009
Maria Cecilia de Souza Minayo
This text brings together some information that highlights certain peculiarities of violence in Brazil, using indicator of mortality, which are considered globally the most reliable data to analyze this problem. To support this discussion, it will be used two basic categories: external causes (homicides, suicides and accidents) and violence. The following are the main characteristics: 1st: high and rising rates in the last 25 years and early fall from 2003. 2nd: differences among the Brazilian municipalities. In 2000, from a total of 5,561 Brazilian municipalities, there were no fatal
traffic accident in 1802 of the cities, in 2633 of them there was not a homicide and in 3382 there was no notification of death by suicide. 3rd: spatial dispersion of traffic accidents and transport, with higher rates in smaller municipalities. 4th increasing rates of suicide among the elderly; 5th: concentration of all types of violence, especially homicides among young people, male and living in the peripheries of large cities. 6th: concentration of violent deaths by means of firearms.
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Professional (in)security and public (in)security Coleção Segurança com Cidadania, v. 01, p. 195‐230, 2009
Maria Cecilia de Souza Minayo Edinilsa Ramos de Souza
Patrícia Constantino Simone Gonçalves de Assis
Raquel de Vasconcellos Carvalhaes de Oliveira
In this work we present a summary of a comparative study between the Civil and Military Police of Rio de Janeiro regarding Professional risks, personal safety and occupational health in public safety. We emphasize the real risk of death and accidents and the perception of risk. The hypothesis that guided the study is that we expected to find greater personal and collective risks at professional practice among police operations, particularly among the Military Police.
We applied the triangulation method strategies, using quantitative and qualitative techniques, combining the use of data collected through different techniques and methods, respecting their specificity at the inter or transdisciplinary dialogue.
The results showed that police officers, despite being law enforcement agents in charge of providing public security and for that reason ‐ present mortality and of aggression rates much higher than that of the general population. In the Military Police the mortality rate for assaults in the year 2006 reached 356/100.000 and 206/100.000 in the Civil Police. The Military Police has a
mortality rate due to violence that is 3.65 times greater than that of the male population of Rio de Janeiro and 7.2 greater than that of the general population of the city. When we look at hospital admissions motivated by aggressions in 2006 for the general population, it corresponded to the rate of 0.10 per 100,000 residents and for the male population in the city the rate was 0.34 per 100,000 residents. At the Military Police in the same year, the rates for hospital admission were 9.29 per 100,000.
All quantitative and qualitative information collected in the study reported here show, that besides experimenting professional risks, military and civil police of Rio de Janeiro are more often victims of their activities. Police officers that suffered higher risk caused by their jobs are those who experience more violence as: injury by firearm or white weapon, physical aggression, sexual assault, attempted suicide and attempted murder.
Among the civil police force we found that professionals with a high school level education face twice as much risk of violence as those with higher education. The ones who choose to enjoy leisure time outside
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their houses also face 2,2 more risk of violent victimization than those who stay more at home.
Among the military police the major risk factors for suffering violence included the length of time in service: officers with less service time (up to 10 years) had 2.4 more risk of victimization in police work than their older colleagues; hearing deficiency and neuralgia: officers with hearing impairments and neuralgia reported having experienced more risks (3 and 4.1 times more, respectively) than those who do not have these health problems, indicating physical suffering associated with mental distress, having as main cause, the experience of situations of violence.
Another factor was working conditions: having a second job besides the military police, without time to rest, was also found to be associated with experiencing more risks due to police work. Both civil and military policemen, that have a second stable activity, experience five times more risk of suffering violence. For those with an occasional second activity ,that risk was two times higher than for those who have no other occupation besides being a police officer.
The psychological effects from reactive fear of potential and experienced risk are multiple: denial: "We can not think it exists"; banalization "is part of our daily lives," "we get used to that reality"; scorn "they laugh at risk, it's like a joke, playing with reality as if in a
fiction" (operational manager) and coping: "It is in the actual combat that we lead with fear." One of the professionals also indicated that use two strategies to soften the effects of risk "either rum or religion." The high rates of military and civilian police who smoke and drink, as evidenced by the survey, seem to be related to the stree of the job, among other reasons. Practicing a religion as a way to feel more protected, was also mentioned by several officers of both categories.
From a managerial perspective the research reveals that the lack of a global view of the working environment of the two corporations leads to an attitude of immediate, reactive, and too focused on operational aspects, causing great mental distress to the police. Lastly, one of the great challenges of Brazil and Rio de Janeiro, in particular is to create an environment and a culture of public and citizen safety, which certainly has to do with social issues and the process of democratization and "citizention" of the majority of the Brazilians. It also includes forms, instruments and technologies that are less aggressive in the control of violence, crime and worsening social climate. Thus, the exercise of public safety will meet the principles of human safety. It will abandon the idea of becoming a prophecy of death of policemen, civil servants that have a constitutional obligation to keep order and prevent crime and not the fate of living and dying victims of social insecurity.
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The study highlights the urgent need to seek improvements in policing strategies and in providing
attention to the aggressors and victms
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Organized Crime and Regular Crime in Rio de Janeiro: differences and similarities
Prepared for the conference “Common Crime and Organized Crime in Latin
American Cities: Commonalities and Differences” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Washing ton, D.C. May 19, 2010
Michel Misse
This work aims to approach
connections between organized crime and regular crime in the state of Rio de Janeiro, seeking to define bases that make it possible to access to which extent organized crime affects regular crimes and, more, whether scholars are underestimating or overestimating their relations. This article will only approach those organizations to which violence is the main device that regulates actions, more specifically those that are best known to the case of Rio de Janeiro – “Jogo do bicho”, “Commandos” and “Milícias”.
Jogo do bicho
Jogo do bicho, which could be translated as “game of the animals”, is an illegal lottery created in the city of Rio the Janeiro and that became the main cause of violence in the state between 1920 e 1950. The “capo” of the organization is the “bicheiro” or “banqueiro”. This person on the top of the gang is the one that has the money to pay the prize to winners and has, along decades, developed a very close relationship with populations in neighbourhoods dominated by him. As in the Mafia, he
coordinates a big network of social assistance, philanthropy and became some sort of maecenas, sponsoring very important local traditions of samba schools and football teams. Besides these, Jogo do bicho is a very popular lottery – and the pay of prizes are reliably paid ‐, so that it has always had enough support of people to preserve itself. Holding itself in the thin line between legal and illegal, it became a very important factor of police, judicial and political systems corruption.
The “Comandos” of drug traffic
Without being a relevant producer of illicit drugs, Brazilian territory is crossed by international drug routes of cocaine that goes from Bolivia, Peru and Colombia to Europe and USA. Those same routes are also used to provide for the retail local market. Throughout the 90’s, the route from Paraguay to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro became the railway to illegal commerce of war weapons for the war between “commandos” ‐ retail drug dealers established in favelas (shanty towns), and between those gangs and the police.
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Extension of the “Comandos” territories Number of areas %
Comando Vermelho (CV) 77 31,4
Amigos dos Amigos (ADA) 34 13,9
Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP) 29 11,8
Areas under control of the milícias 96 39,2
Areas were police managed to brake crime control 9 3,7
Total 245 100,0
There are three main comandos
disputing control on various territories in Rio de Janeiro: “Comando Vermelho” (Red Command), o “Terceiro Comando” (Third Command) and “Amigos dos Amigos” (Frinds of Friends) which operate from inside prisons. The conflict between them was the main cause of the extremely high rates of homicide during the decade of 1990. What connections exist between these Comandos and regular crime in Rio de Janeiro? It is necessary to separate regular crime that occour in the area under the control of Comandos and the area outside, the rest of the city. The regular crime tends to decrease in areas controlled by gangs ‐ having extreme social control in their territory, they violently repress regular crimes. The opposite occurs outside their limits. We may then point out three connections: 1) when polices of repression on drug trafficking are more severe, part of the labour force migrates to other criminal activities such as armed robbery against people, shops and banks; 2) as the
pressure of the police over drug dealers gets softer, car robbery tends to increase since robbed vehicles are used to transport drugs between territories controlled by the same gang; 3) those consumers owning money to dealers frequently turn to theft, contributing to raise the occurrence of this type of crime. When more repression on “business” take place, a young drug dealer or an innocent inhabitant of the favela is killed, or yet, when corrupt police officers raise the price of bribery permanently charged over dealers, it may lead to explosions of riots on some determined areas with buses been set fire and local commerce is obliged to close their doors.
Execution Squads and protection Offer – The “milicias”
In the decade of 1970, on “Baixada Fluminense”, a very densely populated area in the metropolitan periphery of Rio de Janeiro, it appeared the so called “polícia mineira”, squads formed by police officers and former police officers that offered “private security services” to
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shopkeepers and other businessman. These services were not only irregular, but often violent and criminal, using torture and even murder. Later, in the decade of 1990, these groups started offering, rather compulsively, this protection to inhabitants in order to prevent drug traffic gangs to take control of neighbourhoods. The arrangements worked on the expense of very heavy social control in communities and today there are approximately 90 favelas under the control of these groups, which became known by the name of milicias. In these dominated communities there are armed groups that controls distribution of services such as illegal connections of cable television and internet and others. Different from the “Comandos”, the actions of “milicianos” (member of milicias) have no impact in regular crimes against property, such as armed robbery. Their connections are mostly with crimes against life, physical aggression and selling of illegal merchandises and services.
Conclusion
All the three categories of organized crime presented are entrepreneurships that depend – in order to maintain themselves ‐, on a specific and fourth kind of commodity which is that of offering protections to those who offer protections, who control territories, who negotiate weapons, those which operate clandestine gambling. For this commodity to be value effective, a calculus of force and power
correlation must be made. That is why I have been calling this “political commodities” (Misse, 1997, 1999, 2007, 2009). Value is produced by an asymmetric and almost always compulsive exchange, even if the exchange itself is desirable by both parts involved. This goods may be produced by passive corruption, but also by the active pressure under an individual or social group that is obliged to accept the exchange, or, in other words, by extortion. The merely economic approach to the issue would leave aside a crucial political aspect of it. It does not matter for our purposes whether the exchange has selfish or altruistic ends, if the beneficiary is an individual or an entire community. The profit on this “market” does not come exclusively from demand, but can be created by a difference of power and force between parts. And this power does not have to be taken from the state, but can be produced independently, just as before the modern state. Max Weber used to refer to this form of income as typical of political capitalism as opposed to a modern capitalism, based on free competition regulated by rational regulations. The hypothesis of this work however is that this type of earning has never completely disappeared even after the hegemonic consolidation of modern capitalism, but continues to be produced on a complementary relation to it, even if it is considered out of law. It is not possible to understand how this organizations produce their way of living without
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referring to the fact that they do produce or are submitted to political commodities. The existence and prosperity of criminal organizations of all kinds became very much dependent on political arrangements, negotiation and exchange with public agents, among who, police officers are the most important.
While relations between police officers and “bicheiros” tend to be more balanced or even controlled by bicheiros, nowadays police officers in Rio started to actively extort drug
dealers imposing asymmetric political exchange. One of the top former drug dealer of the city, has once been capture by police officers that charged 250 thousand dollars to release him. This active extortion is becoming a model to be spread from Rio de Janeiro to the rest of the country. Without considering these political commodities it is very difficult to understand relations between violence, organized crime and money making in illegal markets in Brazil.
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EXTENSION PROJECTS Fostering healthy early development
Home visitation projects, focusing on very young children are recommended by the
World Health Organization in early prevention of violence. Though multiple home
visitation programs are in place in the Northern hemisphere they are not frequent
in Brazil and none has ever focused on adolescents mothers. The project consists of
home visitation during pregnancy and after the child birth up to the age of 2 years,
intercalated with group work with mothers. Technical support comes from a
Brazilian Expert Committee (child psychologist, experimental psychologists with
expertise in post natal depression, pediatrician, representative from the state
Secretariat of Public Health) and by experts from: WHO, the Pan American Health
Organization (PAHO), the Centres for Disease Controls–Violence Prevention
Department, the Erik Erickson Institute (Chicago), an epidemiologist from the New
York School of Medicine and from the Instituto de Salud Publica de Mexico. The
project is already functioning in two periphery communities in the city of São Paulo
(Heliópolis and Jardim Ângela) and is on the last phase of planning in six others
neighbourhood in the city of Rio de Janeiro and Esteio, this last one on the
metropolitan region of Porto Alegre (state of Rio Grande do Sul).
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Mapping of current university course programs focused
on the themes violence, conflict, human rights and social
control
http://www2.forumseguranca.org.br/lista/ementas
An extensive database of University programs on violence and public security
was made to provide empirical data for the INCT research "Mapping of theoretical
and methodological connections of Brazil literature around the themes of violence
and public safety and its relations with the public policies of the area taken in the
last two decades". So far it has informed that in Brazil, the relationship between
theoretical knowledge and specialized training is direct, as teachers, besides acting
as researchers and knowledge producers are also involved in training people, as
they encourage the critical thought about the thematic and propagate the
accumulated knowledge to train students, researchers and other professionals.
Now, this database is online for broad consultation and may be a useful working
tool for laymen, students and professionals in training. Produced by INCT partners
Brazilian Forum on Public Safety and NECVU / UFRJ ‐ Center for the Study of
Citizenship, Conflict and Urban Violence / Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
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Rights’ Guide
http://www.guiadedireitos.org
It is a website containing extensive information on how to assess human
rights (Civil, political and socioeconomic) from international conventions to
municipal laws, from the functioning and responsibilities of the three branches of
powers (executive, legislative and judiciary) to telephone numbers and addresses of
their offices. Online since 2006, right before broadband internet access boomed
among middle and lower economic classes, it is permanently updated. As for the
regional information, covers the cities of São Paulo and its metropolitan region
known as “ABC Paulista” helping almost 15 million inhabitants to find their way into
the bureaucratic maze of public services.
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Digital Human Rights Violations database
Some categories of crime are rather difficult to keep track, since they have no
clear classification on police records. All too often, the only source of information
for such case is that of the press. That is why NEV monitors some of the most
important newspapers for cases of police violence, lynching and “chacinas”
(multiple homicides, frequently perpetrated by death squads that may include
police officers) in the state of São Paulo. The database cover cases from 1980 to
present and these can be retrieved using key‐words. Besides, cases involving larger
number of victims or with numerous clippings can also be consulted as dossiers.
Despite the fact that it was created for providing information for NEV’s own
researches, this material is now available for outside researchers under request.
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