Construction and Deconstruction of a Homicide Reduction Policy: The Case of Pact for Life in Pernambuco, Brazil

Abstract

This paper tries to demonstrate that both the fall in homicides in Pernambuco (from 2007-2013) and the resurgence in them that followed (2014-2017) are fundamentally linked to two explanatory variables, which are in turn connected: the model of governance of public security produced in Pernambuco at the level of state government strategy and the capacity for deterrence produced in the framework of the Criminal Justice System (especially that of state police, who are under the responsibility and "control" of the executive power of the state). This article argues that the construction of this specific model of governance of Public Security and the definition, monitoring and realization of deterrence strategies within the police were crucial to the reduction of the number of homicides in the most violent areas of the state. On the other hand, the dissolution of the capacity for integrated governance of the police, with the consequent dismantling of the deterrence capacity aimed primarily at the reduction of homicides and crimes against life that had been successfully conceived and realized between 2007 and 2013, explains the increase in intentional violent crimes that has been observed since 2014.

Spatial Modeling for Homicide Rates Estimation in Pernambuco State-Brazil

“…In that way, new studies should consider more variables with the upcoming years, resulting in a better understanding of the social/spatial determinants of lethal violence in Brazil. Thirdly, regional studies towards the public policy of prevention should assess how the Integrates Security Areas (ISA) are important to explain crime rates reduction in Pernambuco [69]. Finally, future works should focus on the behavior of the Theil-L index, given that the result of this research was the opposite of what was expected; even though, it was corroborated by the findings of another study [65].…”

O que funciona e o que não funciona para reduzir homicídios no Brasil: uma revisão sistemática

“…A revisão localizou um total de 13 avaliações de impacto de programas de gestão por resultado em relação a homicídios já feitos no Brasil, sendo que 10 avaliações não foram incluídas por não preencherem os critérios de inclusão, e a grande maioria apontou que os programas produziram resultados positivos: a) Projeto Polícia de Resultados de Minas Gerais (Beato et al, 2001;Loschi et al, 2005); b) Sistema Integrado de Monitoramento do Rio de Janeiro (Cabral, 2016;Campagnac & Ferreira, 2013); e c) Pacto pela Vida de Pernambuco (Oliveira, 2016;Penha et al, 2013;Ratton & Daudelin, 2018;B. F. A. Silva et al, 2016;Zaverucha & Nóbrega, 2015;Silveira Neto et al, 2014).…”

Multicriteria Ranking for Police Efficient and Effective Analysis

“…The Pact for Life program (Programa Pacto pela Vida) [21,22] was Pernambuco's state policy for police repression and social prevention of crime and violence. The initiative based the preventive and repressive actions on reducing impunity of violent crime through the integration of the public security system, readjustment and modernization of processes, protocols and routines directly related to the police operational capacity the Criminal Justice system, consolidation and integration of information, dissemination and democratization of data, and strategic training new police officers.…”

“…17, 18] families offer outranking relations on the set of alternatives considering the decision marker's preferences so that an alternative x (e.g., university, bank, hospital, police department, vendor, city, region, person), for instance, is claimed to outrank another alternative y if, and only if, x is at least as good as y and there is no strong argument to contradict this assertion [19]. In this paper, we combine the Full Disposal Hull (FDH) [20] directional efficiency measure for policing conditional to crime as an exogenous factor with the PROMETHEE outranking for a complete classification of Pernambuco's municipalities based on the efficiency of each police department in solving three types of crimes violent crimes (CVLI), street robberies (mugging) and carjack (or more generally motor vehicle theft and robbery) using officers as input and based on the effectiveness of reaching Pact for Life state goal on reducing homicides [5,21,22]. Some assessments of crime and policing in Pernambuco has used multicriteria and geospatial tools for ranking, clustering and classifying units and regions according to the vulnerability to homicides [23,24,25], preference learning [26,27], and property crimes [28,29].…”