Determinantes inconscientes da letalidade policial

Abstract

The high rates of the use of deadly force in police action in Brazil (released by public security departments, denounced by human rights organizations, reported by the press, questioned by international bodies and studies by researchers from different disciplines, approaches and institutional affiliations) still persist and resist as a wound to the process of building a brazilian Democratic State of Law. In face of impunity and the growing number of victims, despite numerous criticisms, recommendations and alternatives available to address the problem, this research aimed to identify unconscious determinants that contribute to the perpetuation and intensification of this violence. Based on the analysis of the processing of these deaths by the Criminal Justice System, this dissertation also inaugurates its own methodology that places the psychoanalytical listening, though outside its original frame of reference, in favor of research of this social phenomenon. Having as a background a real lawsuit in which police officers accused of murder in the exercise of their function were acquitted by the Court of Appeals, the hearing of actors of the Justice System whose position was overturned in this lawsuit (their associations and perspectives) is interpreted in light of psychoanalytic metapsychology, Norbert Elias's sociological theory and researches of police, violence or the Criminal Justice System. Paradoxically, what stands out in this listening is silence, a common thread of the analysis which synthesizes the absence of effects that the death of the victim had on the system and on the subjects that compose it. Thus, the unconscious determinants of police lethality could be identified on four fronts: under normative, organizational and institutional conditions that ensure the link between impunity and legality; in the ideological and historical aspects of the Brazilian "civilizing process"; in the social and subjective processes of legitimizing violence; and finally, in a juridical unconscious, from which the lawsuit emerges as a symptom of a collective trauma that overcomes it and for which it will always be insufficient. It is concluded that the processes of perpetuation and promotion of state lethality are intrinsically related with common processes of subject formation in Brazilian society. The traumatic nature of this unrepresented violence causes (in the structures of our institutions and in the most intimate construction of our subjectivities) is not only the resistance to change in Public Security policy, but also the forces that ensure the banality of homicide in Brazilian society and their extermination practices.

Lethal Violence in Brazil: A Systematic Review of Portuguese-Language Literature From 2000 to 2020

“…GIS have made geographical analyses of crime data possible for a wide number of users, facilitating the integration of many types of data into a common spatial framework and allowing crime pattern detection over time in combination with spatial statistical techniques (see, e.g., Camargo, 2007;Costa, 2014;Verona, 2006). In Psychology, there are several theses using psychoanalytical approaches, through hearings, discourse analysis, interviews, and observations (e.g., Kohara, 2019); while others combine quantitative approaches (e.g., Estevam, 2011).…”

“…Based on the analysis of a sample of filed criminal proceedings and police investigations in Sa ˜o Paulo municipality in the 1990s, Garcia (2013) investigates how impunity and a repressive police and criminal justice system can lead to a circle of violence, while Lemos (2019) focuses on the characterization of three jails in Southeast and Northeast Brazil and cases of human rights violations. See also the study by F. F. Araujo (2016), and studies of unconscious determinants of lethal police force by Kohara (2019) and Bueno (2018), who investigate the persistence of lethality in the actions of the military police of Sa ˜o Paulo state despite the reduction in homicides observed in 2000-2016.…”