Fear and Legitimacy in São Paulo, Brazil: Police-Citizen Relations in a High Violence, High Fear City

Abstract

In this paper we examine consensual and coercive police-citizen relations in São Paulo, Brazil. According to procedural justice theory, legitimacy operates as part of a virtuous circle, whereby normatively appropriate police behavior encourages public self-regulation and pro-active cooperation, which then reduces the need for coercive forms of social control. Tests of the theory in the US, UK, Australia and elsewhere typically pit normative versus instrumental accounts of crime-control policy against one another. But can consensual and coercive police-citizen power relations be so easily disentangled in a city in which many people fear crime, where some people fear police but tolerate extreme police violence, and where the image of the police as “just another (violent) gang” seems still to have significant cultural currency? Our analysis of the composition, predictors and potential consequences of police legitimacy highlights points of similarity and difference in police-citizen relations in this high violence, high fear city of the Global South.

Relational and Instrumental Perspectives on Compliance with the Law among People Experiencing Homelessness

“…It may be that people experiencing homelessness are so estranged from the police and the group they represent that these processes simply break down -they do not think of themselves as being group members, or that police represent a social category they belong to (or can aspire to belong to). This is consistent with the work by Lind & Tyler (Lind & Tyler, 1988;Tyler & Lind, 1992;Tyler, 1997) and recently discussed in Trinkner (2019), Reisig et al (2020) and Jackson et al (2021). On this account, people are less attuned to process and more interested in outcomes when they do not identify with the superordinate group that an authority represents.…”

“…Original conceptualizations of procedural justice theory (Lind & Tyler, 1988;Tyler & Lind, 1992;Tyler, 1997) incorporated both relational and instrumental motivations for compliance (recent papers by Reisig et al 2020, Trinkner, 2019, and Jackson et al 2021 have also discussed this interplay of relational and instrumental motivation within procedural justice theory). On this account, which type of motivation is most important depends on dynamics of the authority-subordinate relationship and the context of a given situation.…”

Legal Cynicism, Intrusive Policing, and the Dynamics of Police Legitimacy: Evidence from Brazil’s Largest City

“…• Police legitimacy (coercive-consensual continuum) I follow the modeling strategy used by Jackson et al (2021) • Attitudes towards the acceptability of the use of violence…”

“…In a study about the nature of police legitimacy in São Paulo, Brazil's largest city, Jackson et al (2021) asked whether a clean differentiation between normative and instrumental police-citizen relations could be identified. The standard approach is to distinguish the two motivations to comply with the law.…”

“…Probably as a consequence, police-citizen relations are marked by negative attitudes towards legal authority. Studies show that Brazilians distrust the police (Silva and Beato 2013; Oliveira Junior 2011) and other legal institutions (Filgueiras 2013;Ceratti et al 2015), and fear police officers (Jackson et al 2021).…”