Neither Hero nor Villain: The Determinants of Confidence in the UPP Police

Abstract

In this article we analyze the determinants of confidence in the Police Pacification Units ( Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora – UPPs). During their existence (2008-2018), “pacification” was represented by the media as an institutional hybrid which moved between two extremes. The police were either presented as heroes, whom people wanted to guarantee the end of shootings and ensure security in areas previously marked by violence, or as villains, rejected because of the lethality of their actions and the arbitrariness of how they dealt with people. Taking these representations as ideal types, we sought to identify the determinants of confidence in the police, with the counterpoint being a domiciliary survey carried out between 2014 and 2016 with 2000 residents distributed among twenty “pacified” favelas in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The results indicated that the respondents had ambiguous sentiments towards the UPP police, mediated by the perception that shootings were part of daily life in these communities and that the “pacification” had improved security, making the police neither heroes nor villains.

Enforcing Trust: Race, gender, and the policing of citizenship in Rio de Janeiro

“…Most of the vast scholarship on the pacification project in Rio centers on reducing shootouts as the crucial variable for creating trust in the police (Cano, Borges, and Ribeiro 2012; Ribeiro and Vilarouca, 2020; Zaluar and Barcellos, 2013). Another variable often highlighted is the rather placative social projects many UPP commanders started in pacified favelas , such as soccer practice with children.…”