Qualifying Violence: Visible Data, Invisible Lives in Recife, Brazil

Abstract

This article brings attention to the rise of digital computing in policing in Brazil, where new technologies have been integrated into the criminal justice apparatus to surveil, manage, and police criminalized communities. I examine a reformist public policy called the Pacto pela Vida (Pact for Life) in Recife and foreground the process of collecting and interpreting data at crime scenes as a means by which to analyze how criminality is understood and conceptualized. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, I explore how data collected by the police link racial identifiers, places, and different types of offenses. Hence, I argue that the Pacto governmentality infers a preexisting logic of power and control over the Black poor using new technologies and policing models mainly imported from the United States. When police collect data at crime scenes and categorize it according to provided standards, the sociocultural context in which events occur become invisible. [Brazil, criminality, digitized policing, neoliberal security, race] R e s u m o Este artigo quer chamar a atenção para o surgimento da computação digital no policiamento no Brasil, onde novas tecnologias foram integradas ao aparato da justiça criminal para vigiar, gerenciar e policiar comunidades criminalizadas. Eu examino uma política pública reformista chamada Pacto pela Vida no Recife e coloco em primeiro plano o processo de coleta e interpretação de dados em cenas de crime como meio de analisar como a criminalidade é entendida e conceituada. Com base em uma extensa pesquisa etnográfica, exploro como os dados coletados pela polícia vinculam identificadores raciais, lugares e diferentes tipos de crimes. Portanto, argumento que a governamentalidade do Pacto infere uma lógica preexistente de poder e controle sobre os negros pobres usando novas tecnologias e modelos de policiamento importados

Seeing like police: Surveillant practices and scopic skills in Recife, Brazil

“…Recife, one of the country's most unequal state capitals, is no exception to this recurring diagnosis. Stigmatized in circulating imaginaries as sources of danger and criminality, self-built settlements, marginalized working-class areas, and their residents have been historically and disproportionately exposed to the risk of violence-especially when said violence is perpetrated by militarized policing forces themselves (Cavalcanti, 2020;Haynes, 2022).…”

“…The 2007 managerial reform of public security carried out under the Pacto pela Vida (Pact for Life), though widely celebrated for reducing Pernambuco homicide rates between 2007 and 2013, did not structurally or durably alter this unequal reality, especially when assessed and experienced from Recife's urban margins (see Cavalcanti, 2020;Daudelin & Ratton, 2018;Haynes, 2022;Hoelscher, 2017).…”

“…Recife, one of the country's most unequal state capitals, is no exception to this recurring diagnosis. Stigmatized in circulating imaginaries as sources of danger and criminality, self‐built settlements, marginalized working‐class areas, and their residents have been historically and disproportionately exposed to the risk of violence—especially when said violence is perpetrated by militarized policing forces themselves (Cavalcanti, 2020; Haynes, 2022). The 2007 managerial reform of public security carried out under the Pacto pela Vida (Pact for Life), though widely celebrated for reducing Pernambuco homicide rates between 2007 and 2013, did not structurally or durably alter this unequal reality, especially when assessed and experienced from Recife's urban margins (see Cavalcanti, 2020; Daudelin & Ratton, 2018; Haynes, 2022; Hoelscher, 2017).…”

“…As flagged in the introduction, these flexible, WhatsApp‐based policing arrangements do not replace, but coexist with formalized and state‐led sociotechnical systems for urban surveillance, which have functioned in Recife and Pernambuco for over a decade. The Pernambuco Pact for Life inaugurated video surveillance through its Public Pathways Monitoring System in 2009—one among other technologically mediated processes for security data gathering and handling encompassed by the public security reform (see Haynes, 2022). In 2012, the state's video‐monitoring system was expanded, with hundreds of new cameras added to the original set, and, in 2013, the city of Recife inaugurated its own Pact for Life, boosting the municipality's video surveillance capacity 3 .…”