Rethinking Police Violence in Brazil: Unmasking the Public Secret of Race

Abstract

In Brazilian cities, perhaps the most disturbing criminal activity is the violence perpetrated by police officers themselves. This article is an invitation and a provocation to reconsider social scientific thinking about police violence in Brazil. Illustrated by a court decision from a Northeastern city, in which a black man won a case against the state for being falsely arrested and abused by a black police officer on the grounds of racism, this article investigates three paradoxes: Brazilians fear both crime and the police; black police beat black civilians; and government officials disavow responsibility by stigmatizing the police on racial grounds. It then proposes an alternative reading of these paradoxes that opens the possibility for rethinking police reform and argues that democratization in Brazil is deeply intertwined with the future of its darkest-skinned citizens.

Extralegal Agency and the Search for Safety in Northeast Brazil

“…Rather than embodying the rule of law, Brazilian police and prisons exercise a power that is rarely restricted by subordination to welldefined and established laws. Indeed, the operation of these institutions is denounced as a glaring indicator of the 'unrule of law' (French 2013;Pinheiro 2000). Yet these institutions are not merely indexical signs.…”

On Mules and Bodies: Black Captivities in the Brazilian Racial Democracy

“…4 This article examines this ideology by situating the Brazilian criminal justice system within the global racial regime of domination, in which carcerality plays a central role. If we consider the disproportionate incarceration of Afro-Brazilians -along with disproportional killings by the police, premature deaths from disease, and discrimination in the job market French, 2013;Paixao, 2010) -to be situated within this transnational neoliberal logic of black disposability, Brazilian racial exceptionalism does not hold up to scrutiny. As some scholars have shown, political marginalization, social disenfranchisement, and racialized punishment span the African diaspora as a 'supra-national geography of death' (Vargas, 2011).…”

“Racism is a perfect crime”: favela residents’ everyday experiences of police pacification, urban militarization, and prejudice in Rio de Janeiro

“…These pigmentocratic everyday practices are entangled in Brazil's social fabric and social relations, as well as within the military police force, which largely comprises black men (French 2013, 162) and in afro-Brazilian communities such as in the favela. French (2013) notes that black military police officers behaving in racist and violent ways toward the black population are also treated with distrust and racially stigmatized, while government officials deny responsibility (French 2013, 162-163).…”