The Issue of Public Safety in the Next Government - 15/04/2022
by Luiz Eduardo Soares
Brazil needs to undertake several deep and urgent changes, but any progressive candidate seeking to defeat the neo-fascism embodied by the current president will need to form a coalition with conservative forces around a centrist agenda of democratic reconstruction. The situation is so drastic, and the country has regressed so far, that a victory for this moderate coalition will be celebrated as the triumph of life over death.
This context raises the question of how a new administration might handle the issue of public security, especially considering the following: (1) Partial and incremental reforms have not produced consistent results, either because they did not go far enough or because they were discontinued. (2) Constitutional reforms, although indispensable, have not been voted on in Congress, which is indicative of the resistance they face. (3) The next administration, even if anti-fascist and socially sensitive, will have to accommodate alliances so broad that it will likely be unable to push through transformations that might alienate conservative partners. (4) However, if state violence is not contained, there will be no future for democracy.
The following proposals are addressed to the future administration, not to the campaign, whose logic requires a specific electoral strategy rather than a governing one. The goal is to avoid routine disrespect for the Constitution, which should make it appealing to socialists, liberals, and conservatives alike. Today, for the poor and Afro-Brazilian population, legality is utopia.
There are, on average, 50,000 homicides per year in Brazil, and more than 70% of victims are poor black men. Police actions have caused around seven thousand deaths in 2020. The vast majority of victims are black and poor, especially in the context of the so-called war on drugs. There is little elucidation of the circumstances surrounding lethal crimes and almost none, when the perpetrators are police, since impunity counts on the tacit complicity of the Public Ministry. Mass incarceration has been mainly of young, black, poor, and unarmed people with no ties to organized crime who work as small-time dealers of illicit drugs. Most arrests are made when someone is in the process of committing a crime when no investigation is involved. Around 700,000 are arrested, almost 40% for drug trafficking (62% among women). As the Penal Executions Law (LEP) is often ignored, criminal gangs dominate prisons, forcing inmates to negotiate survival by working for organized crime after serving their sentence.
In other words, we are contracting future violence: strengthening two factions at the price of destroying generations of nonviolent youth and their families. What can be seen, in short, is that there is a perverse dynamic at play that has taken on a life of its own. It derives from the combination of drug policy, mass incarceration, lack of enforcement of the LEP, and a police model inherited from the dictatorship. The deleterious effects of this amalgamation were exacerbated by this administration’s policy of making it easier for ordinary people to acquire weapons and ammunition and harder for them to be traced, not to mention the transnational rise of the ultra-right, adept at the militarization of security services.
As absurd as it may seem, the phenomenon of inertial reproduction of the same illegal police practices, indifferent to evidence of their negative effects, as if it were an addiction, deserves a definition as capacious as its persistence is scandalous. I suggest thinking about it and treating it as a repetition compulsion, rationalized by institutional discourse. It is a compulsion to repeat minor violations and major violent acts, setting in motion a performative language whose role is to direct abjection to the Other. This Other, in Brazil, is the black population and, secondarily, the poor, gathered in stigmatized territory. This abjection identifies, isolates, and exorcises evil—even encouraging extrajudicial executions—for the benefit of “good citizens.” Not by chance, the colonel who commanded the Military Police in the capital of the state of Rio de Janeiro declared, in 2008, that the police are a “social insecticide.” This hygienist language reveals what official discourse covers up. The fact that there was no rupture in public security institutions during the process of political transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s allowed the values and behaviors that the police cultivated under the military regime to persist, especially their understanding that it was up to them to play a leading role in the fight of good against evil.
The war on drugs, indifferent to results (accumulating costs, deaths, corruption, promoting right-wing paramilitary militias while failing to reduce consumption), mirrors the psychic and practical plot against which it is projected and which would supposedly justify its existence: addiction.
With this diagnosis in mind, I suggest that the next administration embrace an anti-racist pact in national life, focusing on the sphere of security. Nothing would be more faithful to the letter of the Constitution, which both liberals and conservatives would be unable to oppose. The government could convene social movements and establish as a political priority the end of race and class bias in police actions and in criminal justice. Even if it does not have the substantive means to reach the objective, the proclamation of the goal would have an indisputable power in itself and would trigger a new dynamic. What I propose is a political gesture. The government elected to rebuild democracy would convene anti-racist movements from all over the country and negotiate the formation of regional and local popular groups to propose, monitor, and evaluate the implementation of practical and immediate measures that would be, admittedly, experimental at first and may vary from state to state. This would not simply repeat traditional exercises of convening conferences doomed to fail by their own composition. In addition, it would open a special federal line of credit for states to strengthen the Public Defender's Offices, which cannot be inferior to Public Prosecutors in any respect.
While setting in motion this experimental political process together with society, and while acting to reduce environmental devastation, attacks on native peoples, misery, unemployment, and the uberization of employment, the government would concentrate on controlling weapons, severely restricting their circulation and shifting the focus from military incursions in vulnerable areas to the interception of arms trafficking. At the same time, it would work with state governments to universalize the use of cameras on police uniforms and oversee the creation of a federal police education council as an institution of the State, not of one particular administration.
The central point is the anti-racist renegotiation. Only it will have the strength to dissolve the anti-democratic and illegal dynamic of autonomization which has made the police a refractory of political and civil power. Only it will extend the democratic transition to the realm of criminal justice, a process that has hitherto been precarious and incomplete. The impacts on every other social issue would be profound and positive.
Luiz Eduardo Soares is a writer, anthropologist, and political scientist. He is a visiting professor at the UFRJ, a retired professor at UERJ and a former professor at IUPERJ and UNICAMP. He has published 20 books, the most recent of which are Demilitarize; Public Security and Human Rights (Boitempo, 2019), Brazil and its Double (However, 2019) and Inside the Fierce Night; Fascism in Brazil (Boitempo, 2020). He was National Secretary of Public Security, Under-Secretary of Public Security and Coordinator of Security, Justice and Citizenship of the State of Rio de Janeiro, as well as Municipal Secretary of Violence Prevention in Porto Alegre and Nova Iguaçu.
