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Serving States and Serving Citizens: Halting Steps toward Police Reform in Brazil and Implications for Donor Intervention Elizabeth Leeds
Donor efforts to promote reform for democratic policing are hampered by narrow visions of what constitutes reform and concerns about unintended consequences of their support. This article reflects upon efforts to promote institutional changes of the police in Brazil from 1997 to 2003. It discusses the political and administrative constraints of carrying out reform and argues that strategies for change require broader forms of intervention than are usually promoted by external donor agencies. The article describes efforts to create new paradigms of police training, foster partnerships between police and universities and civil society organizations, and encourage previously non-existent accountability mechanisms. Keywords: Police Reform; Training; Human Rights; Accountability; University Partnerships; Donor Intervention Introduction The year 2004 marked the twentieth anniversary of Brazil’s first major push to democratization following twenty years of an authoritarian regime that began in Elizabeth Leeds is a Research Scholar at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, New York University. The strategies and most of the projects and research discussed in this article were undertaken while the author was a Program Officer in the Governance and Civil Society Program of the Ford Foundation Brazil Office from 1997 2003. The author is grateful to the Foundation for the opportunity to reflect in a systematic way on that experience and to the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University for institutional and logistical support. Christopher Stone and colleagues at the Vera Institute of Justice and Merrick Bobb of the Police Assessment Resource Center (PARC) were invaluable partners in helping to search for new directions in democratic policing. Correspondence to: Elizabeth Leeds, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, New York University, 53 Washington Square South, 407W, New York, NY 10012, USA. E-mail: El629@nyu.edu ISSN 1043-9463 (print)/ISSN 1477-2728 (online) # 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/10439460601124122
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1964. The Diretas Ja´ march for direct elections in January 1984 was a milestone in the re-establishment of democratic rule. Since then, advances in democratic process and the growth of a vibrant and organized civil society have given Brazil the tools to push forward an agenda for social justice. Yet in the twenty years since the beginning of redemocratization, the sector that has made least progress is criminal justice and, in particular, the police. The democratic constitution of 1988, which, on paper at least, changed virtually all aspects of government, left the police institutions unchanged. One need only read the newspapers of most Brazilian capital cities, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reports, or the recently released report by the United Nations special envoy on extrajudicial killings to know that police violence and corruption continue to plague Brazilian society and low-income populations in particular. It is for these segments that democratic advances have been most elusive. What the police misconduct statistics do not give us, however, is an understanding of efforts, however halting, to encourage institutional change within the police. This article discusses the complexities of fostering police reform and the implications for funding agencies that support such efforts. Context Administrative Structure Serving a federal system with 27 states, Brazil’s police forces are organized into statelevel jurisdictions with the exception of the Federal Police, which has responsibility for national borders, airports and ports, and such trans-border criminal activities as drug trading and money laundering. The two police services that have the most direct impact on citizen security*the Military and Civil Police*generally reflect the longstanding history and culture of their particular states or regions*a variable whose implications are great for attempts to foster institutional change.1 The Military Police, as its name implies, is organized along hierarchical/military lines, following a strict command structure, and is the police force most visible to the average citizen as the uniformed beat cop, the traffic police and the police service notified through a 911-type system to respond to emergencies (the latter in many though not all states). Its two-tiered system, with a well-educated officer corps and a less-educated and poorly paid rank-and-file with little opportunity for advancement,2 produces a poor incentive structure for self-improvement. The Civil Police (the investigative or ‘‘judicial’’ police) is the crucial link between the citizenry and the prosecutorial system. It is in the delegacia , or civil police precinct, that investigations are carried out and decisions made regarding whether an individual will be indicted or a particular case prosecuted. Both police forces have strong, longstanding and distinct institutional cultures that resist change imposed from the outside, especially when reform discussions involve notions of institutional integration, as has frequently been the case in recent years. The closed corporativist structure of the Military Police with its own system of military justice both discourages external
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scrutiny and produces a system rife with internal injustices against lower-ranking personnel. Service to Whom? The greatest and most general challenge for police reformers in Brazil’s postauthoritarian era is to create a police that serves all of its citizenry equally rather than serving the interests of the state, a particular regime or a set of elite citizenry. Historical accounts of both police forces note their role as a preserver of the status quo and of public safety against ‘‘unruly’’ behaviour in slave and freed slave populations (Holloway, 1993) and in subsequent moments of political unrest throughout much of the twentieth century (Jakubs, 1977; Canelli, 1993). Both police forces were arms of the state apparatus of the military regime (Pinheiro, 1997) and the authoritarian legacy remains a strong force within these institutions (Zaverucha, 2003). In those states with serious rural land conflicts in particular, the Military Police continues to serve interests of rural landowners in repressive and violent ways (Correa, 1999). Police forces do not see themselves as public policy agencies open to public scrutiny and accountable to the publics they should be serving. Political-administrative Constraints Throughout Latin America*and Brazil is no exception*public safety is the most important issue of citizen concern in public opinion polls for all class levels.3 As such, virtually all electoral campaigns produce position papers or platform publications to outline proposed public safety. Rarely, however, are the comprehensive policies outlined in these campaign documents ever implemented. The overtures to public safety improvement are constrained by political/administrative variables that are not unique to Brazil. First and foremost are the political costs of major reform necessary for public safety. In many states and at the federal level, rooting out corrupt police on a scale that would make a difference will inevitably affect standing public officials. Second, police unions and professional associations are consistently contrary to any constitutional change that would dilute their institutional culture. In Brazil, the most glaring example is the opposition by police lobbies to amend the constitution to allow the unification of the military and civil police forces*the most frequently cited reform measure. The political use of police by elected officials is especially marked in those states where traditional oligarchies are still powerful. In the northeastern state of Sergipe, for example, the laudable efforts of police in certain municipalities are frequently frustrated by local elites carrying out illegalities to support their own interests (Neves et al., 2002). In Bahia, Lemos-Nelson’s (2002) study on the oversight efforts with the Civil Police has noted that the proximity of local chiefs of police to Bahia’s political establishment has stymied the efforts of a particularly dedicated group of police internal affairs personnel.
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Despite the campaign rhetoric of aspiring politicians, the political costs of carrying out police reform are complicated further by the realization that public safety improvement is dependent on many variables, and not just the police. To undertake seriously public safety improvement as a goal of a particular administration is to risk political reputations by claiming responsibility for reduction in crime*a phenomenon linked to other related variables such as the prison, prosecutorial and judicial systems and socio-economic variables. The police also use the excuse of the complexity of ‘‘the system’’ as a way of dodging responsibility for improving performance (Neves et al., 2002). All too often a particular politician, once in office, opts for the short-term and frequently repressive band-aid approach, just to show that progress is being made or that there is a security presence that will make a difference. Governmental response to the perceived public desire for ‘‘get tough’’ public safety policies in the face of escalating crime rates is a Latin American-wide phenomenon (Ungar, 2004). Brazil is no exception. Quick-fix policies tend to appear as elections approach when incumbents are concerned with responding to a public impatient for crime-reduction and hard-line policies. Invariably quick fixes lead to an escalation of violence and a worsening of public safety conditions. While public outcry and a call for tough-oncrime policies are frequently middle-class demands (Caldeira, 2002), low-income populations, especially in more traditional regions of the country, often expect the police to deal with alleged criminals in the same way they ‘‘discipline’’ they own wayward children (i.e., with a physical beating) (Barreira, 2004). And finally, reformers must contend with the inevitable programmatic discontinuities that occur from one political administration to the next and within administrations as public safety personnel are replaced mid-stream for a wide variety of reasons. These range from public safety crises for which someone has to accept responsibility (and those in command positions are inevitably fired whether or not blame is justified) to the short-sighted view that sufficient progress in crime reduction is not being made and that positive results, however fleeting, require different strategies and personnel. The big challenge for reformers is to create conditions for the institutionalization of those innovative advances that do occasionally occur in moments of political opening. Reform by Crisis The 1990s saw a series of high-profile police crises4 that served to put police reform squarely on the public agenda. While the political constraints mentioned above frequently act as a break on sweeping reform efforts and the inevitable commission studies that follow each crisis generally re-invent a non-moving wheel, the crises usually make visible the visionary and courageous police officials who are committed to change. The severity of the police atrocities of the 1990s called international attention to Brazil’s public safety problems and this attention, in turn, stimulated state government officials and/or the committed police to begin the reform process, if
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only to improve the public’s image of the police. Those states where the greatest progress has been made reflect the presence of such officials and police personnel. For example, the state of Ceara´, known for innovative reforms in the 1990s in a number of public policy areas (Tendler, 1998), instituted police reforms in response to a series of police crises. Calling itself the ‘‘Government of Change’’, the state government introduced changes that sociologist Cesar Barreira has called a ‘‘contradictory evolution’’. In an evaluative study of the public safety reforms from 1988 to 2002, Barreira (2004) notes that each of the reforms had limitations,5 but nevertheless were steps to start improving public safety policy. Another effort to create an image of less truculent police resulted in the recruitment of women by the Military Police in the 1980s and 1990s. As sociologist Barbara Soares has noted in her research on the impact of an increasing female presence on the Military Police, growing numbers of women police have yet to produce more than cosmetic changes in police performance.6 She points out that the creation of women’s police stations (delegacias de mulher) in the Civil Police, on the other hand, as a response to the demands of the feminist movement of the 1980s 1990s, has had a more lasting positive impact on public safety policies (Soares, 2004). The contrast suggests that when police reforms are in response to civil society demands, the impact may be more permanent than if reforms are government initiatives merely to change images as a result of police crises. Forms of Intervention If public safety has become a priority for the Brazilian public and nominally for its governments at all levels, it is slowly being recognized by external donors and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that the lack of public safety and rising rates of crime and violence affect both the strengthening of democratic institutions and economic well-being. Approaches to improving public safety are as varied as the institutions proposing them, whether multilateral institutions (World Bank,7 InterAmerican Development Bank, European Union, United Nations Development Program), bilateral development agencies (from the United States, Britain, Canada, Sweden), private philanthropic organizations (e.g., the Ford, MacArthur and Tinker foundations, Open Society Institute) (Foglesong & Phillips, 2003) or private external consultants contracted by Brazilian government agencies. All categories of funders are understandably cautious about involvement in public safety reform. Those promoting strengthened capacity for criminal justice institutions and personnel are concerned about the unintended adverse consequences of, for example, training programmes for more effective crime-reduction techniques that could be used for undemocratic intelligence-gathering rather than improving public safety (Neild & Ziegler, 2002: 15 16). However, those who believe in the importance of police reform see it as a step in building more confidence between society and government more broadly. It is with the police that most citizens have their first
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encounter with the state, and more often than not those encounters are tainted by corrupt or repressive behaviour. Most analyses of external interventions for promoting democratic policing overseas have reflected on the experiences of bilateral ‘‘justice assistance’’ programmes and what it is feasible to achieve (Bayley, 1995b; Marenin, 1998; National Institute of Justice, 1995). In criticizing the effectiveness of such programmes, analysts have argued that what is most important in police reform strategies is the most difficult to carry out: ‘‘The programs that would make the greatest impact require time, stability and democratic political auspices. They require the very conditions that police reform is supposed to create’’ (Bayley, 1995b: 90). Dealing with these larger contextual issues over a longer time is difficult for most bilateral or multilateral institutions. Most aid for police reform is government-to-government, focused on technical assistance and constrained to relatively brief (one or two year) periods. In speaking of police assistance in Panama, Haiti and El Salvador, Marenin (1998) notes ‘‘clearly democratic policing takes time, for what is at stake is the fundamental relationships between civic society and government, of which the police are a most visible representative and link’’. Strategies for Change Given the contextual framework of the Brazilian police outlined above and the need for dealing with police reform in the context of donor constraints, what is a feasible strategy and what kind of donor can most effectively carry it out? The optimal strategy is, first, to stimulate a new vision of police-society relations in which respect for human rights and effective policing are not contradictory aims; second, to promote new concepts of police organization that would more easily respond to community needs and crime-reduction in a more pro-active way rather than with traditionally reactive and usually repressive practices; and, third, to foster greater community-police trust by encouraging the notion of public safety as a public policy like any other by creating a variety of police oversight mechanisms. Any donor adopting such a strategy must have a long-term vision8 and the flexibility to support a broad spectrum of projects ranging from mapping a field to investing in new and innovative institutions once the key players have been identified. It became clear in 1997, when a series of police crises (see Note 4) stimulated renewed thinking about reform, that forward-thinking police wanted resources, not necessarily just financial ones, but ideas, translated published materials and help with new forms of training*in short, partnerships with sympathetic applied academics and policy makers. Creating independent (i.e., nongovernmental) resources for police would guarantee the continuity of such support beyond the boundaries of a particular political administration. Yet even with autonomous institutions, the ideas and applied research that those institutions would produce would need to fall on sympathetic ears in order to have a policy impact.
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An important vehicle for reform in established democracies whose police services have already undergone reform processes has been the academic community, where the development of an applied academic field of criminal justice has served both as an external evaluator of criminal justice institutions and an educator of criminal justice personnel. Until quite recently in Brazil, the worlds of academia and the police were distant and antagonistic; as targets of police repression during the military regime, universities were seen as a source of subversion. As a result, neither social scientists nor progressive politicians in the post-authoritarian period were willing to take on public safety and criminal justice as a legitimate subject of study or as a public policy needing reform (Soares, 2000). Additionally, and resulting from this chasm, the fields of criminology and public safety by and large do not exist in Brazil in either their theoretical or applied dimensions.9 To create bridges between the academic community and the police would stimulate new paradigms of police training, foster a new applied academic field of criminology and public safety studies, and interest the police in carrying their own research for proactive strategic planning. University-police Partnerships Like much police training in Latin America, Brazil’s model has traditionally followed the system of in-house (police academy) instruction, separately for the Military and Civil Police, with a heavy curricular emphasis on the legal system and (for the Military Police) military instruction. With the exception of the states of Minas Gerais and Pernambuco, where external police training has occurred for approximately twenty and fifteen years, respectively,10 partnerships between universities and the Military Police began only in the 1990s. They now occur in one form or another in at least nine states. For all of its closed hierarchical structure, the Military Police has been far more open to external training partnerships than the Civil Police. In most states, these partnerships focus on the officer corps at mid-career level and offer the mandatory ‘‘specialization’’ courses that are necessary for career advancement. The specialization course offered by the Federal Fluminense University (UFF) in Rio de Janeiro in partnership with the Military Police of that state provides an example of the potential for change through training not only in terms of innovative curriculum content,11 but (and perhaps more importantly) a methodology that is in stark contrast to the culture of non-questioning military hierarchy. It also shows the possibility of conflict with the more traditional elements of military hierarchy. Course originator and coordinator Roberto Kant de Lima notes that traditional military-style courses focus on the idea of training in which standardized procedures based on memorizing mechanical repetitions remove from police the capacity to reflect on the complexity of real situations they might confront (e.g., problems regarding adolescents, drugs, social and racial discrimination, the elderly, gender, domestic violence) (Lima, 2002). One student interviewed for one of many articles about the much-publicized course said: ‘‘The course gives the police real food for thought. Military Police deal with knowledge in a very pragmatic way. Our theoretical training
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was always based on manuals where all situations are always foreseen and there is ready-made solution for each problem. We are now beginning to think’’ (Ludemir, 2002). The symbolism of the contrast between the traditional police academy and the non-authoritarian style of a public university is not lost on either the students or their superiors who are concerned that the traditional military values are being lost. One episode during the second year of the course is a telling sign of the course’s potential to bring about cultural change within the Military Police. The original agreement between the Military Police and the university stipulated that students would attend the classes, held on the university campus, dressed in street clothes and unarmed. This, after all, was a free and openly democratic university setting. When a nationally televised police crisis prompted the substitution of the Military Police commander who had signed the original agreement, the new and more conservative commander changed the rules of the game, ordering students to attend classes in uniform and armed to maintain the identity of the Military Police. The decision had a chilling effect on the internal dynamics of the course since uniforms signified rank and students felt constrained from contradicting, in the spirit of academic debate, an officer of higher rank. In an unprecedented moment of arguing with the commander against his decision, the students convinced him to return to the original terms of the agreement. In the class’ graduation ceremony at the end of the year, the same commander said in his formal remarks that he was fearful that, through the course, the Military Police was losing its traditional identity and, disappearing with that identity, the knowledge of what it always knew how to do. The intention of the course was precisely to begin to change that culture and identity. As important as comprehensive training may be, most educators involved in new paradigms of police training recognize that there persists a large gap between, on the one hand, changing values through new curricula and teaching methodologies and, on the other, teaching pragmatic operational skills that increase effectiveness in crime reduction while following the dictates of new democratic policing. As important as this change in identity might be, the new way of thinking is being proposed to midcareer officials who have to deal with rising rates of crime and violence and a public clamoring for greater public safety (Sapori, 2004). Courses like that at UFF are just one way that universities can play an important role in changing police-society relations. Another and somewhat more pragmatic and operational approach has been that of the Center for Studies in Criminology and Public Safety (CRISP) of the Federal University of Minas Gerais. CRISP responds to both the lack of applied public policy and public safety courses within Brazilian universities for both police and the larger criminal justice community and the need for effective operational methodologies to reduce crime within a democratic framework. Its crime analysis courses, given to both officer and street-cop levels of the Military Police of Minas Gerais were a pioneering effort to address those needs. A concrete example of the public policy implications of this approach is the development of a multisectoral crime reduction strategy resulting in the significant
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reduction of homicides among the low-income under-age-24 male population in a pilot project called ‘‘Stay Alive!’’ (‘‘Fica Vivo!’’). The project is inspired by the limited success of Boston’s Operation Cease-Fire Program in the 1990s involving a partnership between the Boston Police and clergy in the city’s African-American community and was adapted by CRISP to the local reality of Belo Horizonte, the capital city of Minas Gerais. Stay Alive! represents the application and evolution of CRISP’s innovative crime-mapping and crime analysis research and training applied to the reality of a 100 per cent increase in the number of homicides between 1997 and 2001. Recognizing that reversing rising crime rates was not just a matter of improved police training, the project sought a partnership between the Military and Civil Police, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Judiciary, the Medical School of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, the Secretary of Education of Belo Horizonte and local churches (Beato, 2002). The state’s governor, recognizing the preliminary success of the project, adopted the model for 21 regions in Minas Gerais in 2004. Accountability Mechanisms While police reform through new training paradigms and new external partnerships are welcomed by many forward-thinking police, equally important efforts to promote police accountability are usually met with hostility, resistance and obstructionism. Of the potential mechanisms of police oversight in Brazil, the most promising and yet still highly problematic is that of the police ombudsman office (ouvidoria), created in five states in the mid and late 1990s and now found, in one form or another, in 13 Brazilian states. The ouvidorias, which receive individual complaints from citizens and even from lower-ranking police regarding their own institutions, were created to be more effective oversight mechanisms than the longstanding police internal affairs offices (corregedorias) and the external public prosecutors’ offices. With rare exceptions, neither of the latter two offices plays an effective police oversight role.12 The creation of ombudsman offices is a voluntary act in Brazil. They are instituted in moments of political opening in individual states and with varying degrees of effectiveness. While the first ombudsmen came from the human rights community, broadly speaking, many of their successors have been public prosecutors or otherwise linked to the justice system with differing degrees of independence. While, in principle, the creation of external oversight vehicles is an essential step in the process of creating a more accountable and effective police service, in reality, the conditions of the ombudsmen offices have impeded their effectiveness. Their autonomy has been limited by several factors: scarce financial resources; their physical locations within the offices of their state secretariats of public safety, thereby calling into question the independence by the public that seeks them out; their appointments being ultimately made by the governor of their states, thus creating political linkages which limits autonomy; and the lack of subpoena and independent investigative power (Lemgruber et al., 2003). These problematic institutional arrangements are compounded by poor or non-existent records kept by police and coroners offices
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on potential police abuse. For example, a consistent finding of police researchers is the mislabeling in police reports of encounters with victims in which torture or death occurs. The category ‘‘bodily harm’’ (‘‘lesa˜o corporal’’) frequently hides occurrences of torture or death by excessive force and ‘‘resisting arrest’’ is often found as the explanation for torture or death when, in fact, deliberate excessive force was employed (Cano, 1997). How can donors contribute to increasing the effectiveness of such official institutions as ombudsman offices or provide other tools for effective oversight mechanisms? In a strategy similar to that of promoting police-university relationships, donors can support public safety evaluative research by academic centres, thereby creating a body of public safety knowledge that has been heretofore nonexistent. An example is the extensive evaluation, cited above, carried out by the Center for Studies in Public Safety and Citizenship (CESeC) of the Candido Mendes University in Rio de Janeiro on the first five ombudsman experiences in the country. The study is an analysis of the ombudsman offices and offers proposals for improving their effectiveness. In an international seminar held in conjunction with the study, participants from England, South Africa, Portugal and the United States provided examples of alternative oversight models. The study’s coordinator, Julita Lemgruger, noted in the resulting publication that even if adequate resources and information were available, the resolution of individual cases does nothing to change public safety policy in a more comprehensive way. Focusing on the ‘‘bad apples’’ does little to change the structure, administration and culture of the police, which are the larger causal factors (Lemgruber et al., 2003). Indeed, the critical elements of the international models focused on the ability of oversight bodies to become involved in providing guidance for improvement of police practices and engaging police in a review of their own policies.13 Donors can support police accountability efforts also through fomenting partnerships between advocacy groups and public safety personnel. An example is the civil society/human rights/public safety partnership between the Para´ Society for the Defense of Human Rights and the Secretary of Public Safety in the northern state of Para´, (the site of the police massacre at Eldorado de Caraja´s in 1996) through the Office of the Police Ombudsman of that state.14 A founder of the Society, one of the oldest and most effective human rights NGOs in the country, was asked by the then Secretary of Public Safety to become the state’s first ombudsperson. Now in her eighth year as ombudsperson (an unusual example of long-term continuity), Rosa Marga Rothe has been coordinating a study of grave human rights violations carried out by the police of Para´. Such a study will strengthen the credibility of the ombudsman’s office as well as provide solid evidence for prosecutions of police misconduct. Civil Society*Police Partnerships Partnerships such as that between the Para´ Society for the Defense of Human Rights and the police of that state are emblematic of a new kind of collaboration between
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traditional civil society organizations and the police*one that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. These partnerships reflect a vision of human rights concerns that moves beyond those issues that occupied activists during the authoritarian regime. They also reflect a new generation of human rights activists who are willing to partner with actors previously thought of as antagonistic to their interests. These partnerships are particularly important for creating new paradigms of human rights training. The issue of whether human rights can be taught, whether such training has any positive practical impact and whether human rights sensitivity needs to be embedded in broader discussions of citizenship and democracy are constant concerns in police reform discussions. Another of Brazil’s pioneering human rights organizations, GAJOP, in the northeast state of Pernambuco, coordinated a comprehensive human rights training project in the three northeastern states of Pernambuco and Sergipe. GAJOP’s partners were the federal universities in each state, represented by their respective social science departments and/or human rights commissions. Built into the project was a concern with devising a new methodology (a new pedagogy) of holding human rights discussions with the police. Several participants emphasized that the idea of the project was not to ‘‘teach’’ human rights, but rather to create a space for reflection and dialogue. Rather than ‘‘transmitting education content’’, the project participants employed a dialogic concept of education that spoke to the broader context in which the police operate. Paulo Neves, sociologist and project coordinator at the Federal University of Sergipe notes: ‘‘[I]t does no good to speak of human rights in a technical manner if, in the reality of police personnel, human rights appears to have no relevance [in a society sharply divided by class and race]. It’s through the reflection about everyday practices and life experience that a concern with human rights is born’’ (Neves et al., 2002). Project participants were fully cognizant of the course’s limitations in a society in which large segments of the population do not believe in the need for human rights. The contradictions between verbal affirmations of human rights by police in a class setting and the continuing on-the-street practices were fully apparent. Yet the postcourse evaluation carried out by all project participants noted that the courses allowed for unintended positive consequences. First, they provided a space for police to express themselves openly in a way not possible within their own institutions. Second, they were an opportunity to bring together disparate parties and, in some cases (e.g., Paraı´ba) create more cohesive alliances between the police and the academic/human rights community with the opportunity to break down the stereotypes and prejudices held by both. And finally, since the project involved the creation of a database with profiles of each police participant, it added to the incipient, but still limited, body of knowledge about police institutions in Brazil. While GAJOP and the Para´ Society for the Defense of Human Rights represent an older generation of human rights organizations that have made the transition to new political realities, a newer group of civil society/human rights organizations are
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concerned with increasing levels of violence whose causes are multiple: violence by police and prison personnel and the kinds of structural violence15 that contributes to involvement of children in organized drug-trafficking or leads them to live on the streets. A number of these organizations began in the 1990s in response to highly visible acts of police violence and the complex set of root causes that led to them. For example, Viva Rio in Rio de Janeiro began as a broad coalition of civil society actors (human rights organizations, the media, community associations, private sector actors) in response to the Candelaria and Viga´rio Geral massacres in 1993. Today Viva Rio is one of the country’s pioneering organizations in police training, conflict mediation and small arms control. The Sou da Paz organization in Sa˜o Paulo was founded in 1999 to combat violence through disarmament campaigns, monitoring public safety policies and encouraging exemplary police practices through annual awards to the Sa˜o Paulo Police. The AfroReggae Cultural Group of Rio de Janeiro, also formed in response to the Rio violence of 1993, has become internationally known for its path-breaking use of cultural activities (hip-hop, dance, circus, gaffiti) to create new options for at-risk youth and new paradigms for police-community relations. Most recently, they have embarked on a project carried out in the city of Belo Horizonte, capital of the State of Minas Gerais, to build bridges between low-income communities and the police through their musical and circus performances. An equally important set of civil society actors comes from the private sector: business and industrial groups and the media. Concerned about escalating rates of crime and violence for a variety of reasons, some community-minded, some selfserving, private sector actors have become directly involved with public safety issues following a worldwide trend of the last decade. To understand the potential benefits and challenges of private sector involvement, the Vera Institute of Justice, supported by the Ford Foundation, organized a meeting in Kenya in 2003 on public-private partnerships for police reform, raising such issues as encouraging constructive public-private partnerships while avoiding dangers of police collusion with business leaders and sharing the skills and resources of business so that the benefits of policing are extended to all segments of society (Bhanu & Stone, 2004). The Brazilian participant in that meeting, the Institute Sa˜o Paulo against Violence, a coalition of private sector, media and university personnel, has worked closely with Sa˜o Paulo police to introduce new administrative practices. Paulo Mesquita, representing the Institute at the Kenya meeting, reinforced the challenges of promoting private sector-police partnerships in highly unequal societies where the natural tendency is to provide more efficient police services to those segments of the community that can best afford to support the police. The challenge is for the private sector to be willing to approach crime and violence in a comprehensive way that benefits all sectors of society (Mesquita Neto, 2003).
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Donor Concerns: Challenges and Conclusions Many of the projects described above have become references throughout Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America for innovative training, applied public safety studies and pioneering efforts in violence reduction. Yet what should donors be concerned about in evaluating the effects of their investments in such projects? First is the issue of what is being evaluated in police training programmes. Should training programmes be judged on the basis of the ability of police to reduce crime when many studies have shown crime reduction to be based on a series of variables over which the police have little control? In localities where police violence has been especially high (Rio, Sa˜o Paulo, Para´), should a reduction in police violence or an increase in respect for human rights be the factor evaluated?16 Short-term refresher courses in human rights training, usually given to lower level police personnel, have relatively little impact on ingrained police practices.17 Can we assume that year-long comprehensive courses for mid-career officers will trickle-down positively to the street-cop level? A no less important concern for donors is the need to think comprehensively about promoting police accountability mechanisms, broadening the paradigm of oversight. Not only must we support the kinds of oversight agencies described above, we must also help create ways to make accountability both palatable and desired by the police (Stone, 2003). David Bayley has noted that police will always resist external oversight, but they will accept outside operational and management research that leads to better performance. Accountability has to be built into that performance (Bayley, 1995a). Additionally, we must build demand for accountability among those populations who suffer most from police abuse. Low-income and marginalized populations throughout Latin America frequently do not recognize that they have the right to protest police misconduct or are too fearful to do so. Creating a safe channel for this demand is one of the most basic building blocks for accountability. Finally, donors must be concerned with the continuity of successful programmes and policies after a particular set of public safety personnel has left office. To what extent will the commitments made at a particular political moment be honoured by successors and what is required for the institutionalization of reform polices. The activities described in each of the projects discussed are necessarily long-term in nature. Their real effects will be seen only in the next generation of police personnel. The partnerships created were done so in part to limit the effects of political discontinuities on positive reforms. The challenge of institutionalizing reforms to avoid discontinuities can happen only with the participation of civil society (universities, NGOs and the public at large). A secondary challenge is to convince the public that hard-line public safety policies do not contribute to effective policing. And, as the most positive projects show, public safety is not just a police issue. Other segments of the criminal justice system and social agencies concerned with education,
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health and income-generation are necessary partners in the larger effort to get the police to serve all citizens with efficacy and respect. Notes [1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
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[8]
[9]
In addition to the three police units mentioned, each state has a Polı´cia Florestal to patrol the vast tracks of woodlands/tropical forests. Many cities have a municipal police force, which traditionally guards city properties such as schools and carries out traffic details. The Federal Highway Police (Polı´cia Rodovia´ria) has an increasingly important role in the attempts to control inter-state drug and other contraband trafficking, auto theft, carjacking and robbery of truck cargo *all of which are on the rise. While many states now require a high school education for entry to the lower tier of the Military Police, many at that level have completed only primary education. The average national monthly wage for the beat-cop level is approximately US$250, with variations between US$500 for the Federal District (Brası´lia) and US$140 for the northeastern state of Piauı´. See, e.g., the chapter on Brazil by Marcus Melo in the World Bank publication Voices of the Poor: From Many Lands . Melo (2002: 366) notes that the high prevalence of violence and crime rank almost as high as the shortage and quality of employment as the most important issues for low-income populations. The most notable examples of extreme police violence are: the killing of 111 prisoners in the state penitentiary of Carandiru´ in Sa˜o Paulo, 1992; the killing of eight street children (the Candelaria massacre) and 21 residents in the low-income (favela) community of Viga´rio Geral, 1993; the killing of 18 members of the Landless Peasant Movement (MST) in the state of Para´, 1996; and the killing of favela residents in Sa˜o Paulo and Rio captured by amateur video operators, 1997 (that year also saw a series of police strikes throughout the country). Examples of ‘‘contradictory evolution’’ are creating an ombudsman’s office and women’s police stations (delegacias de mulher), but without adequate resources to function properly; and creating a unified and external office of the military and civil police internal affairs units (corregedoria), but appointing ‘‘old school’’ personnel with traditional mentalities to direct it. Similarly, with the introduction of human rights training into the police training curriculum, it became politically incorrect to say that human rights ‘‘got in the way’’ of policing activities, but the impact of the course content on daily procedures was limited. An exception is, once again, the state of Minas Gerais where women Military Police officials hold command positions and bring alternative visions to dealing with police management and community relations. Despite the World Bank’s concern with governance in recent years, and despite the findings of its own publication, Voices of the Poor (see Note 3 above), it has been reluctant to support specific projects on police reform and public safety (Ball 2001). It is interesting to note that thirty years ago the Ford Foundation provided start-up and sustaining support for the Police Foundation in Washington, DC, as a response to a crisis within the police in the United States. An internal Foundation document in 1987 noted that the Police Foundation was created ‘‘to stimulate movement away from centralized and quasimilitary models of police operation to more flexible neighborhood-based patrol of operations which are more responsive to varying community needs and values’’. It is precisely those closed and quasi-military models of police operation that funders are beginning to address today on a global scale. (For a history of Ford Foundation support for police reform, see Dash 1997.) Sociologist Claudio Beato, Director of the Center for Studies in Criminology and Public Safety of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, notes that institutional rigidities of the
Policing & Society
[10]
[11]
[12] [13]
[14]
[15]
[16]
[17]
35
Brazilian higher education system have been an obstacle to training and research in public policy in general and public safety in particular. The emphasis on theoretical concerns and resistance to applied and/or interdisciplinary social science research has limited public policy analysis to more traditional public administration approaches (Beato 2002). The Joa˜o Pinheiro Foundation, the public policy and research and training institute of the state of Minas Gerais and the Federal University of that state, through the pioneering research and teaching of the late sociologist Antonio Paixa˜o, were the country’s leaders in developing a training partnership with the Military Police of Minas Gerais. Course subjects, vastly different from what would be offered in a similar police academy course, are: Criminal Justice Systems and Public Order; State Violence in Brazilian Society; Social Control and Criminality in Rio de Janeiro; History and Democracy; Applied Criminology and Public Safety; Public Policies, Governmental Decisions and Public Safety; Culture, Deviant Behavior and Urban Workers in Brazilian Society; Research Methodology and Public Safety; Violence and Society; Social Issues and Public Safety; Media and Public Safety; Social Thought and Urban Organization; Police Theory; Management and Decisionmaking Processes; Organization and Culture (Lima 2002). For an analysis of oversight of the Civil Police in Bahia, see Lemos-Nelson (2002) and for a comprehensive analysis of police oversight mechanisms in Brazil, see Macaulay (2002). The project’s published study, Quem Vigias os Vigias? (Lemgruber et al. 2003) includes, in an appendix, summary articles by all five international participants, each discussing the accomplishments and challenges of their respective models. They include: Christopher Stone, Director, Vera Institute of Justice (New York); Sir Alistair Graham, Director, Police Complaints Authority (Great Britain); Antonio Rodrigues Maximiano, Inspector-General of Internal Administration (Portugal); Karen McKenzie, Executive Director, Independent Complaints Directorate (South Africa); Merrick Bobb, Special Counsel for the Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department and President, Police Assessment Resource Center (Los Angeles). Stone’s synthetic overview sets out the issues that are relevant to most police accountability contexts. The selection of a visible human rights activist to be Para´’s first ombudsperson by that state’s Secretary of Public Safety, himself a retired Civil Police officer, is indicative of the potential for collaboration (rare as it is) between the police and human rights communities. The Secretary, Paulo Sette Camara, was aware that he would have limited political space to institute a vigorous oversight mechanism. He adopted the strategy of creating a mechanism for civil society involvement to share the responsibility for oversight. The statewide Council for Public Safety includes as its members the Para´ Society for the Defense of Human Rights, the Center for the Defense of Children, the (black organization of Para´), as well as the various official public safety organs. Taking such an initiative is rare by a public safety official in Brazil (Interview with Paulo Sette Camara, 9 February 2004; Sette Camara 2002). Structural or institutionalized violence is defined here as conditions that cause or lead to highly unequal distribution of basic resources such as poor or non-existent health services and inadequate public education, mass transportation and urban services that result in high rates of chronic diseases, alcoholism, school leaving and similar characteristics of the urban underclass. These concerns are echoed in a presentation at the WOLA conference ‘‘Police Reform and the International Community: From Peace Processes to Democratic Governance’’ by Charles Call entitled ‘‘Contrasting Donor Approaches to Police Development Assistance’’ and reported in Neild and Ziegler (2002). The few evaluations of human rights training in Brazil note the difficulties in translating the training into actual changes in on-the-job performance *see, e.g., Rosalia Correa (1999), who studied the impact of training on lower-tier police in Bele´m, capital of the northern state of Para´.
36
E. Leeds
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