Global Research -- Rio de Janeiro: Power, Public Security and New Democratic Potentials

Alison Coffey (EPIIC’09, Synaptic Scholar, A’11)

I arrived in Brazil in June 2009, still reveling in the buzz of EPIIC: Forging an Urban Future. After nine exhausting but fulfilling months with a reading list like no other and the joy of soaking up the wisdom of our guest speakers, I landed in a new country where I intended to learn the language and begin an equally intense exploration of the urban experience in Rio de Janeiro, particularly its favelas. After working as a research assistant for Dr. Janice Perlman, Director of the Mega-Cities Project and renowned scholar of urban inequality and favelas (as well as a Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award recipient), I arrived with ideas, doubts, and questions that over the year developed into research for my senior thesis.

My move to the pulsing metropolis of Rio de Janeiro (with a metro population of 12 million) was a shock in many ways, as I tried to navigate the city with my shaky Portuguese and reconcile my love for this new and welcoming place with the intense social stratification and discrimination that mark the city. When not in my urban geography courses at the university, I spent my days working on an NGO project to document an infrastructure-upgrading program in the city’s largest informal settlement. I passed afternoons in the winding streets and on the lajes (concrete slab rooftops) of the city’s favelas. I spoke with residents, ate avocado popsicles sold from windows in alleyways, and danced to the bailes funk, or street parties, that blast Brazil’s equivalent of hip-hop.

I had not wanted to arrive with preconceived notions of what my research would be – things are always different on the ground – so spent several months integrating into Brazilian life before defining a research topic. As my stay in Rio continued, the most salient issue for the favelas today became clear: the implementation of a new policing initiative designed to retake State control of favela territories that were under the control of drug factions. When my fall semester exchange at the Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro came to an end, I began four and a half months of full-time research on the topic for my thesis.

A pilot program to install a permanent police presence and provide social services to the communities, the Unidades de Policia Pacificadora (Pacification Police), or UPPs, has drawn high national and international praise for a new approach to policing that does not involve the same levels of lethality that characterize regular military police interventions in the favelas. Despite the retaking of these territories, disarmament of the traffic, and significant reductions in violence, deep tensions and concerns do remain.

My original research plan was to explore whether the UPPs represent a more democratic form of policing and whether these specialized units within the police force have the potential to scale up and influence the greater state of public security in Rio de Janeiro. Through participant-observation and interviews with favela leaders, residents, and state officials involved in the creation of the UPPs – and close collaboration with a few community leaders and graduate researchers to develop a responsible and ethically-sound research framework – I sought to understand the experience of favela residents with this new police intervention: changes in perceptions of community security, interactions with police in the community, and the effects of new services and formalization programs that accompany the UPP.

Through their responses and my own observations, it became clear that a more democratic approach to public security in the favelas must not only be characterized by an egalitarian distribution of policing and reductions in police violence, but must also seek collaboration and citizen participation as well as respect community autonomy in the political sphere. While a permanent police presence has succeeded in reestablishing state control and brought the homicide rate to zero in many favelas, a successful public security policy must go beyond policing to include investment in education, healthcare, and access to jobs. While the government employs a strong discourse of “liberating” the favelas from the dictatorship of the drug traffic, the UPPs themselves exhibit authoritarian tendencies as residents critical of the program have been criminalized, police units have shown themselves unwilling to engage in dialogue, and the police have informally superseded the local Residents Association and become the administrative mediators between the community and the state.

This fieldwork experience led to a consultancy with the World Bank’s department for Sustainable Development in Latin America and the Caribbean. In summer of 2010, I began work as a research assistant on a study evaluating resident perceptions of the UPPs and a favela upgrading program that will inform the work of the Rio’s State Secretary of Social Action and Human Rights – the state entity charged with coordinating the implementation of social services in the favelas where the state has regained control. This winter break, I will return to Rio to begin fieldwork with the World Bank team, carrying out interviews with female residents about the changes in their communities since the UPP installation. It is gratifying and humbling to see how the experiences emerging from the IGL can feed directly to those with the ability to put this knowledge into action and make mid-course corrections to the program. With the support of the Institute for Global Leadership’s Synaptic Scholars, EPIIC, and Empower programs, I am now beginning the consolidation of my fieldwork into a Senior Honors Thesis for the Latin American Studies and Urban Studies Departments.

The UPPs present a new promise for Rio de Janeiro to overcome its urban divides and the upcoming World Cup and Olympics have secured the drive to follow through with this initiative – with the current governor promising to bring UPPs to all favelas dominated by the traffic in the next four years. However, the city’s history of discontinuity in its policies for the urban poor has raised strong barriers in fostering trust within the favela. Funding is guaranteed only until 2016, and the deterioration of the program would lead to irreversible consequences for the city as a whole. Despite its successes, a sustainable solution to the city’s urban violence demands an integration of public security interventions with social policies that focus on sustainable livelihoods.  Most importantly, the current problems posed by the UPPs cannot be overlooked nor remain unaddressed. Voices from the favela must be actively incorporated into municipal and state decision-making. Right now the UPPs are in the spotlight, but they will truly be able to claim success when they no longer appear there.