Uniformed bandits: the rise and persistence of police criminality in Brazil

Thesis

The thesis examines the involvement of police officers in criminal governance in Brazil. Criminal groups run by Brazilian police, including death squads and militias, have been prominent providers of unlawful governance for several decades. Death squads and militias rule over neighbourhoods in the urban margins and participate in a variety of illicit trades, including drug-trafficking, gambling, and protection rackets. Despite their important role in politics and urban violence, police criminality is an understudied phenomenon in Brazil, as scholars prefer to study drug-trafficking organisations run by civilians. The thesis aims to address this lapse by examining the factors that explain the proliferation and persistence of police criminality. I employ a case study approach focused on death squads and militias in the city of Belém.

The study relies on in-depth fieldwork and its data sources include elite interviews, court depositions, media archives and government records. I argue that the proliferation and persistence of death squads and militias in Belém is indelibly tied to Brazil’s militaristic public security ecosystem. This ecosystem generates a supply of experts in extreme violence and sustains an institutional setting lacking in accountability mechanisms. Police officers take advantage of this institutional paradigm to disseminate illicit expertise throughout the law-enforcement hierarchy. Police criminality is also able to proliferate because police institutions engage in selective enforcement of illicit activities conducted by law-enforcement. In the process, police involved in death squads and militias are able to cultivate fearsome reputations, through which they can rule over their local turfs and invest in a variety of criminal markets. The study also finds that the infiltration of illicit police interests in electoral institutions and the onset of large and profitable illicit markets, including transnational drug-trafficking and clandestine transport, ensures that successive generations of police officers can continue to establish and lead criminal enterprises.

Authors: Funari, G

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-bdpgnke9x
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: policing; criminal governance; police violence; Brazil; organised crime; militias; urban violence
• Subjects: Urban Studies; Criminology; Latin American Studies; Sociology