Policing in Rio de Janeiro

In this chapter I describe how I gained access to the military police and examines the institutional and political dynamics of the pacification project. I argue that the tensions between attempts to modernize the police and the perpetuation of policing as warfare express ongoing processes of state transformation in Brazil. By bringing attention to these tensions we can gain a better understanding of how and why institutional reform processes fail, as well as how the police’s role in the emergence and formation of authoritarian state projects. While the pacification was a complex public security intervention shaped by different interests and objectives across multiple levels of scale, I argue that it is best understood as an attempt to capture the war machine dynamics operating across Rio’s urban landscape. That is, as a modernizing project that sought to expand bureaucratic state control both within the Military Police as well as the favelas.