Rio de Janeiro’s favelas have been controlled by drug trafficking gangs since the 1980s; on the flip side are local militia—often composed of former police officers, prison guards and firefighters—who try to protect residents but also extort them for money and services. Police claim an awkward tertiary presence, one that has resulted in the world’s highest rate of police-on-civilian killings. There were 4,707 police killings and 17,392 homicides in Rio between 2005 and 2013, according to research spearheaded by Stanford political scientist Beatriz Magaloni.
“This type of violence hits the poor who live in urban settings the most; you cannot disassociate poverty from violence anymore,” Magaloni says. “That increasingly drove me to this problem.” In 2011, she took a group of international policy studies master’s students to Rio, where the city’s secretary of public security, José Mariano Beltrame, told them about an intriguing endeavor: the establishment of pacifying police units, an attempt to quell the violence and provide the favelas with more citizen-friendly policing. Beltrame needed to know: Do they work?
Leading an international research team, Magaloni stepped in to manage a multipronged evaluation of the effort. Through data analysis (her team manually geocoded every homicide and every fatal shooting by police in an eight-year span), a large survey of residents in the favelas, and a survey and focus groups with police officers, Magaloni says they’ve gained knowledge and intuition about how the pacifying units are working. Moreover, they’ve built relationships with cops who want to make things better.
“Part of our work has been learning how to get close,” she says.
There’s more to do. Residents are distrustful of police, and officer buy-in to the pacification program is mixed. So far, the researchers have developed a violence “scorecard” system for officers, which identifies individuals who could be removed from duty and offered training on peaceful approaches. They’re conducting a body camera program, enabling them to study—after the fact—violent interactions involving officers. Magaloni will assess preliminary results of that study this fall.
