Cuidado, é “de menor”: adolescência e criminologia midiática no programa policialesco Cidade 190

Abstract

This monographic work aims to analyze the construction of social representations about adolescents in Ceará’s police TV program Cidade 190. From the concepts of media criminology (Zaffaroni, 2012) and stigmatization (Goffman, 2004), the programs that mentioned adolescents were investigated in two significant periods for public safety in the state. The first one, between November 5 and 9, 2018, is the period corresponding to the 3-year anniversary week of the Messejana’s Slaughter, a series of homicides committed by military police officers that occurred in the early hours of November 11 and 12, 2015, in Fortaleza. The second moment corresponds to the period between January 7 and 11, 2019, when the state of Ceará crossed a wave of violence that began on January 2 and resulted in 258 attacks against public and private buildings and transports. Based on the analysis of the contents of the selected corpus, the existence of a criminalization process of that social group was verified, which occurs through the silencing, the overexploitation of criminal cases in the police TV program, their decontextualization and the punitive and criminal approach given to the problem of public safety in general.