A Polícia da Boa Vizinhança: as ações da polícia em contextos de conflito e a produção intersubjetiva de práticas policiais locais

Abstract

This dissertation is about how police practices are forged based on local situational contexts of Military Police (PM) ostensive patrolling in Ceará, Brazil. I analyze how the production of police practices are linked to the interactions and relationships maintained between police and population of neighborhoods considered “problematic”, in allusion to the large contingent of police occurrences in the place. Special attention is given to the conflictual network that permeates the execution of “streets patrol” by PMs. This dimension influences the production of reflective practices and moral maneuvers mediated ways of making, seeing and saying of the PMs and residents of “Zona de Policiamento Noir”, fictitious name adopted for the Area of Operations (AO) of the policing program “Ronda do Quarteirão” in the Juazeiro do Norte city. The police are investigated here under an ethnographic perspective, aiming to describe and analyze the relational dynamics of police and residents in social life based on the implication of the ostensive patrolling performed aboard one of the Policing Program Cars “Ronda do Quarteirão” in Juazeiro do Norte City, in everyday life in the place. This focus was built based on my participation on board the vehicle with the PMs of this program during the course of patrols in the area in the period 2011 to 2013. The data produced from the ethnography clarified the processes linked to the possibilities of relationships between police and residents, triggered by the police daily presence in the neighborhoods, converted into an area of operations, while performing patrols. There is, here, the opening to think about the ways police work from local specificities and how residents, from their contexts, request the police in their everyday plots performed through reports at police. The ethnography explores how these relationships are permeated by agonistic disputes, power relations reified by zones of shadows between legality and illegality building conflictive reciprocity between police and population.