Reflexões sobre quebras estruturais e o efeito contágio na segurança cearense

Abstract

In recent years, the number of homicides has been growing across the country, and the state of Ceará is one of those with a high number of deaths. The objective of this work is to reflect on structural breaks or regime changes in a time series to observe whether there have been changes in the pattern of homicides, and verify the existence of a contagion effect for the states of the Northeast Region. For the methodology, time series were used to verify the existence of structural breaks, with the hypothesis of multiple breaks, graphs were created and used for visual analysis. After preparing the graphs, the moments in which the breaks occurred were observed, then an investigation was carried out into the events that occurred in the state that could have been the cause of these breaks. As a result, some measures adopted by the State government to reduce the number of homicides had the desired effect, even if only in the short term, and when analyzing the beginning of 2019, the reason for the low numbers found was not necessarily caused by the effect of some measure of the government nor the coming of national force. In the analysis of the contagion effect, the curves for the number of deaths in the states of the Northeast Region were observed and five of them showed similarities in behavior. By checking the period in which the attacks occurred in Ceará, it was possible to find facts that occurred in the state of Rio Grande do Norte that could have influenced these actions. It is important to highlight that new studies include more data for analysis, and that there is the possibility of evaluating causality and investigating the contagion effect in more depth.