The voices of the police indicate a gradual process of transformation in the relations between favela communities and the police, which is driven by top-down policy but mainly by bottom-up practices of dialogue and communication at the sharp end of police work in the favelas. This is supported by meetings and joint programmes being developed by the police and the community, as well as by inter-sectorial State policies that are seeking a novel intervention in favela territories.
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Police interviewees unanimously point to awareness and acknowledgement of prejudices and negative perceptions as central for the process of change.
“It is a question of culture, a question of the violence that is passed on to the police, what is expected of us. We are the ones going in as aggressors of these communities, so no doubt this is a factor that makes it very hard, because culture impregnates you. This weight has been there for a long time, so it is a great difficulty, repression is in people’s heads.
How am I going to be there together with a favela person?
But we need to explain, to get that policeman to see. That is why we want to have younger policemen serving in these communities. Because they will have been trained with this new conceptions of communication. Community police don’t carry this burden.”
(Military Police commander, headquarters)
“I am going to be very frank. I believe that the majority of us have prejudices. It was practically impossible to imagine a good conviviality between police and favela for a long time.
When we started this work, we did not have the dimension we have today…. We have gone through a lot of problems that are cultural, of relations, not exactly related to crime… People used to see the military police as enemies, even if they had nothing to do with crime. Things changed fast because we did not come alone, we came with other State sectors aiming to improve things.”
(UPP commander, community-based)
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Another important aspect is the gradual and developmental nature of the process, which requires time, understanding of the resistance to change, and most importantly, understanding of the culture and frame of mind of the community.
“In the first months it was stone-hard. Police walked through the alleys and it was urine in a bag, even faeces, stones, and bricks in the head. So, how could we handle this? In the same way? To shoot? No. We needed to get there and talk, and that is what we started to do. We created the ‘getting closer’ task force.
And things started to work. Slowly, they started to change.”
(UPP commander, community-based)
Equally important for the interviewees is the emphasis on processes of contact and interaction, which are also producing transformations inside the police. Contact and interaction are processes challenging the historical logic of separation between soldier and society, inherited from the institutional culture of the Brazilian army. The internal prejudice against the UPPs refers to its search for community and opposition to the logic of war, which is now precisely seen as the source of its effectiveness. Usually nicknamed as ‘duck’ (pato), the UPP policeman is now becoming a ‘swan’ (cisne) because he can deploy different techniques and master different skills:
“The Army failing in Alemao [Complexo do Alemao, a favela of Rio]. We need to get there as soon as possible. Look, how to talk to a guy from the Army, totally formal, that he needs to interact with the community, to play, to dance capoeira, to fly kites with the boys? Impossible… The logic is separation. I have to separate. It is as if it were contagious, polluted. If I mix too much I get contaminated… We, in the UPPs, don’t even wait for the community or the children to ask us to play, to
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fly kites with the boys… The commander in Cantagalo, he is a percussionist. They do not invite, and he goes there and play.
This is the magic of interaction. This is the magic.”
(UPP commander, headquarters)
“Unfortunately, an UPP policeman, when in contact with other sectors of the police, he will frequently hear: ‘This guy is UPP, he does not shoot, he does not arrest.’ As if our work were to shoot and to arrest… It is totally the opposite, as an UPP you need to be smart, you are community police, you need to anticipate the problem, to be proactive and to use your brain.”
(UPP commander, headquarters)
“UPP is the great avenue for us to transform the police. Why?
I have in an ex-skull, an ex-BOPE4 my team. He was like a robot, and I said: ‘Now my friend, the game is different, let’s go?’ ‘Let’s go’, he said. One day, he came here and the guy was crying, all sentiment [laughs]: ‘Colonel, I had never had a hug from people in the community, only bullets’…”
(UPP commander, headquarters)
In these extracts we can observe that the UPPs and the new relations they foster are producing a new self-perception for the policemen themselves, not only for the community. There are many anecdotes of ‘humanisation’, of rediscovering that there is a human dimension in themselves and in their work. This allows a new sense of pride and worth; it changes identities and practices both inside and outside the police.
4BOPE stands for Special Police Operations Battalion (Batalhao de Operacoes Policiais Especiais). ‘Skull’ (caveira) is the nickname given to a BOPE member.