Police Reform in Brazil

Throughout Latin America, public security is an increasingly important issue due to growing concerns regarding drug trafficking, organized crime, homicides, and violence. While much of the research on the topic focuses on citizens' support for hard-on-crime policing and politicians' subsequent enactment of such policies, scholars have not studied the responses of the innocent people who become unintended victims of these policies through government-sponsored violence. How do these people seek to hold the state accountable for the negative consequences of hard-on-crime policies? Which policies do they seek to advance? With which other civil society actors and policymakers do they ally and why? Most importantly, when are they successful in shaping public security policy? In this research project, I focus on the organized resistance against police brutality in Brazil's urban areas, especially in the poorer regions known as favelas.