Rio de Janeiro's UPPs: peace or authoritarianism?

INTERVIEW / LUIZ ANTONIO MACHADO DA SILVA

While the media waxes on the virtues of Rio de Janeiro’s Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora, (Pacifying Police Units) better known for its acronym UPP, placed in the most violent areas of Rio, many are less comfortable, concerned that the UPP may simply push crime elsewhere and that it allow the police to exert authoritarian control over the underprivileged; in other words, that the UPPs are a mere continuation of a history of violent security policies.

Not one for extremes, Sociologist Luiz Antonio Machado da Silva, professor at the Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro (Iuperj) and associate professor of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) prefers to analyze the phenomenon with the necessary detachment.

Machado believes that the UPP’s success may lead to a change in the standard practice of enforcing public order marked by police brutality. But he cautions that change will only be possible if the interventions are grounded in high quality debates that include the parties involved and appropriately trained police officers. In an exclusive interview to Comunidad Segura, Machado analyses potential benefits and risks that the UPPs can bring to the communities they serve at a local level, and to society in the larger sense. Machado’s view is informed by social sciences and democratic values.

Do you think the UPPs are responsible for dispersing and relocating crime, and changes in the type of offenses committed?

It may happen. It is very hard to provide an accurate measurement of the causes of new patterns of criminal activity, always the subject of technical debate. But there have been lots of rumors around this. The authorities themselves have issued public alerts so that criminals leave the areas prior to establishing the new UPP units. It is as if the authorities recognized that they are only trying to move criminal activities to other areas. On the other hand, while I don’t want to be cynical, I really think that even if the UPPs serve merely to push violent crime away from socially visible areas and further away from the big media, that in itself may be a good thing; it may release some of the tension and thus allow for more sober discussions of the public order enforcement policies and by so doing include the perspective of the camadas populares, or the underprivileged in the debate.

Does the increased feeling of personal security that results from violent areas being pacified help to reduce violent crime in the city as a whole?

It could help by releasing tension in social relations, both in the locations were the UPPs were established, and in the city as a whole. Today fear interferes profoundly in organized and open debates of public problems, and when discussions actually happen, it contaminates their content. Fear has been a terrible influence: it makes us see potential threats to physical integrity and property everywhere and in all our interactions. This in turn leads to spiraling demand for more repression and a generalized trend of self-isolation among the rich, leaving the camadas populares  underprivileged in a “squeeze”.  

The underprivileged groups fear not only violent crime but also the police that has fulfilled to perfection requests for more suppression and confinement of the poor. If the UPPs are able to improve their control of violent crime with less aggressive suppression, it is possible that they result in a more democratic political debate, one that leads society to show an interest in the discussion of a public security policy that is less reliant on war as its basic approach.

What are the virtues of the UPP units?

UPPs are very recent, and are not yet stable. It is still early to make an evaluation. But we can speculate on what is happening now. If we take it that the UPPs will turn out successful – which is a possibility but is by no means certain- it could mean change in the culture of the police forces, a culture that is suspicious of good intentions when it comes to the poor and is prone to arbitrary and violent acts. Any such change will depend on how successful corporations are in training UPP officers to be democratic. If we reach a point where communities resident's complaints are heard, which is a challenge - and residents themselves have a role to play in this- it will be both as a result of better trained officers and will also serve to boost officer training.

What are the weak points?

There are risks, and they are very grave. The UPPs exert huge control over the intimacy of residents, far beyond acceptable in an open and modern society like ours. Those of us who have heard of the Parques Proletários (housing projects made of wood erected during the Vargas government that were built with the intention of providing temporary housing for favela residents) have noted the similarities between the control exercised by the UPPs and those of the administration of the Parques Proletários, that created and enforced draconian regulations. This is already creating a lot of strain between residents and officers (as well as arrests for supposedly “desacato a autoridade” (resisting an officer). This is one of the key points in the process for stabilizing the UPPs , and one that will be decisive for the UPPs if they want to lay down roots in life among the locals, it is also one of the central points of its philosophy, inspired in the so called “proximity police”(neighborhood policing).

So if these police units take root, they could be threatening democracy?

The central issue for a virtuous UPP is perhaps, political. The program that is being conceived and established coincides with a period in which resident's associations have been considerably weakened. The resident’s associations were in the past, a political organization rooted in the urban population that truly represented them. Today the very success of the UPPs, along with their close relations with other services and social protection agencies, has focused a great deal of the requests, complaints and expectations of the local residents. This trend, still in its first stages, seems to me the biggest threat to UPP establishment. To have politics turn into an issue of law enforcement would kill the process of democratization and development of citizenship at the foundations of urban society.

Could you explain this weakening of local organizations a little better?

Resident's associations in these communities are being treated with suspicion, unwarranted but generalized suspicion that they may be colluding with criminals in their various localities, and therefore, protecting illegitimate interests. Their demands, for that reason, are not being given appropriate attention, which, evidently, makes them even less legitimate locally. The associations on the other hand are also threatened because they need to negotiate their independence with criminal groups, or at the very least they have to try and avoid them, since facing up to these criminal groups is tantamount to suicide. Since the public authorities give very little attention to local demands, resident leaders see themselves forced into “partnerships” with the government agencies or NGOs over which they have little or no say.

Since they regulate daily life in their respective communities, should we see the UPPs as a tool for cultural and political control over the camadas populares lower classes?

What we legally define as the “power of policing” (or the recourse to suppression to maintain public order) includes the use of force, but controlled force, force that is regulated and limited by judicial, political and administrative factors. The foundations of a public security policy that involves a proposed creation of a pacifying police unit is based on an understanding of the social relations, that even if unwittingly, deforms the legality of the power of the police, by militarizing the ideas involved in police practice. There can only be a pacifying agency in places where there is no peace, so that at the origins of the UPP project we have an assumption of urban war.

And why not describe the current situation as war?

Who is our enemy? It is a plain and undisputed fact that there is no civil war, nor is there a war against any other nation state. This Other, that is not only different from us, but a true enemy that destabilizes the peace of our daily lives and that frightens us, we can point to it as our domestic barbarians. The result is that we have the pacifying police to respond to twin needs: first, to suppress and remove barbarians through brute force and, at the same time, to convert them to civilization, that is, to our own values, interests and standards of sociability.

In an article published at the O Globo newspaper on March 20th, 2010, you stated that in practice the UPPs reinforce the split in the city. Could you explain why that is so?

Nobody has ever proposed the need for a UPP at areas used by the wealthy, such as Vieira Souto and Praia do Pepê, for example. The UPPs are a specific proposal for public security in areas of the city that could all come under the same denomination of “territories of poverty”, and whose most typical example are the favelas (shantytowns). These areas are the ones that, in the opinion of public security administrators, need a pacifying police. The other areas of the city are seen as peaceful, and already have normal policing.

I am not suggesting that this split is intentional. It is an example of what I call unintended consequences: one does something with a goal in mind, but whether that goal is met or not, other results are produced, many unforeseen.

Could you give us more detail?

Social life is very complex, so that it is impossible to evaluate all the meanings, implications and results of the intervention programs we conceive. Any public policy or individual decision is always subject to unforeseen developments and improvements. On the other hand, changes on patterns of sociability are slow, topical, and for that reason, it is very rare that they are identified while they are taking place. Creation and stabilization are opposites complementary to each other. I do not pretend to have analyzed this new venture of suppressive public order enforcement exhaustively. I just took some of the implicit dangers as parameters, along with some of its potentialities with respect to boosting or lowering of the urban segregation and the marginalization in our society.
You mentioned that you prefer to "apostar em pequenas mudanças cotidianas que afastem a exceção e desfaçam margens" (to deposit faith in incremental daily changes that undo the exceptions and work against marginalization).

Could you give us a few examples of these small changes that would be more efficient in lowering the violence?

Both the virtues and the shortcomings that were cited about the UPPs are indications of the relative trends with respect to daily changes that could alternatively worsen or undo the social and geographic marginalization in the city. The media has been excessively enthusiastic about the virtues of the UPPs, and I think this is just as dangerous a threat to the population as it is damaging to the very success of the program. The UPPs have not brought with them a discussion of public policy that is less violent; as if they constituted a mere continuation of previous practices and that the traditional arbitrariness and violence that is usually visited on the poor were untouchable.

In my view there is no doubt that this initiative is part of a general trend that penalizes great segments of the camadas populares, or the underprivileged; but, at the same time, it could mean a partial reversal of the brutality that characterizes the attempts to enforce public order. In sum, the UPPs bring with them a degree of innovation, but what direction it takes will depend on how long it lasts, the quality and nature of the participants and of the debate that eventually sets around it.

Translated by LHM