Brazilian police procedural shows signs of strain

The police inquiry is a key that opens, and closes, the doors to criminal procedures in Brazil. A 2009 study of five major Brazilian cities – Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Recife, Brasília and Porto Alegre – found that criminal investigations as formalized in the shape of the police inquiry, privileges bureaucratic activity to the detriment of investigations.

Commenting on the study’s conclusions, sociologist Michel Misse (photo) from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and study coordinator, said investigations are overwhelmed by bureaucracy because police inquiries have three aims instead of merely two. Along with indications of probable authorship of the crime and material proof, factors that enter the report to provide grounds for penal action, the police inquiry also tries to determine guilt.

“All the police stations that took part in our study showed that there is an excessive amount of paperwork that goes in to compiling the inquiry report, while the inquiry report ought to take on a merely preliminary and administrative role”, Misse states in his introduction to the book “O Inquerito Policial no Brasil – uma pesquisa empírica,” that came out of the study. Misse also stresses that there is a worrying distance between police officers and captains as well as between police captains and prosecutors, despite the interdependent roles they have in establishing criminal proceedings.

Police inquiry, many actors in tandem

The criminal justice system in Brazil is based on the interaction of distinct forces that take on complimentary roles in preparing criminal proceedings. Criminal proceedings are launched in the justice system by the prosecutor’s office. The prosecutor’s office, or Ministério Público, will base its work on a police inquiry prepared beforehand by law enforcement.

Law enforcement in Brazil is broken down in basically two police forces, the military and the civil police force. Each police force is responsible for carrying out specific aspects of police work, and must, therefore, work in tandem. The military police force is in charge of maintaining public order, and policing streets and the civil police force in charge of police investigations. Police inquiries are compiled by the latter but must necessarily take into account the work carried out by the military police force.

A jigsaw puzzle of competences in police work

If the military police come across a criminal offense they must take offender and victim to a police station run by the civil police to file a complaint. If the military police finds a body, they must summon peritos, crime scene investigators, who are also under the civil police force. The civil police force will launch a police inquiry into the facts, and compose a report that it will hand over to the prosecutor’s office, the Ministério Público. But criminal proceedings only begin in the justice system when the prosecutors accept the data in a police inquiry and use it to officially open a criminal investigation.

“We found in our study, that there is a split between the police investigation and the inquiry report, the latter as a procedural that apprehends the investigation from a political perspective,” said the professor at a seminar held before the book launch, the Seminário International  de Violência e Democracia na América Latina, held the July 1st, at the Science and Culture Forum at UFRJ in Rio.

Specialists headed the study in each of the Brazilian five states: Misse coordinated the study in Rio, Artur Trindade Costa of the University of Brasília in the Federal District (DF);  Rodrigo Ghiringhelli de Azevedo from PUC-RS in Rio Grande do Sul; José Luiz Ratton of the Pernambuco Federal University in Pernambuco, and in Minas Gerais, Joana Vargas, at the time a member of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and currently at UFRJ.

The study was born out of a suggestion by the National Federation of Federal Police Officers (Fenapef) that is currently campaigning to reevaluate the role of the police inquiry and looked for scientific data to subsidize its position or provide proof of the need to revise the inquiry.

Fenapef president Marcos Vinício de Souza Wink believes the study confirmed his organization’s view of the inquiry as a problematic tool, and that it must change so that police investigations become faster and more efficient. Wink states that the police inquiry “generates bureaucracy, contradictions between police and judicial opinions, is subject to political meddling, results in a low rate of crime solving and a “back and forth” of paperwork between the police and the prosecution (Ministério Público).”

Inquiry ping-pongs back and forth, and needless paperwork

During the seminar, Michel Misse stated that the researchers did not approach the police inquiry from the point of view of discussions of law, doctrine or politics. Researchers instead carried out an ethnographic study of the civil police stations in the five states.

“We observed work at the police stations and analyzed statistical data from data banks such as the one that belongs to the Rio de Janeiro prosecution. We were the first to access the RJ Ministério Público data bank,” said Misse. Difficulties in securing the appropriate authorization led researchers to abandon plans of including the federal police in the study.  

Paulo Roberto Poloni, Fenapef vice-president stated that in federal police inquiries bureaucracy is so prevalent, that approximately 60% of the paperwork is empty of content.

Poloni stated that the back and forth between the police and the prosecution generates an immense quantity of paper. “Computers made it easier to produce documents, but they also had the perverse effect of increasing them that resulted in lengthy autos full of unnecessary pages that have no value as far as proof is concerned, while evidence remains hidden away in the middle of reams of paper,” said Poloni.

In Poloni’s view, the goal of bureaucracy in inquiries is an attempt to delay the start of criminal proceedings. “The components of an inquiry that pertain to evidence become diluted over time, and generate conditions that favor absolution, light sentencing or simply discontinuing the case. The bureaucratic police inquiry contributes to slowing down pace of the criminal justice system, inquiries have failed to evolve while crime hasn’t,” said Poloni. Poloni states that the fact that inquiries are many and convictions are few is proof of the system’s inefficiency.

Police captain Sergio Simões Caldas, head of the Rio de Janeiro Police Captain’s Union (Sindepol-RJ, Sindicato dos Delegados de Polícia do Estado do Rio de Janeiro) concedes that there is judicial police work that fails to convert documentation from mere formalities to effective substantial evidence.

But he adds that the inquiry offers a set of key pieces that the prosecution needs to ground accusations and inform the criminal process. Caldas also notes that inquiries are a universal procedure used throughout Brazil. In his view, the problems with inquiries would be solved by adopting measures to increase its quality and speed.

A fractured career

Another problem shared by all the cities cited in the study, noted by Michel Misse is the fact criminal offenses vastly outnumber the quantity of officers available to handle them and perform investigations. This fact is further aggravated by the disconnect between civil police investigations and the military police force’s work in crime prevention.

Citing homicide as an example, Misse states problems are further complicated by the fact the military police force does not routinely preserve the crime scene, while it is invariably the first to arrive. Not only does the military police lack training in investigation, they are barred from conducting preliminary investigations that are decisive in solving homicides and other offenses. On the other hand, the best crime solving indices come out of flagrantes, that is, offenses involving flagrante delicto, more often a result of the work of military police than civil police force.

“If our police officers participated in all aspects of policing this problem could be solved, even if we chose to keep both corporations separate,” said Misse.

Misse also notes there is a clash of know-hows between investigative police officers in the civil police and their hierarchical superiors, the police captains, - the latter join the force directly to the post of police captain, or delegado, after passing entrance examinations, and typically hold a law degree. “We have noted there is a conflict of interest between the two levels of hierarchy, for lack of a unified career in the police force. This means we don’ t have a career that rewards experienced and devoted officers by conferring them with greater authority in the police force, as happens in other countries,” said Misse. 

Director of Civil Police Union disagrees

Commissioner Franklin Bertholdo Vieira however, diretor of the Civil Police Officers’s Union of Rio de Janeiro, disagrees. He sees no intrinsic conflict, “Police authority has always appreciated the work of those lower down”, Vieira said. In his view all the civil police corps work together towards a common goal. “The police heads exact diligence but they also allow for freedom to work,” said the commissioner, who works at the Homicide Precinct. In his view the work of the civil police force has been improving with the launching of delegacias legais, police stations that interface with the judicial system, and the Dedic- Programa de Delegacias de Dedicação ao Cidadão, or Citizen Policy Station Program.

Commissioner Vieira believes the police inquiries are weak in terms of their productivity because of a lack of material resources and  training of investigative officers. In his view resources were diverted away from the civil police to the military police force to combat and suppress crime. “It is easier and cheaper to invest in the military police,” said Bertholdo Vieira.

Study co-author Joana Vargas in turn reserved criticism of the prosecutor’s office during the seminar. “The Ministério Público sits in the confortable position of either accepting inquiries or sending them back to police captains citing insufficient evidence, with new deadlines. Because they need to fulfill these legal deadlines, failed inquiries are put in no man’s land for months, and often years, until they end up being discontinued. This was quite clear in our study.” 
Inquiries in other countries

The book discusses police inquiries dedicating a chapter to each state. The second half of the book discusses criminal investigations in three countries, Argentina, Spain and France. More information available at the Booklink portal.

Translated by Lis Horta Moriconi