The Conquering State and Police War-ification? / O Estado Conquistador e a Guerra-ficaçã de Policiamento?: Community Collective Alternatives to the Police and Penal Economies of Pacification

In a study that helped launch global debates around defunding/abolishing the police in 2020, this chapter, consisting of excerpts from an earlier master’s thesis, offers an analysis of the militarization and securitizing effect of the Police Pacification Units. Since its creation in 2008, the UPP has aimed to confront armed criminal groups in the favela, but it quickly came to represent a new model of intensified social control and repression in Rio. Despite the existence of a war on drugs and control of territories as a way to win the support of the whole city with an allusion to peace, there is no war in this process. Franco advocates a shift from police-centered models of governance toward public services models. Never previously translated into English, the thesis was published in Portuguese only three months before Franco’s assassination in 2018 by a death squad linked to the son of Jair Bolsonaro.