Involved With as Police Method / Envolvido-Com e Proximidade Punitiva: Selective Guardianship and Itinerant Controls in the Streets of Rio

Involved with crime (envolvido-com) is used in favelas and among the police in Rio de Janeiro. The term articulates a police epistemology anchored in a form of social common sense that has come to dominate discourses about violence in Rio and which informs a methodology of policing. It is thus ultimately rooted in beliefs that the police spring from the same moral, cultural, and geographic origins as populations they surveil, categorize, and punish. Police see themselves as having made a conscious choice to become a human living correctly—becoming a cop and not a bandit, having clawed their way out of the same physical and social milieu that produces bandits. This, they feel, earns them both human rights and a duty to employ their classificatory eye, formed by life at the margins, to take in who is and is not involved with crime, and who is deserving of death.