Police Deadly Force as Social Control: Jamaica, Brazil, and Argentina

Police Deadly Force as Social Control: Jamaica, Brazil, and Argentina

Description

This chapter compares the police use of deadly force in three culturally diverse urban settings-the island of Jamaica (chiefly in Kingston), the urban states of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in Brazil, and the City and Province of Buenos Aires in Argentina. Although they differ in size, in language, and in political traditions, they have a few notable characteristics in common. Under continuing conditions of debt and underdevelopment, their cities are swollen with poor people in relation to the countryside. They also share some political characteristics with the United States and Canada. They are also now liberal-democratic polities, with popularly elected officials and an aggressive free press, in which the police bear a roughly similar relation to the executive power. In each case the police bodies are protomilitary bureaucracies formally answerable to civilian law-enforcement officials, but with a large amount of customary discretion. In the United States, furthermore, the study of the use of force in common street confrontations is very familiar; it is often what we talk about when we talk about police “due process” problems. So much work has been done on deadly force in the United States that it is useful to try to apply some of the insights from that work to the problem in the Caribbean and Latin America. One of the most salient trends concerning deadly force in U.S. cities, according to a study by Lawrence Sherman and Ellen Cohn, is that the number of civilians killed by police officers dropped drastically in the years from 1971 to 1984, by about 50 percent. To give a dramatic instance, in New York City, killings of civilians dropped from a high of eighty-seven in 1971 to twelve in 1985. The trend appears to be the result of a policy decision made by police officials generally throughout the country since the 1970s. It was notoriously the case that the urban rebellions of the 1960s were frequently precipitated by police actions (not always of deadly force, to be sure) and that they were exacerbated by indiscriminate gunfire. The rebellious were not cowed but enraged by the excessive use of force. Furthermore, some police officials thought that there was no sufficient reason to shoot a person who was not a threat to the life of another. Each of these factors-societal interests combined with humane principle-have led not only to the abolition of the substantive rule justifying the shooting of any unarmed fleeing felon (Tennessee v. Garner, 471U.S.1 [1985]) but also to the radical reduction in the use of deadly force. This narrative tells us much about the use of deadly force in nonmilitary situations. When such force is broadly used, it reflects a policy of social control by violence. It is, moreover, in the last analysis a conscious policy; the senior officials have enough command over their subordinates to change the way they use their weapons. And the policy fails, finally, when it systematically provokes a violent response. It has ceased to be legitimate when it is perceived as begetting an endless round of violence. Studies of police deadly force were conducted in Jamaica in 1986 and in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in 1987 by the human rights monitoring group Americas Watch, through missions in which the author participated, and by the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales in Buenos Aires in 1987 and 1988. The initial reports for Jamaica and Brazil were based on statistics and cases collected through direct complaints and newspaper tallies made by local human rights groups; they have been buttressed in this article by official figures collected later by the Nucleo de Estudos da Violencia at the University of Sao Paulo. In Buenos Aires, the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS) had official statistics in addition to its own. These investigations show that there are proportionately more police homicides on the island of Jamaica, in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and in Buenos Aires than there are in the United States. The contrast with the United States raises the question of whether the more frequent use of deadly force is minimally legitimate in those societies and, if so, how the justification occurs. Moreover, insofar as the patterns of violence seem to be repeated from place to place, the similarity raises the question of whether they reflect common cultural and socioeconomic patterns. Blocking the way to this or any other comparison, either among the three countries or with the United States, is the explanation customarily given by all such governments for the use of deadly force. In liberal-democratic states such as these, it appears not to be politically acceptable for the police to admit killing a large number of people arbitrarily; they must act under the cloak of the rule of law. In all but a small fraction of cases, then, each of the governments claims that shootings of civilians were justified because the civilians were armed, and often because they shot first. Fortunately, studies conducted in the United States since 1975 in the course of the effort by police officials to reduce the number of shootings, whether justified or not, imply some methods for seeing roughly what is going on behind the statistics and the justifications. Yet these methods, even if they can rend the veil of rationalizations, only make it more difficult to understand why police violence prevails in these societies, as well as why both elites and the victim class find the level of violence acceptable or even tolerable. In this connection, I have tried to construct a comparative index (also very rough) of the “perceived threat of unrest,” based on earlier studies of Latin America. Finally, I have looked at public attitudes reflected directly in opinion as well as at indirect indicators such as incidences of vigilantism.

Source Publication

Vigilantism and the State in Modern Latin America: Essays on Extralegal Violence

Source Editors/Authors

Martha K. Huggins

Publication Date

1991

Police Deadly Force as Social Control: Jamaica, Brazil, and Argentina

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