Enforcing Trust

Race, gender, and the policing of citizenship in Rio de Janeiro

Bibliographic Data

ID2263261
AuthorsMarta‐laura Haynes (0000-0003-1791-9876, Department of Anthropology John Jay College of Criminal Justice New York NY)
Year2023
Volume35
Issue1
Pages14-26
Publication date2023-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCity & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0893-0465 • E-ISSN: 1548-744X
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/ciso.12447
OpenAlexW4363674390
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited32

Policing in Rio de Janeiro is notorious for its brutality. For Unidades da Policía Pacificadora (UPP), a proximity policing program marked by less overt violence, the forging of trust became a strategy for reshaping the image of police and favelas. Yet, this policing model reproduced racial and gender bias that was persistent in broader Brazilian society where trust is coded as white and female while danger is coded as Black and male. In UPP, these ideologies manifested in using lighter-skinned and female officers to produce trust through whiteness and gender. For residents, pacification underscored a longstanding racial encoding of citizenship and trust as performances of whiteness and belonging. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2015 among the military police and in favelas, I examine in this article how Brazilian ideologies of race and gender intersect with local notions about trustworthiness and class. For the UPPs, enforcing trust was attached to the expectation of submission and uniformity-ultimately strengthening white supremacy. Through intimate ethnographic accounts of commanders' and residents' experiences, I show the nuanced ways trust intersects with local ideas about race and gender and how it served both as a vehicle for pacification and as a mode of citizenship

Crime Patterns and Interventions · Policing Practices and Perceptions · Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses

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