A civilização do delegado

Police and politics, police and civilization, police and the city, police and labor, and police and criminality are the dyads that provide titles for the five central chapters of Marcelo Thadeu Quintanilha Martins's study, originally presented as a doctoral thesis at the University of São Paulo in 2012. The book's geographic and temporal purview, as its subtitle indicates, is the Brazilian state of São Paulo between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s, though its text takes the reader far from southeastern Brazil and some of its implications might be pushed past the time frame of the epilogue, which closes with a “despedida” (farewell) lingering into late 1937. Readers of Portuguese interested in state building, criminality, and the modern history of Brazil's most important provincial unit will find much to repay their attention.Marshaling a wide range of manuscript, periodical, and memorial sources, Martins demonstrates that the growth and professionalization of São Paulo's police was part of a modernizing, “civilizing” project undertaken by the state's rulers and imposed on its people. While that constatation will surprise almost no one, Martins makes other contributions that are well worth noting. In the first place, his transnational approach, which traces changes in policing, investigative work, and criminalization in São Paulo to global transfers of technologies and ideas, departs from traditional diffusionist understandings in which innovation irradiates exclusively from the North Atlantic countries. Instead, Martins identifies cases in which European colonies and the postcolonial Southern Cone were sites for the production of knowledge subsequently adopted in Brazil and elsewhere. Second, over the course of the book Martins provides miniature portraits of more than a dozen bacharéis de direito (law graduates) who made their careers as professional delegados de polícia (police delegates). While he may go too far when he calls these quick studies “microhistories” (p. 304), Martins is joined in this overstatement by the doctoral examiner who authored the book's front-flap blurb, and, more importantly, his biographical sketches do offer a more human understanding of police work as a career while also illustrating how particular men fashioned their professional lives and public personas, in the process shaping the institutions of which they were a part.It is difficult, probably impossible, to judge how much these contributions stemmed from Martins's experience of interviewing long-retired delegados and their families (the interviews are not listed in the bibliography or acknowledgments, nor are they consistently cited in the footnotes), but that these conversations yielded key insights is clear. To take only one example, though one of potentially broader, comparative interest, even as the professionalization of the police was carried out, with the entire force subject to the orders of São Paulo's president (the period's equivalent of governor), the machine politics headed by the state executive depended on local fraud and violence, to which some, but not all, delegates turned a blind eye. Why the virtuous cops, in an essentially corrupt system? One answer, provided by an informant identified only as “an experienced delegate,” is that when the presence of a relatively honest officer of the law in a given county became an inconvenience to local power holders, they would have to come to the president hat in hand to request the officer's transfer or dismissal, thus enhancing the executive's power (pp. 111–12).Martins's interest in individual human lives extends to the people who were the objects of police attention. Indeed, he shows as lively an interest in career criminals and other colorful types as in the police officials who are his focus. Readers of Joseph Love and Boris Fausto who would like to learn more about the São Paulo ward boss José Molinaro (1872–1928) or the murder-suicide in which the high-end escort Nenê Romano (1897–1923) met her end will find it here. The same goes for the storied burglar Gino Meneghetti (1888–1976), who named his sons after Spartacus and Lenin, seeing his own calling as a kindred contribution to the cause of social rebellion. Indeed, the sheer volume of local color and period detail that the book contains may provide something of interest to any graduate student considering a subject relating to early twentieth-century São Paulo, irrespective of her specific research topic.The book's title is taken from a short story by Mário de Andrade, in which the modernist jack-of-all-trades referred to the “civilization of the delegado” said to have dawned when career officers began to rein in hitherto-untamed local potentates. Martins uses the phrase ironically as well, seeing it as a “myth” crafted by contemporaries, including journalists. Given the symbiosis of professionalized law enforcement and police brutality through this period and beyond, and not only in Brazil, one might also refer to the civilization of the police as a South Asian law graduate is supposed to have referred to European civilization. It would be a good idea

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