A atuação policial na perspectiva de jovens negros: vozes dos invisíveis

Abstract

This article is a synthesis of the research of the Professional Master's Program of Studies, Research and Training in Policies and Management of Public Security - PROGESP at the Federal University of Bahia which aimed to understand how representations and points of view of young blacks from popular neighborhoods Salvador / BA about a police activity. The theme selected was based on the current paradoxical situation, in which, on the one hand, Brazilian black youth have enjoyed prominence in legislative policy in the area of protection of human rights established by the Federal Constitution of 1988 and by ordinary laws, notably the Statute of Equality Racial Law (Law 12288/2010) and the Youth Statute (Law 12.852 / 2013), which determine that the State should treat young people as subjects of rights and should adopt special measures to prevent police violence incident to the black population, giving them the right to social and political participation, among others. On the other hand, the escalation of crime in Brazil in the last decades has served as the basis for a repressive way of thinking that dominates the Brazilian society, which in practice authorizes, in a veiled, and sometimes explicit, way the Police violence against the black youth of popular neighborhoods, undermining the rights envisaged in the legislation. In the face of this paradox, the research proposes a reversal of this way of thinking about social control, here called the "repressor metonymic", in order to understand the views of black youth about the police activity, thus widening the spectrum of the debate on public security to the detriment of too reducionist repressive perception. Therefore, a qualitative research was carried out consisting of a field work in which 6 (six) black youths from peripheral locations of Salvador / BA were interviewed. In the paper, the Theory Based on the Data of Glaser and Strauss was used as epistemological posture and methodological tool, so that the hypotheses were being constructed in successive levels of abstraction by coding the data extracted from the interviews. Thus, the coding generated 11 (eleven) categories of analysis, which were interrelated in search of a central category with explanatory capacity of the phenomena observed. The results showed that the interviewed youth do not have an a priori aversion against the police as an institution aimed at compliance with the law and the protection of society, but they criticize the praxis of police action, perceiving it in a predominantly negative way, ranging from an ambiguous view of the police (protection x threat) to the perception of the police as an absolute danger (oppressors, monsters). In addition, these young people are not aware of and / or do not believe in mechanisms to control abuses committed by police officers and are seen as vulnerable to discriminatory and aggressive approaches resulting from institutional racism, which presents a number of intensity variations in depending on personal and local circumstances.