Policing in Brazil

Transcript of interview with Lieutenant Colonel Rodrigo Duton fro Rio de Janeiro

SKN

Hello everyone, this is Susanne Knabe-Nicol from Police Science Dr with an exclusive interview for the Police Science Dr Magazine. I’ve got a police officer from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and he’s going to speak to us about policing. First of all, he's going to introduce his background and his experience and his ambitions for what he's trying to achieve in his role in policing. So, let me welcome to the stage Rodrigo Duton. Can you please tell people about who you are and what you've done so far?

RD

I'm a Lieutenant Colonel from the Rio de Janeiro State military police. Although we have military in our name, we do not belong to the army, nor to the navy, nor to the air force, we are not armed forces, we are state-level military police and we work along with the civil police. There are two police forces in each Brazilian state. I'm a Lieutenant Colonel with 27 years in the force, I also worked in the special forces as a helicopter pilot and the past two years I was abroad studying a Master's degree at the University of Glasgow and started my international academic career.

SKN

You said you're in the military part of the police but it's not actually, so in the UK, military police would be within the military and they are policing their officers, but for you it's different. In Brazil you've got the civilian police and you've got the military police - what's the difference between those two exactly?

RD

The military police in Brazil is a state-level police force, our main activity is to patrol the streets on the beat, patrol 24/7, so we do the prevention, the preventative job is made by the military police in each Brazilian state. And complementing that is the civil police, another state-level police force, and they do the investigations, so once we arrest someone on the streets, we bring this person to the police station and then starts the other force’s job, we don't perform the whole cycle of police in Brazil at the state level. So, this is one of the hurdles we need to face because we need to integrate better our activities and each state has this challenge to put the two police forces to work together, cooperating with each other.

SKN

What are the challenges in that? It sounds very much like you guys are out on the street, you are patrolling, you are hands-on, you grab people and you're beat patrol, very much the eyes and ears, and then you bring someone in and it's the other part of policing, the civilian policing that does the investigation. So, does that work well, what doesn't work well and how do you think it should be improved?

RD

I must say this is really weird for many people outside Brazil but for us it's something very common because since the Federal Constitution in 1988, this is the model here in Brazil, and before that it was by this configuration in each state: 2 police forces. We are under the authority of the governor of the state, the challenge is to integrate our activities, but we have different cultures, we have different roles and we have different approaches, so each state of Brazil has the challenge to try to better integrate these two forces. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't, but it's part of the game for us and I saw outside of Brazil this sounds really weird because police forces usually perform the whole cycle of policing.  You have people on the streets and the same force has people doing the investigations, it is not the case at state level here in Brazil.

SKN

One of the reasons why I find this pretty interesting is in the UK, we have quite a few civilian roles that you can do within policing and they are also investigative, I was also an investigator in the police and I also was a civilian, I was never a sworn officer. At University, many of the students that come onto my courses, I teach on undergraduate criminology courses, many of them would like to become detectives, some of them are quite happy to also do the uniformed part of the training and be out on patrol and some are not. And I get that because I also wouldn't have minded being a detective and an investigator, but I wouldn't want to be out on patrol in uniform - I was in uniform when I was a Police Community Support Officer and absolutely hated it. If I could make a prediction, I could imagine that we would have more and more civilian roles in the back office dealing with the investigations, interviewing the suspects and doing some of the main part of the investigative work and I could imagine that the uniformed officers would be like your military police, they're going around, they're doing the arrests, they're doing the search warrants, they're doing the raids and bringing them to that other part of policing, which maybe in the future will be more and more civilianised, I'm not sure. You guys are already doing that in a way except both parts are police officers but you've got a group that is doing the grabbing and you've got another group that's doing the investigation. You did mention there were some challenges, what can be some of the challenges in how you guys work together?

RD

I can say that one of the main challenges in my opinion is when you need to investigate someone, you sometimes cannot tell everybody what we are doing, and in this case here in Brazil, as long as we are two different police forces, sometimes the lack of good communication is a problem for both sides, because the military police is doing the beat patrol and sometimes we don't know what's happening, what the other force is doing, is investigating so we had some problems in the past because of a lack of communication between the forces, this is a problem.

SKN

What is the training route for each of those two branches? What is a training like to become a police officer in one of those sections?

RD

As I told you I have 27 years in the military police, so we have the military training, and the civil police, the other state level police force in each state of Brazil, they have a completely different academy. Their police academy is not the same police academy that we join, so they have completely different training, disciplines, culture, approaches. The most important thing is trying to integrate these two police forces at the state level to work together and to produce better results, this is one of the biggest challenges faced in Brazil at the state level.

SKN

You also told me previously you've got a strong interest in evidence-based policing and you see it as your mission to bring evidence-based policing into your area, into the state of Rio De Janeiro. What are you hoping to achieve, what is it you would like to change?

RD

I believe evidence-based policing is a trending topic and we should follow this path because it is necessary for you to have strong evidence to support our decision-makers and once we have academia beside us it's really important, because we are not alone and we start in this process right now. This is something really new here in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro specifically. I don't see any initiative so far, so what we are trying to do is to bring academia closer to the police to work together and to investigate together, to study together, to discuss. I think this is the path that once we have better informed decisions based on academic evidence, it will help us a great deal, I believe.

SKN

Would you maybe like to give a quick definition of evidence-based policing and can you present some examples to those people who are not familiar with it?

RD

I would say that evidence-based policing is a way of informed decision-making based on evidence. And when I say evidence, not criminal evidence, it’s more academic evidence, research, the trials, you do studies in specific areas, so this informs decisions. We need to better help our decision-makers. Although the name is evidence, we are not talking about only criminal evidence but academic evidence, it should help a lot for us to take better decisions and to test and trial and to follow the academic path.

SKN

What kind of projects in the field of evidence-based policing would you like to see introduced in your area? What kind of evidence-based policing principles or findings would you hope to see in your area in Rio?

RD

We have a strong problem here concerning drug dealers, concerning illegal firearms, so we need to better investigate how these firearms, how drugs arrive here in Brazil, specifically in Rio de Janeiro, because we don't have international borders, we are on the coast, we are bordering the Atlantic Ocean, so borders in Brazil are far away from my home town, my home state, and we don't produce drugs, we don't have coca plantations, we don't produce firearms but we have a lot of problems with drugs and firearms here, so we need to study more in depth what's happening and take some actions based on informed academic decisions.



SKN

I was showing where on the map Rio is so as you can see it is right on the Atlantic, relatively far away from any of the borders. Rio is a city but it's also a state, you guys don't produce any that stuff, so where is it coming from? So, obviously the first step in evidence-based policing is understanding the problem - and what do you know so far about the problem, what is the extent of it?

RD

It's really a huge problem, because we have huge borders and our borders are porous. For you to have a rough idea, Brazil has 17,000 km of land borders and we share borders in Brazil with 10 different countries in South America, among these 10 we have Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, the three major producers of coca in the world. So, cocaine arrives pretty easily in Brazil, just in terms of comparison, the United States South border with Mexico has roughly 3,000 km of land borders and Brazil has 17,000 km of land borders with 10 different countries, and three major producers of coca, so just considering these numbers you can understand how huge is our challenge here in Brazil to control our borders, to avoid international trafficking, to counter international organised criminals is really huge problem.

SKN

Can you tell us a little bit about some of the unique issues that Rio has, you mentioned to me last time about slums, poverty, what is the specific make-up of Rio, maybe compared to the rest of Brazil?

RD

Slums here are places in our country where poor people live, the vast majority of people who live in slums are poor people, they are not criminals at all. It's a bad understanding if you believe people who live in favelas are criminals, of course not, 90% I believe are honest people, decent people, good people. But favelas are difficult places for the police to go inside, so it's a safe haven for criminals to hide themselves inside the favelas, this is a challenge for us because they use the geography of the favelas to hide themselves and to fight us when we go inside the favela to try to arrest them, so it's a very complex issue. Sometimes it's similar to criminal insurgency because they use many ways to bring the population on their side, fight against the state, the police forces. I believe the lack of actions made by the state in the past decades help people not to believe in police actions. So, sometimes police becomes part of the problem, but we are always part of the solution, but criminals are always the problem. So, inside the favela, this dynamic is really hard to deal with.

SKN

Can you expand a little bit on what you just said about that the police can be part of the problem, did you say that was because of the perceived inaction from the government in the favelas?

RD

Part of the population inside the favelas see the police as part of the problem because they accuse the police of being violent. But what happen is, when the police go inside of the favelas, the drug dealers, the criminals, they shoot at us, so what can you do when people are shooting at you? You need to go there and to arrest these people to stop the shooting, and sometimes, and many times, most of the time, we need to shoot back. So, the violence never ends but what can we do when you enter a favela and you will receive shootings from rifles and even anti-aircraft machine guns?

SKN

And what was your research about that you did for your studies in Glasgow, is there something you you've done in your research that you would like to bring to Brazilian policing?

RD

One of the topics I was researching was the origin of these organised criminal gangs in Brazil. And it's no coincidence that our major criminal gangs started in the prison system. In the 70s in Rio de Janeiro state, they started a very famous one called the Red Comando – Comando Vermelho, they started inside the prison system. And 20 years later, in the 90s started the PCC, the Primeiro Comando da Capital from São Paulo. Both criminal gangs are now International gangs, they send drugs worldwide and they started in the prisons. So, if we don't care about our prison system we are going to replicate this problem in the future over and over again.

SKN

Very complex issue, the criminal justice system how to deal with a very complex issue and I've got my views on this. Last question please, if you could wave a magic wand and make one change in policing, what would that be?

RD

f I had this power, I would try to make the state level police forces doing the whole cycle of policing. It's very strange for me as a researcher, I believe only Brazil has this system at the state level. We have the federal police at the federal level, the federal police perform the whole cycle of policing, they have people on the streets, they have people on the airports doing the ostensive job and they also investigate. But to change this it's in our Federal Constitution, so we can only change this if we change the Constitution. I don't believe this is the better model, to have two separate police forces at the state level doing different jobs but trying to reach the same the same results, this is strange for me.

SKN

That's quite interesting so you're suggesting a very fundamental change to merge the two forces and have one per state, right?

RD

Not necessarily one police force, but the cycle of policing - you do everything inside one same force like we have in the federal police, you can do the beat patrol, you can do the investigations inside the same force, you can have two, three or 10 police forces like you have in the United States, you can have many police forces, but each one doing the whole cycle should be a good idea. We need to investigate more and to study more about it to see how it could work.

SKN

You've got a very big task ahead of you to change the Constitution so you can change and hopefully improve the policing system but you know somebody's got to do it, just because the task is difficult doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. So thank you very much for your time today, Rodrigo