Como a Polícia Militar de Alagoas enfrentava a criminalidade em Maceió durante a redemocratização? Uma etnografia documental de processos criminais (1997-2000)

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the manner in which the Military Police of Alagoas exercised its mandate of the police, specifically in the dimension of crime control, between the years 1997 and 2000, in the city of Maceió. The mandate of the police is the irreducible concept of the police, according to which the institution is solely responsible for handling any type of emergency in which force may have to be used. For this purpose, the study examined 162 criminal case files initiated through the actions of the Military Police during the specified period, in addition to some editions of the Gazeta de Alagoas newspaper, used as a supplementary source. The technique of documentary ethnography was employed in this genealogical research, which adopted the diachronic perspective of the history of the present. It proceeds from current problems—urban violence, penal selectivity, institutional victimization, and procedural authoritarianism—to trace their conditioning factors in the past. For the quantitative-descriptive analysis, in addition to an ethnographic diary, a research instrument was developed in google forms, linked to a spreadsheet, comprising 50 variables that ranged from the time of the in flagrante delicto arrest to the final court sentence. The chosen time frame encompasses a period of profound economic, political, and social crisis in the state of Alagoas, which acted as a catalyst that revealed the core of militarized policing practices. Furthermore, the 1990s represented Brazil's period of political transition, a moment when institutions were re-accommodating themselves within this new democratic framework. However, although the Federal Constitution of 1988 provided for an extensive and unprecedented list of fundamental rights, with a strong appeal to guaranteeing human dignity, it also galvanized within its articles an authoritarian conception of public security formulated during the Estado Novo and the military dictatorship. Thus, the hypotheses that guided this research were: i) militarized policing was selective, with a disproportionate focus on vulnerabilized people and territories; ii) the actions of the Alagoas Military Police reflected operational limitations derived from the state's economic crisis; iii) the criminal cases initiated by the actions of military police officers lacked evidentiary robustness; and iv) the Alagoas Judiciary, rather than curbing abuses, legitimized authoritarian police practices. The research findings confirm all the formulated hypotheses, showing that redemocratization did not break with the authoritarian legacy of public security. Institutional and operational patterns persisted, maintaining a repressive, militarized, and exclusionary model. The democratic rule of law operated selectively, varying according to the class, territory, and race of the individuals approached, and policing practices were reactive, improvised, and of low complexity. There was a predominance of confronting crimes of illegal firearm discharge and possession (125) compared to property crimes (19) and drug trafficking and use offenses (11). The majority of in flagrante delicto arrests were judicially ratify, even in the presence of a series of inconsistencies and nullities, and a significant portion of the cases were closed through the conditional suspension of prosecution (70) and the expiration of the statute of limitations on punitive action (40).