Policial youtuber: uma análise de vídeos publicados no Youtube por integrantes da Polícia Militar de Alagoas à luz dos conceitos de mandato policial e populismo penal

Abstract

This final paper assessed the phenomenon of police channels on Brazilian Youtube, based on the concepts of police mandate and penal populism. These publicly accessible profiles are created and managed by police officers who record and display part of their work routines: patrols, frisks, arrests etc. In them, police officers show their understandings and narratives about the policing developed, maintaining direct interaction with the audience-spectator, through comments on videos on the platform and other social medias. These channels were cataloged using the YouTube Data Tools software, available online and free of charge. First, the emergence of these channels is addressed, drawing a quantitative panorama through which the prominence that the State of Alagoas holds, followed by State of São Paulo, in the national outlook of these profiles. Furthermore, it was noticed a tendency to contain these pages by police corporations and, at the same time, the possibility that the latter adopt this type of content on their official channels, as a public relations strategy, based on the movement to implement body-worn cameras mandatory for police use. Then, based on the established theoretical framework, the content of 150 videos from the 3 largest channels in Alagoas were observed, focusing on the way in which policing is understood and the interaction between police officers and spectators. In these posts, aimed at entertainment and monetization, the raw reality of policing is interpreted and presented as a war on crime mandate, as well as placed at the mercy of the dynamics of populist penal discourse.