POLICING AND SOCIETY THAT DESERVE EACH OTHER

“A politically active student generation doesn’t need father figures to confront a society which daily reveals its inequality, injustice, cruelty and general destructiveness. Youth have experienced and seen it all with their own eyes. A permanent feature of such a society is fascism, defeated military but with great potential for repetition. The same as far as racism, sexism, generalised insecurity, environmental pollution, degradation of work, degradation of education, and other ignominies are concerned” (Herbert Marcuse, 1976)

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For more than a year Brazilian students have occupied their schools to keep them open and to show frustration over the entire school system. They organised classes and workshops, cooked for one another, and handled routine maintenance on the buildings they took over. Quite differently, the police officers who occupied the assembly chamber of Rio de Janeiro last month wrecked windows, doors and offices. None of them was prosecuted and their outrageous behaviour did not shy police away from accepting a new ‘mission’, bestowed on them by government: to give ‘citizenship classes’ to high school students.

In Brazil’s totalitarian democracy, to have police officers lecturing dos and don’ts to youngsters is just another chapter of the ‘war against schools’ carried out since November 2015 by politicians, the army and the criminal justice system. They are determined to ‘fight to the end’ the most militant among secondary students – known as ‘Secundas’ – and demoralize them. ‘Preventive’ technics include searching and seizure youth at gun point in school premises and outside. In more than one occasion male officers stripped naked and photographed girls in police stations. Supportive parents and teachers endure intense harassment by school principals and have their homes and property raided by gangs of hoodlums.

Last week, justice Alfredo Attié, Jr. told the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in Washington, that he heard of a sixteen-year old Secunda followed up, kidnapped, beaten-up, tortured and left for dead by thugs in a secluded room of a subway station. Similar cases have been reported.

The authorities’ intention is to criminalise the students’ struggle for free education. The Secundas are the legitimate inheritors of their colleagues who in 2013 and 2014 started in Brazil the fight against corruption and for good-quality public transportation, education and health. Whilst society was mesmerized with soccer ‘up to FIFA standards’, students were fighting with courage and devotion against police abuse, ridiculous tax exemptions and outrageous government expending in building stadiums and other structures. They were brutally repressed by Polícia Militar, a ‘death wish’ force whose extinction was demanded in 2012 by the UN Council of Human Rights, on account of the slaying of thousands of, mostly innocent, people.

During the 2013-2014 demonstrations, PM, the Tonton Macoutes of Brazilian state governors assaulted non-violent crowds with truncheons, rubber bullets and pepper spray. On one occasion anti-riot squads sprayed tear gas straight in the eyes of a wounded youth held in custody. “A typical act of torture”, said Carlos Weis, a public defender, documented by the media but never punished nor admitted by the state.

That and other atrocities – such as those caused by rubber bullets: the blinding of Sergio Silva, a photographer, and the grievous injures incurred by journalist Giuliana Vallone – were candidly justified by the state governor of Sao Paulo. To him, is was just “police prevention” of potentially “more dangerous” incidents involving youth and “sixty thousand people going to watch the opening of the World Cup” (El País, jun. 13, 2014). Sixty thousand soccer supporters for whom the impact of the tournament on Brazilian public services meant very little, so it was assumed that they were definitely against student demonstrations (Tribuna do Norte, jun. 1, 2014).

In a country were citizens are granted the right to vote but not to engage in policymaking, freedom of thinking and doing differently is absolutely risky and of no importance compared to the ‘right’ of going to a soccer match. Celebrities thought as much. Former soccer player Pele, for example, said that since “there was no time to check how public money was spent, Brazilians would better use earnings from tourism to recover what had been stolen, forget about demonstrations and support our team”. Another soccer star, Ronaldo, attempted to reduce to the smallest possible the students’ demands for better public services – “no one can make a World Cup with hospitals".

Not surprisingly, points of view on the media were not different. “The streets belong to nobody because they belong to all”. Thus, it is not advisable to confer on students, a “pressure group”, “the right to impose their agenda on the whole society” – thus, “society will necessarily loose with that form of expressing discontent [i.e., street demonstrations]” (Veja Magazine, jan. 27, 2014).

Using soccer as an excuse, Brazilian government and public opinion decided that they didn’t know how to handle student protests. So, the answer was to let the least competent, the police, to handle the matter typically. Which means, refusing to negotiate and grossly violating basic freedoms of movement, of fair treatment, of express opinions, and of being protected by law.

2014 marked the beginning of another sinister period in Brazilian history after the military dictatorship: a police state were security forces permanently run over constitutional freedoms and betray their very reason to be: to protect citizens and their capacity to exercise their rights. Let alone the remote possibility of Brazilian police to adopt a truly modern perspective of security and law enforcement: (1) the objective is not to ‘win’ nor ‘punish’ but to make social control of conflicts viable; (2) there are no ‘enemies’ to exterminate but prolonged sorts of strife that threaten community development and society’s wellbeing; (3) the required minimum of violence must be employed to optimise results with social peace in perspective; and (4) to interfere using the maximum of restrain and utmost tolerance.
 

Brazilian students were completely alone in their early struggle against corruption, except for the support of teachers, the homeless, indigenous people, and street vendors, all of them as discriminated as the students. Together, they protested against an international competition – of sad notoriety since the day Brazil was shamefully defeated by the German national team. Only then, looking for anyone to punish for its own frustrations, the rest of society engaged on a spurious ‘war against corruption’. A conflict motivated mainly be hatred and petty political interests which has destabilised the country’s institutions, by violently excommunicating nearly all true ‘forms of expressing discontent’, mainly of students.