key: cord-1008372-co0dxz5g
authors: Durão, Susana; Silva, Evandro Cruz; de Souza, Wellynton Samuel Oliveira
title: Covid‐19, Policing and (Anti)Fascism in Brazil
date: 2021-01-18
journal: City Soc (Wash)
DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12366
sha: 569f581d8f35666fed3c8e7cb3ba412c9dee8091
doc_id: 1008372
cord_uid: co0dxz5g

nan

© 2020 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI:10.1111/ciso.12366.

In Brazil, the political management of the pandemic has been violent since day one, and instead of reorienting the course of government, it revealed its necropolitical tendency based on denial. The philosopher Marcos Nobre (2020) states that the arrival of Covid-19 has only accentuated the Bolsonaro government's defining trait: it operates according to logics of war, in which the political adversary is cast as an enemy to be exterminated. Or, as Miriam Leitão, journalist and op-ed writer at Globo, notes, he acts in a persecutory delirium. In this war effort, the president has several allies, many of them in the armed forces and in the police agencies.

This threatening policy and the flirtation with the police forces was already apparent back in 2018, before the elections. Since his candidacy for president, the security forces have been a pillar of support for Bolsonaro, who has acted as a kind of union leader of the low ranks of the police forces throughout his political career. During the 2018 election, Bolsonaro promoted the increase of successful police candidacies to the state, federal and state legislative powers. The presence of military police officers in government positions is notorious, even if not as organized as high-ranking military personnel, which led to the idea that they are a "military party". In the last eight electoral cycles some 7000 police officers ran for legislative and executive seats -though only a small percentage was successful (only 34 were elected). Police began to gain space in the national political arena since 2018. Statistics reveal that 1 in 58 police officers have (mostly right or far-right) political aspirations. This state of affairs has led some specialists, such as Renato Sérgio de Lima (president of the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública), to warn of the eminent danger of a democratic rupture at the hands of police officers.

With authoritarian processes underway, police lethality -in which Brazil is a champion -does not stop. "The police that kills and dies the most in the world", has become the mantra of Amnesty International and Brazilian Humans Rights. Between 2017 and 2018, police killings increased by 19.6% in Brazil, despite a reduction in homicides, robberies, and property crimes. However, the situation is worse when the number of police deaths is seen as a proportion of the total number of intentional violent deaths. São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro lead these statistics: in 2018, 33.1% and 28.1% (respectively) of the total number of intentional violent deaths were at the hands of police.

In the state of Rio de Janeiro, deaths during police interventions increased by 13% while in the state São Paulo the number rose by 53% during March, April, and May 2020, months marked by the pandemic and stay-at-home orders. As such, we can surely say that we are looking at the expansion of Brazil's necropolitics (Mbembe 2003) . Despite isolation and quarantine, and with mobility severely restricted, black people and poor citizens in general are still being shot and killed by their police. The political logics that produce deaths by Covid-19 and by police interventions in Brazil seem more and more aligned. The profiles of the victims and the places most affected are the same: young black and poor people, residents of urban peripheries. The harm caused by the advent of the new coronavirus proves that the main cities of Brazil quickly adapted to the unequal distribution of the violence produced by the governments. In cities across the world -from Brazil to the United States to Kenya (Kimari 2020)-there seems to be a constant relationship between violence caused by the new coronavirus and violence produced by the security apparatus, leading to joint protests against both.

Both police violence and virus violence seem to be decisive vectors for governments that create very unequal fields of possibility of death among postcolonial populations (Mbembe 1993) .

By June 2020, that same police violence gave birth to a new wave of civilian protests in Brazil (as in the United States following the killing of George Floyd by police officers), which despite Covid-19 energized the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Back in 2013, the international activist movement centered its attention on the African-American community, denouncing once more the violence towards Black people. In Brazil, the deep connection between Bolsonaro and the police, and the increase in electoral candidacies of members of the security forces, provide a specific tone to the political debate on violence.

Truth be told, police violence has always been at the center of Brazilian black movements' agendas, protests in Brazil. Inspired by Foucault's preface to Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 1961) , and its critical influence in the Brazilian academy, the movement defines fascism not merely as a state form, but as a way of life that had been taking shape in the country before Bolsonaro's election. Its members consider fascism to be a socially and institutionally embedded, lethally violent perspective based on the war on drugs that started to appear inside the police forces, but also as a signal of a wider trend in society. According to them, the shape of fascism is not produced from top to bottom; rather, it is identified in the daily growth of citizens who exalt the language and logic of war and reinforce a vision of violence as a way to solve social problems, even if it means exterminating part of the poorer black population in Brazil. Statistics show that black people are 75.4% of those killed by the police.

Despite the simultaneity of the protests, in the US racial inequality has remained at the heart of the disputes, while in Brazil they also voice dissatisfaction with government responses to the pandemic, and reflect an expansion into a general critique of a right-wing extremist government. The police institutions are divided. Despite being permeated by many who feel well represented by those authoritarian governments, many other police officers do not accept the government's actions at face value but also question what they see. belligerent aesthetic (Ghertner et al. 2020) . In Brazil, we can watch this process gaining momentum, and in one of those disputes lies the antifascist police movement.

The "antifascist police officers" movement is a network mostly composed of a large number of so- We do not claim to speak on behalf of this heterogeneous movement, nor do we mean to suggest that the movement is the only form of reflection or debate on democracy within the police -there are various other organized police groups, focusing on LGBT, feminism and racial issues. It is also important to remember that during the military dictatorship there also was some opposition from within the police and armed forces to the regime, and some officers were victims of actual persecution. Here, we outline some of the philosophical and practical orientations that the contemporary antifascist police officers profess.

They are policemen and policewomen who see policing as work (and not as a mission) and police officers as workers (and not as missionaries); who differentiate between antifascism and antifascists, emphasizing their position against ideas and ideals rather than against people; who want to build a two-way dialogue between police organizations and the larger society, through police democratization support groups; who want to participate in much needed structural changes in the architecture of the public security system; and who believe in the creation of inter-and trans-agency dialogue platforms, breaking free from the Brazilian paradigms that organize the most obscure solidarities and complicities between police subpowers.

© 2020 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI:10.1111/ciso.12366.

The all-or-nothing argument for abolishing the police is a weak one, as its proposed solutions disregard historical processes. What the anti-fascism police movement evidences is that, even in the worst global scenario in terms of an anti-democratic government and police forces unable to deal with a pandemic, we find a broad range of political and social reactions. As Beatrice Jauregui's research shows, police worker politics and their legitimacy in the Global South are co-configured with processes of democratization, decolonization, and development, and despite locally specific fights and movements, police worker politics are a global phenomenon (Jauregui 2018; Jauregui, forthcoming) . To tell a police officer that they must cease to be a police officer in order to be coherent within their own ideologies and democratic practices fails to see the police in its complexity.

Furthermore, such a statement is blind to the plurality of social life, flattens the democratic political game, and ignores the possibility that police officers are simultaneously victims and enforcers of the Brazil's violence and inequalities. It might be more valuable to understand an antifascist police agent as more useful to democracy inside the institution than outside of it.

If biopolitics is a policy that involves the body, the same applies to police institutions. Living (and lively) bodies exist inside police forces. To say that a police officer cannot profess an antifascist stance is to suggest an institutional homogeneity that simply does not correspond with reality. To say that a police officer cannot fight for democracy is to deny that inequality is fractal. Part of those contradictions cannot be solved without the action of workers such as police officers -mainly the low-ranking ones -who are generally young, black and poor, and who have finally found a stable form mode of income in this profession. The fact that the police systematically wield lethal violence against demographically similar compatriots, is a fundamental knot in the present Brazilian democratic crisis. If we want to reverse events such as those described earlier in this text, we will need, without a doubt, to include police agents.

The Brazilian Supreme Federal Court's emphasis on the need to restrict the police use of lethal violence during the pandemic appears to have been ignored by the police forces and their commands.

Meanwhile, in November 2020, Brazil has seen over 160,000 deaths from coronavirus, in just over eight months. The words of the Supreme Court's Minister Carmen Lucia that the country faces a tragedy as a result of a political irresponsibility has not sensitized the executive branch. Alongside the United States, Brazil is one of the countries most affected by the pandemic. Yet during this same pandemic, the São Paulo police beat their own record of killings, despite an abrupt drop in robberies and thefts. As this dispatch has underlined, the pandemic is accompanied by police lethality. Black social movements, the anti-fascist policemen, and others can help to reverse this scenario, albeit late.

Anti-Oedipus: Anticapitalism and Schizophrenia

Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life

Efeitos da Medida Cautelar na ADPF 635 sobre as operações policiais na Região Metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro

Police worker politics in India and beyond

Police Unions and the politics of democratic security and order in postcolonial India

A Nairóbi-Fora-da-Lei contra as Pandemias

Ponto Final: A guerra de Bolsonaro contra a democracia

O mundo negro: Relações raciais e a constituição do movimento negro contemporâneo no Brasil