Transaction Search Form: please type in any of the fields below.
Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 11:14 pm
Time: 11:14 pm
Results for profiling (brazil)
1 results foundAuthor: Ramos, Silvia Title: Police Stops, Suspects and Discrimination in the City of Rio de Janeiro Summary: This paper presents the results of Abordagem Policial, Estereótipos Raciais e Percepções da Discriminação na Cidade do Rio de Janeiro (Police Stops, Racial Stereotypes and Perceptions of Discrimination in the City of Rio de Janeiro), a study carried out in 2003 by the CESeC and supported by the Ford Foundation. The research was designed around two main objectives. Our first aim was to gather information on the relationship between Rio’s citizens and its police, and specifically their experiences with police stops or blitz, identifying the possible variations in quantity and quality across racial and social lines and assessing the impact of police stops on the currently held opinions of police work. Our second aim was to investigate the mechanisms and criteria involved in the military police officer’s (the uniformed street cop) definition of a “suspect” in order to verify the possible influence of racial, class, or other social profiling. In other words, is the police definition of a suspect conditioned by that person’s social and racial status? We consider police stops ideal situations for the study of these topics since they involve direct contact between the police and the population, in which: a) citizens are not free to choose whether to initiate contact or not (in contrast with, for example, the decision to file a complaint or to call the police to solve a problem) and b) these encounters happen outside the context of criminal activity, irrespective of concrete information on which to base suspicion, and therefore are more conducive to the influence of stereotypes and prejudices. In theory, any citizen, male or female, traveling on foot, driving a car or using any other form of transportation, may be stopped and searched in the course of both routine police action and special crime fighting operations. In practice however, police stop only a fraction of the population, and it is well known that the practice is not random, but in fact selective and, as such, one that depends largely on previously held criteria for suspicion, be it physical appearance, attitude, place, time or circumstances, or even a combination of these and other factors. The city population, on the other hand, has its own ideas and expectations concerning the criteria adopted by the police force in such situations – ideas and expectations that may or may not be confirmed in the encounters experienced on the streets, which may or not change through concrete experience, and which may or may not coincide with opinions on how the police should act. The context of police stops provides us, therefore, not only with an objective basis for identifying profiles being adopted by the police force, but also with a privileged angle to observe the overlap between these profiles and the perception of citizens, between perception and experience, or, in other words, how images, expectations and stereotypes are played out between police and citizens in their day to day encounters. This study combined quantitative and qualitative methods. We began by interviewing militants of the black movement and young people involved in cultural activities in the shantytowns. Four focus groups were organized with young people of different regional and class backgrounds in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Apart from providing extremely rich qualitative material, this approach to the topic gave us firm grounds for building a questionnaire to be used in the quantitative survey. The second stage of the project consisted of a home survey carried out by Science – Sociedade Científica da Escola Nacional de Ciências Estatísticas (The Scientific Society of the National School for Statistical Sciences) – during June and July of 2003. For this survey a sample of 2250 people, statistically representative of the population of Rio between the ages of 15 and 65, completed a form with 79 questions designed to convey their experiences and perception of police stops in the city, as well as their general views on police, justice, public safety, and on racial and class discrimination. Open interviews with military police officers from different battalions of the municipality – low and high ranking officers – were also carried out with the objective of understanding the dynamics and the logic of the police stops and blitz, and also of registering the opinions held by different groups within the Military Police regarding the survey topics. We had originally planned to include focus groups with military police officers, and a sample survey of the Military Police in the State of Rio de Janeiro, but this stage of the project was abandoned because of numerous obstacles raised by the Rio de Janeiro Public Security Authorities to any survey being carried out within police institutions. The interviews that were carried out for this project, as well as previous studies by other authors and the analysis of technical documentation relative to the blitz became, therefore, this paper’s primary source of data on police stop procedures and the criteria used by the police for determining suspects. This preliminary report discusses some significant findings of the study done focusing on the practice of police stops. Complete results, including other types of experiences and perceptions related to the police will be part of the final report, soon to be published as a book. Details: Rio de Janeiro: Center for Studies on Public Security and Citizenship, University Candido Mendes, 2004. 16p. Source: Boletim Seguranca e Cidadania, Number 8: Internet Resource: Accessed May 8, 2012 at http://www.ucamcesec.com.br/arquivos/publicacoes/boletim08ingles.pdf Year: 2004 Country: Brazil URL: http://www.ucamcesec.com.br/arquivos/publicacoes/boletim08ingles.pdf Shelf Number: 125204 Keywords: Police Behavior (Brazil)Profiling (Brazil)Traffic Stops (Brazil) |