The Killing Consensus

We hold many assumptions about police work—that it is the responsibility of the state, or that police officers are given the right to kill in the name of public safety or self-defense. But in The Killing Consensus, Graham Denyer Willis shows how in São Paulo, Brazil, killing and the arbitration of "normal" killing in the name of social order are actually conducted by two groups—the police and organized crime—both operating according to parallel logics of murder. Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, Willis's book traces how homicide detectives categorize two types of killing: the first resulting from "resistance" to police arrest (which is often broadly defined) and the second at the hands of a crime "family' known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). Death at the hands of police happens regularly, while the PCC’s centralized control and strict moral code among criminals has also routinized killing, ironically making the city feel safer for most residents. In a fractured urban security environment, where killing mirrors patterns of inequitable urbanization and historical exclusion along class, gender, and racial lines, Denyer Willis's research finds that the city’s cyclical periods of peace and violence can best be understood through an unspoken but mutually observed consensus on the right to kill. This consensus hinges on common notions and street-level practices of who can die, where, how, and by whom, revealing an empirically distinct configuration of authority that Denyer Willis calls sovereignty by consensus.

Policing is widely understood, empirically and theoretically, as a core function of the state. Much of the knowledge presumes that police are the only body that may kill and arbitrate killing, routinely and without retaliation from contesting parties, as a means of establishing and maintaining a legitimate legal order. This dissertation examines an urban circumstance where killing and its regulation is not simply the realm of police. Sio Paulo, Brazil is a city with parallel normative logics of killing. Via ethnographic research with homicide detectives, I examine these two logics: homicides and police killings known as resistencias. Under democratic restructuring, with failing public security and underwritten by historic and spatial inequities inscribed via disparate processes of urbanization and planning, investigations reveal the practice of a 'normal' homicide that is a product of a system of governance in the urban periphery. Killing has become the realm of an organized crime group known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). Via a prison-periphery nexus, the PCC determines the moral borderlines of violence in the spaces it controls. In apparent moral contrast, police kill citizens at a rate of roughly one per day. Under the rubric of 'resisting arrest' there is a presumption of guilt for the dead and a presumption of innocence for the shooter. Homicide detectives investigate and arbitrate whether these presumptions are 'appropriate'. When not, a resistencia becomes a homicide and the offending police are arrested on the spot by detectives. I track the 'deservedness' of each logic and find that while the two appear antagonistic, there is often a confluence of imaginaries, coalescing in an implicit and obscured 'killing consensus'. This consensus is consolidated via co-orientation and everyday practices pointing towards mutually understood spatial and moral boundaries of who can be killed, why and where, underpinning a decline in homicides here by more than 75% since 2000. Yet, in a 2012 crisis that consensus was 'killed'. Violence erupted between police and the PCC, rupturing the everyday forms of equilibria that have given this city a false floor of security in recent years. Lastly, I examine how public debate and a modest effort to contribute to it led to contradictory reforms.

**Includes test bank and PowerPoint slides for professors who have adopted the text in their course. Contact [email protected] for more information. ** This well-received criminology textbook, now in its third edition, argues that crime must be understood as both a social and a political phenomenon. Using this lens, Marginality and Condemnation contends that what is defined as criminal, how we respond to “crime” and why individuals behave in anti-social ways are often the result of individual and systemic social inequalities and disparities in power. Beginning with an overview of criminological discourse, mainstream approaches and new directions in criminological theory, the book is then divided into sections, based on key social inequalities of class, gender, race and age, each of which begins with an outline of the general issues for understanding crime and an introduction that guides readers through the empirical chapters that follow. The studies provide insights into general issues in criminology, ranging from the historical and current nature of crime and criminal justice to the various responses to criminality. Readers are encouraged and challenged to understand crime and justice through concrete analyses rather than abstract argumentation. In addition to a new introductory chapter that confronts how we define crime, measure crime, and understand and use criminology in this millennium, the third edition provides new chapters examining crime in relation to the environment, terrorism, masculinity, children and youth, and Aboriginal gangs and the legacy of colonialism.

The sources of public morality are an increasingly pressing issue within philosophical and theological ethics. This book presents essays, covering a broad spectrum of the various aspects of this problematic question, by some of the leading scholars in the field. The essays address various approaches and traditions. Most were first presented as lectures at a Societas Ethica conference in Berlin during August 2001; others are presented here for the first time. Sven Andersen teaches systematic theology at Aarhus University, Denmark, Centre for Bioethics. Ulrich Nissen teaches systematic theology at Aarhus University. Lars Reuter teaches systematic theology at Aarhus University.

An important new ethnographic study of São Paulo’s favelas revealing the widespread use of race-based police repression in Brazil While Black Lives Matter still resonates in the United States, the movement has also become a potent rallying call worldwide, with harsh police tactics and repressive state policies often breaking racial lines. In The Anti-Black City, Jaime Amparo Alves delves into the dynamics of racial violence in Brazil, where poverty, unemployment, residential segregation, and a biased criminal justice system create urban conditions of racial precarity. The Anti-Black City provocatively offers race as a vital new lens through which to view violence and marginalization in the supposedly “raceless” São Paulo. Ironically, in a context in which racial ambiguity makes it difficult to identify who is black and who is white, racialized access to opportunities and violent police tactics establish hard racial boundaries through subjugation and death. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in prisons and neighborhoods on the periphery of this mega-city, Alves documents the brutality of police tactics and the complexity of responses deployed by black residents, including self-help initiatives, public campaigns against police violence, ruthless gangs, and self-policing of communities. The Anti-Black City reveals the violent and racist ideologies that underlie state fantasies of order and urban peace in modern Brazil. Illustrating how “governing through death” has become the dominant means for managing and controlling ethnic populations in the neoliberal state, Alves shows that these tactics only lead to more marginalization, criminality, and violence. Ultimately, Alves’s work points to a need for a new approach to an intractable problem: how to govern populations and territories historically seen as “ungovernable.”

Security has become one of the most important aspects of sport mega-event organisation. This book explores how Rio de Janeiro was imagined and transformed into a security fortress when the 2014 Men's World Cup and the 2016 Olympics came to the city and how the fortress was nonetheless permeable and porous. Dennis Pauschinger experienced exceptional backstage access at high level in the Brazilian mega-event security architecture as well as at street level with the local public security sphere. His ethnographic account takes us from the hidden world of surveillance and control centres, to the security perimeters around stadiums, and to the mundane routine of police officers during day and night shifts at local police stations or at the Special Forces' headquarters. This book shows how police officers' emotions and Special Forces' war narratives impact the static and technology-based security models at mega-events and how traditional patterns of police work, along lines of class and racial inequalities, still prevail and shape the city's public security. The book argues against the common narrative of the positive impacts of mega-event security legacies upon host cities by advancing towards a general understanding of how security governance is carried out in places where the use of digital security technologies co-exists with overly lethal and repressive forms of policing.

This book provides an ethnography of street-level policing in the United States and offers an analysis with valuable lessons for today’s law enforcement officers. Author George C. Klein, sociologist and former police officer, explores the characteristics of policing in a suburb outside of large Midwestern city in the United States. As a participant-observation fieldworker, he functioned as an ethnographic researcher, recording with a sociological eye the "real world" tasks of policing, including the ordinary as well as the more remarkable aspects of day-to-day law enforcement. He approaches the data with three levels of analysis, looking at embedded issues in policing, such as discretion, danger, corruption, cynicism, race, and class; a mid-range analysis that examines police work as an example of street-level bureaucracy; and a global analysis assessing the entrenched roles of race, class, and demography in police work, as well as, society, in the U.S. This book focuses on the need for police officers to solve social problems that other institutions in society are unwilling, or unable, to solve. It examines a myriad of issues, such as police socialization, the use of force by police officers, stress levels and suicide risk factors, disparate styles of policing, police militarization, de-escalation, and more. With compelling detail, the author helps the reader understand the turmoil regarding policing in the United States today. It is ideal for police professionals as well as students and scholars of criminal justice, criminology, sociology, psychology, history, political science and journalism.

Police Unlimited is centred on the controversial idea that police forces are a focal point for conflict in modern society. Instead of emphasising the socially integrative function of police forces, the book links to a conflict model concerned with its socially divisive effects. Throughout the book, the consequences of this social division are discussed, using a detailed ethnographic study of the Dutch police as a starting point, and extending the analysis out to look at the global situation. The book is based on a five year ethnography exploring police discrimination in the Dutch police. It examines cases of conflict, both inside and outside the police station, thus covering interethnic tensions at work as well as hostility towards migrants observed while joining officers on patrol. The cases are discussed in light of the corroding public character of Dutch policing and the risks involved in terms of discrimination, and the arbitrary, or even privatized, use of power. Signalling an increased blurring of the private and public spheres in policing, the book warns of an "unlimited" police service that is no longer constrained by the public contours that delineate a legal bureaucracy. To develop a police anthropology, the ethnographic materials are consistently compared with other police ethnographies in the "global north" and "global south". This comparative analysis points out that the demise of bureaucracy makes it increasingly difficult for police organizations across the globe to exclude politics, particularism and populism from their operations. Police Unlimited addresses the curious position of police organizations in the 21st century through the lens of a police anthropology concerned with deep-seated police discrimination across the world. In an age in which bureaucracy is considered to be the social evil of our time, Police Unlimited offers a controversial message: it is exactly the dehumanized and impersonal nature of bureaucracy that transforms policing into a neutral and fair practice.