| dc.description.abstract | In the present dissertation, we intend to analyze the procedure used by the police
to identify the suspect teenager in the city of Recife. When we try to understand
the procedure of suspicion, what is noteworthy is the racial issue. Indeed, whilst
racism assumes founding conditions in our society, the racial issue emerges as
a negative and strategic definer within social control strategies carried out by the
police. The hypothesis we draw is that race not only attracts the looks of
surveillance on behalf of police agents, but also seems to legitimize, both
institutionally and socially, the violent behavior of the police towards the
teenagers’ bodies, and against whoever else is affected by the “looks” of
suspicion. In addition, we observe that, over the years, race has become a crucial
component of the “dangerous individual” social type, and of social groups that
represent a threat to the physical and patrimonial integrity of hegemonic groups.
These constructions that are focused on dangerous classes, under the pretext of
social order maintenance, remain today as criminal policies in the fight against
crime, and are camouflaged in discourses of neutrality and the myth of racial
democracy. In this regard, we draw on the theoretical lenses of critical criminology
to understand the process of suspicion, focusing on the permanence of
criminological speeches in the Brazilian context. Finally, still integrating our
theoretical framework, we felt the need to handle the analytical instruments
proposed by Michel Misse’s concept of criminal suspicion, so as to understand
how autonomized is the procedure of suspicion led by the police,a procedure that
legitimizes a number of authoritarian interventions and that stems from a set of
instruments driven to contain the dangerous character and the deviation that
supposedly determine certain individuals. Methodologically speaking, this is an
ethnography conducted within the premises of the DPCA – Delegacia da Criança
e do Adolescente (the police station specialized in crimes committed by
teenagers) through participant observation in which it was possible to analyze
between the lines of what constitutes a blurred reality in the discourses of
neutrality regarding police action. A police station impacted by the daily violence
that drains over a contingent formed by young and poor black people. | eng |
