University of Florida Thesis Or

EXPERIENCING POLICING IN SÃO PAULO AND LOS ANGELES: CONSTRUCTING RACIAL IDENTITIES, SPACE, AND SECOND-CLASS CITIZENSHIP

J. SEBASTIAN SCLOFSKY

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2018

To my parents, Pedro and Alicia. To Adi, Itay, and Ilai. And to all the victims of state violence.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work would not have been possible without the support and friendship of many people and institutions. First and foremost, I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee, Philip Williams, Michael Bernhard, Daniel O’Neill, Carlos

Suárez-Carrasquillo, and Ieva Jusionyte. For their guidance, their intellectual and personal support, for helping me through tough times, and for believing in me and my project, I will always be indebted and grateful.

I would like to acknowledge the Department of Political Science at the University of Florida for their support through these years in Anderson Hall. In particular, I want to thank Sue Lawless-Yanchisin for all her assistance and help, and more important for being like a mother to all of us. I would like to recognize Aida Hozic, Ido Oren, Dan

Smith and Michael Martinez for their support too.

This dissertation would not have been possible without the financial support from the University of Florida Graduate School, College of Liberal Arts and Science, Center for Latin American Studies, and the Department of Political Science, which allowed me to conduct my fieldwork in Los Angeles and São Paulo. I want to thank the Latino Fund from the American Political Science Association for their financial support too.

I am grateful to the Law, Crime and Governance in the Americas Workshop at the Center for Latin American Studies, which provided a forum to present my work and learn from many colleagues addressing similar research projects from different disciplines. I want to thank anthropologists Ieva Jusionyte and Richard Kernaghan for teaching me how to navigate the difficulties of conducting fieldwork in complex and violent contexts.

Many of my colleagues in the Department of Political Science at the University of

Florida have been extremely helpful throughout the years. In particular my classmate

Kevin Baron, who introduced me to his family in Southern California and made my stay in Los Angeles possible. I want to also thank Alec Dinnin, for his friendship, assistance, and his constant encouragement. Many thanks to Chesney McOmber, Dan Eizenga,

Dragana Svraka, Mamdou Bodian, Lina Bendabdallah, Oumar Ba, and Ross Cotton.

Two colleagues of mine have been very important for me throughout these years. I want to thank Kevin “el Jefe” Funk for his support, his encouragement, and more important for his friendship. Kevin’s integrity and ideals have taught me to stand strong by my principles and to keep fighting to make our society a better place. My family and I will always be grateful to call you, Maca, and Leo our friends; without doubt this has been one of the most important achievements during our stay here in Gainesville. I want to also thank Mauro Caraccioli for his unconditional support, for his constant optimism, and for making me believe that there is hope in academia. My family and I are also proud and happy to call you, Vane, and Celeste our friends.

I want to thank Graduate Assistant United, my union, for all their support during my stay at the University of Florida. To all its members and officers, in particular, John

Hames, Mary Roca, Lia Meriavaki, Taylor Polvadore, Alec Dinnin, and all other union leaders throughout these years. It has been a privilege and an honor to serve as an officer with you.

I would like to acknowledge my colleagues from the Law and Society

Association, in particular those working on Critical Police Studies. A special thanks to

Danny Gascón for opening the doors to the world of law and society, for introducing me

to wonderful people, and more important for becoming a friend. I also want to thank

Aaron Roussell, Kate Henne, Andy Baer, Matthew Shaw, Daanika Gordon, Analicia

Mejia, Melissa Guzman, Patrick Lopez-Aguado, and Xavier Perez.

In Los Angeles, I want to thank Sue and Bryon Baron for welcoming me to their house and their hearts. They were kind enough to have me as their adoptive son during the time I spent conducting fieldwork in Los Angeles. I miss the conversations after a long day of interviews in South L.A., watching the Daily Show, and learning from your experience in the city. I will always be grateful for your kindness and love.

Also in Los Angeles, I want to thank Sahra Sulaiman and Misty Wilks for guiding me, introducing me to the people and streets of South L.A., for teaching me how to navigate the different neighborhoods, and more important for making me love South

L.A. Many thanks to Marie-Alisse, Adela Barajas, Gilbert Radillo, Mark Anthony from

Dignity and Power, Unai Montes-Irueste, Community Coalition President Alberto

Retana, and the Empowerment Congress West Area Neighborhood Council for sharing your stories, experience and knowledge. To LAPD officers Sunny Sajasima, Keith

Linton, Capt. Jorge Rodriguez, and Sgt. Emada Tingirides, as well as many other anonymous police officers, who took me on rides along, shared their stories, insights, and experiences about South L.A. Finally, I want to specially thank the many anonymous residents of South L.A. who opened their hearts and were kind enough to share their life-stories with me. You are the main characters in this work, I hope I have honored your stories and that of your loved ones. While, as promised, I have kept your identities secret, you are not anonymous to me.

In São Paulo, I want to acknowledge first and foremost Patty Liberman and Angel

Dachs for allowing me to stay at their house throughout the time I spent conducting fieldwork in the city. We have been friends for many years, and while being away from my family was very hard, living with you made it much easier. I will always be indebted for your kindness and generosity.

In São Paulo too, I want to thank Douglas Silva for his help, guidance, and friendship. Without Douglas’s help I would not have been able to conduct my fieldwork in São Paulo and this dissertation would not have been possible, so thank you. A special thanks to my comrades Sheila Stanquieri and Clodoaldo Azevedo. I want to acknowledge Ana Paula Costa, Samara Vitoria, Josiane Santos, Prof. Tiago Matheus,

Camila Nunes, Associação Santos Mártires in Jardim Ângela, Escola Afiz Gebrara in

Capão Redondo, Samira Bueno from the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública,

Daniela Skromov and Wil from São Paulo’s Public Defense Attorney’s Office, and the office of the Military Police Ombudsman, for sharing their knowledge and experience with me. To all the Military Police officers who agreed to be interviewed for this work, many thanks. Finally, as in Los Angeles, I want to acknowledge all the anonymous residents of São Paulo’s periphery, who opened their hearts and shared their stories and those of their loved ones. I hope I have honored your stories and those of your loved ones, and while, as promised, I kept your identities secret, you are not anonymous to me.

Living far away from Uruguay for so long has not been easy. Therefore, I want to thank the maestro Óscar Washington Tabárez, for his work in Uruguay, for reminding me the character and greatness of this small country lost in a small corner of the

American continent, and for making it easier to live all these years abroad. The

“¡Uruguay nomá!” has given me the strength to keep going, gracias maestro. In

Uruguay too, I want to thank Gabriel “Pote” Korytnicki and Martín Hodara for their friendship and support throughout the years.

Finally, I want to thank my parents, Pedro and Alicia, for their unconditional love, their constant support, for believing in me, and for encouraging me to pursue my dreams, as crazy as they may have been. For teaching me what justice really means, and that all the money in the world is not worthwhile as long as others are suffering. I hope I have made you proud. To my sisters, Sandra and Patricia, for their love, support, and encouragement, and for always being there. To my brothers-in-law, Ignacio and

Daniel, for their support and love, and for being parents to Vicky, Lalo, and Guille, the best nephews in the world.

To my two boys, Itay and Ilai, thank you. Spending so much time working in this dissertation has taken time away from being with you and I am sorry for that. Despite being so young, the two of you have shown patience, and have given me the time and strength to work on this project. More important, your love has been the fuel that allowed me to move forward.

None of this would have been possible without the constant support, encouragement, love, and optimism of my wife, Adi. There are no words to describe the sacrifices you have made so I could write this dissertation. I love you and thank you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF TABLES ...... 11

ABSTRACT ...... 12

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 14

The Penal State and the Expansion of Police Powers ...... 17 The Political Development of the Penal State ...... 19 The Expansion of Police Powers ...... 22 The Export of the Penal State to Latin America ...... 25 The Penal State, Mass Incarceration, and Policing Literature: Contributions and Shortcomings ...... 27 The Penal State and Policing ...... 31 Moving Beyond the United States and into Latin America...... 33 Why São Paulo and Los Angeles? ...... 38 Method ...... 42 Work Outline ...... 45

2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PENAL STATE AND THE EXPANSION OF POLICE POWERS ...... 48

Defining the Penal State ...... 50 The Structural and Political Changes Leading to the Formation of the Penal State ...... 54 The Attack on Penal-Welfarism ...... 61 The Politics Behind the Development of the Penal State ...... 65 Race and the Penal State ...... 69 The Penal State and the Expansion of Policing ...... 73 The Export of the Penal State to Latin America and Brazil ...... 80

3 FROM SMALL TOWNS TO MEGACITIES: THE URBAN DEVELOPMENT OF SÃO PAULO AND LOS ANGELES ...... 86

São Paulo: From Frontier Town to Megacity in the Global South ...... 88 Coffee and Early Industrialization ...... 91 Getúlio Vargas and the Estado Novo ...... 102 The Military Regime ...... 108 Democratization and the Transition to a Post-Fordist Economy ...... 112 Los Angeles: From Pueblo to Global City ...... 118 The Early Transformation of Los Angeles ...... 120

The 1920s Industrial Boom ...... 129 Challenging the Open Shop and Racial Segregation ...... 136 Towards Post-Fordist Los Angeles ...... 147 Rodney King and the Post-Fordist City ...... 154

4 SHARED EXPERIENCES I: CONSTRUCTING RACE AND THE MAINTENANCE OF RACIAL HIERARCHY ...... 158

Constructing Race: “You want to know who is black? Ask the police, they know” .158 The “Halo of Blackness”: Carrying the Sign of Suspicion ...... 164 Black Bodies as Disposable: Violent and Deathly Encounters ...... 174 Constructing and Defining Community ...... 179 São Paulo: Bandido versus Trabalhador ...... 182 South L.A.: Defining Community and “Anti-Community” ...... 189 Managing Interracial Conflicts: Latinos versus African-Americans in South L.A...... 195 Conclusions ...... 202

5 SHARED EXPERIENCES II: CONSTRUCTING SPACE AND BEING “OUT OF PLACE” ...... 206

The Penal State, Policing and the Construction of “Periphery” ...... 209 The Post-Metropolis Flow and Being “Out of Place” ...... 230 Conclusion...... 240

6 SHARED EXPERIENCES III: CONSTRUCTING A SECOND-CLASS CITIZENSHIP ...... 245

Authoritarian Enclaves, Citizenship and Inequality ...... 245 Police Killings and Extreme Violence in São Paulo’s Periphery and South L.A. ....251 Police Abuse ...... 266 Police Investigatory Stops and the Reproduction of Second-Class Citizenship .....284 Conclusion: Can we call these places “democracies”? ...... 290

7 CONCLUSIONS ...... 294

Constructing Race, Space, and Second-Class Citizenship Status ...... 295 Constructing “Preto” ...... 296 Constructing Periphery and “Periférico” ...... 299 Reinforcing the Second-Class Citizenship Status ...... 301 The Penal State and the Expansion of Police Power ...... 303 Where Do We Go from Here? ...... 306 Dismantling the Penal State ...... 309

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 313

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 334

LIST OF TABLES

Table page

1-1 Demographic characteristics of interviewees in Los Angeles (108 total interviews) ...... 44

1-2 Demographic characteristics of interviewees in São Paulo (122 total interviews) ...... 44

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

EXPERIENCING POLICING IN SÃO PAULO AND LOS ANGELES: CONSTRUCTING RACIAL IDENTITIES, SPACE, AND SECOND-CLASS CITIZENSHIP

J. Sebastián Sclofsky

May 2018

Chair: Philip J. Williams Major: Political Science

How do negative encounters between residents of South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery and the police affect the way residents construct their racial identity, their sense of space, and a second-class citizenship status? Why residents of South L.A. and

São Paulo’s periphery share similar negative, mostly violent, experiences with the police?

Based on extensive fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2015 in South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery, in which I interviewed residents, community leaders, activists, police officers and public officials, I show the ways in which the negative encounters between residents of these communities and the police, lead residents to define themselves as black and associate blackness with criminality. Furthermore, police actions construct the notion of periphery as a space of violence, deviance and lawlessness, and ascribes the same features to its residents, showing them what their place in society is. Finally, the regular negative experience with the police reinforces in residents of these areas a sense of second-class citizenship, challenging the democratic quality of these areas, which should be considered as authoritarian enclaves.

The socio-economic changes that took place in both cities in the second-half of the twentieth century, with the passage from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economy, led to a reconfiguration of the state, by which the welfare state was replaced by a penal state.

Rather than addressing the problems created by the socio-economic and the hierarchical racial structure through social programs, they are now dealt by the criminal justice system, which has produced a massive increase in incarceration, and has expanded police powers to the point by which the police have become a key player in the production and reproduction of this new social order.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

“I believe the first memory I have about violence and the police took place something like twenty-years ago,” Adailton told me.1 Adailton is an Afro-Brazilian psychologist, born and raised in one of the many Capão Redondo’s favelas. Adailton now works as a counselor for young residents and families at a community center in

Capão Redondo.

I was eight years old and I was walking to school with other five friends. We were climbing through the streets, walking beside the drainage pipe that carries rainwater and sewage. Suddenly we saw a truck blocking the road. It was a delivery truck, which had been robbed. The police had blocked the exit from one side, and the assailants were leaning against this side of the truck. Suddenly the police began shooting, the problem was that we were in the middle of it. The police knew we were there, they saw us, still they were shooting at us. We began running up the street, but the police kept shooting, and the thieves too. We were six kids walking to school with our backpacks, in a regular day, and suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of a gun fight. We had no escape but to jump into the sewage. We entered the drainage pipe with all the dirty water and we run up the hill. We came out on the other side of the street, far from the danger. We cleaned ourselves as best as we could and went to school, as if nothing had happened. I’m still alive, despite what happened that day and what I experienced many times around here. I was able to study, I have a master degree in psychology, I have a good job, I feel I succeeded, but more than that, I feel I am a survivor, and I ask myself every single day, why I survived and many of my friend didn’t. From the six kids that were there that day, two were killed by the police, one was killed by the gangs, another spend time in prison and now jumps from job to job, including drug dealing, the fifth one died in a work accident at a construction site. By chance, I was able to survive, only by chance, I am the outlier, most of my friends are not that lucky (Adailton in conversation with the author, São Paulo, October 2015).

1 With the exception of public officials, some police officers, and community leaders, all the names of the interviewees have been changed, as well as their place of residence and work, in order to guarantee their safety.

This work is about Adailton and many more like him, who, from a very early age, have lived with violence, in particular police violence. “From a very early age, kids learn what means to be pobre, preto, e periférico.2 The police teach us,” Adailton explained to me.

Adailton’s story is not exclusively a São Paulo story. It takes place in other global cities in which residents, in particular nonwhite residents, of low-income neighborhoods go through similar negative experiences with the police, which end shaping their racial identity, their sense of space, and reinforce their second-class citizenship status.

“My first 100m race took place in that park, running away from the police,” Mark, an African-American resident of Watts told me. Mark used to compete in track and field, but not anymore, he now works in one of the public housing projects in Watts. “They

[the police] are the best trainers around here, you better run like hell if you don’t want to get beaten or worse.” For Mark, growing in this part of Los Angeles, meant running, running from violence, poverty, gangs, and the police. “Being beaten by the police is like getting your ID,” Mark explained, “after that you know you’re black and from the projects.”

Mark and Adailton, separated by thousands of kilometers, living in two different cities, share similar negative experiences with the police. By examining the negative experiences residents of South L.A. and São Paulo’s western and southern periphery have with the police, this research asks how these negative encounters affect the way residents construct their racial identity, their sense of space, and a second-class citizenship status? Furthermore, it asks why residents of South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery share similar negative, mostly violent, experiences with the police?

2 Pobre, preto e periférico translates to poor, black, and from the periphery.

By analyzing the life-stories of dozens of residents in São Paulo’s periphery and

South L.A., I demonstrate the ways in which regular negative encounters with the police lead residents to define themselves as blacks and give content to their black identity.

Blackness is defined as sign of criminality, a threat to society, an “other,” who needs to be under constant surveillance. Police actions, furthermore, construct an idea of community, indicating who belongs and who does not belong to the community, who is a respectable member and who is a threat. At the same time, the police play an important role defining space. Police actions construct the notion of periphery as a place of lawlessness and deviance, a menace to the rest of the city. Periphery residents learn what means to be from the periphery through their negative interactions with the police.

When stopped by the police outside the periphery, residents will be reminded, oftentimes in violent ways, what their place in the city and in society is. I argue, that we should conceptualize periphery not as geographical term, but rather as a space of socio-economic deprivation, racial segregation, and a space in which the penal state takes its most repressive features, defining them as authoritarian enclaves. Finally, the regular negative encounters with the police reinforce the residents’ second-class citizenship status. I contend that both São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A. should be seen as authoritarian enclaves in which rights mostly exist on paper.

In order to understand why the police have acquired such a prominent role, and why residents of São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A. share similar experiences, we need to examine the transformations that led to the development of the penal state and the expansion of police powers in these two cities.

The Penal State and the Expansion of Police Powers

In the last decades, several authors have recognized a significant increase in harsh penal policies, which include mandatory long sentences for a wide array of crimes, including nonviolent crimes; the belief that an increase in punishment would solve the problems of crime;3 that crime is the consequence of individual choice and moral failing; that criminals cannot be rehabilitated, and that rehabilitation is not society’s responsibility; the expansion of police powers and police presence in low- income communities; and most of all the phenomenon of mass incarceration (Garland,

2001; Gottschalk, 2006, 2014; Lerman & Weaver, 2014; Schoenfeld, 2018; Simon,

2007; Wacquant, 2003, 2008, 2009b). David Garland (2001) explains that the institutions of crime control and criminal justice form part of a network of governance and social ordering, which includes the legal system, the labor market, and welfare institutions. The changes in crime control are more than just society’s response to crime. They include practices of controlling behavior and doing justice, new conceptions of social order and social control, and innovative ways of maintaining social cohesion and managing group relations. The penal state first developed in the United States, and was later exported and adopted in other places, in particular in Latin America.4 The

3 The three-strikes law, approved first in Washington in 1993 under Initiative 593, and later in 1994 in California, when voters approved Proposition 184. The law establishes that someone who commits three felonies, automatically receives a prison sentence for at least 25 years.

4 Wacquant (2009b) indicates that in the last decade of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first century, the United States’ “War on crime” imposed itself as the “inevitable reference for all governments of the First world,” and has become the theoretical source and practical inspiration for the hardening of penal policies producing an increase in incarceration in these countries (2009b, p. xiii). The “War on crime” and the penal state has expanded beyond the First world, and similar hardening penal policies can be seen across Latin America. The export of US version of community-policing, an increase in punishment and incarceration, the constant reference by Latin American authorities of Broken Windows theory and US policy-makers associated with “tough-on-crime” policies, such as Rudy Giuliani, have become common across the continent.

development of this penal state is the product of changes in the socio-economic structure, the slow development of state building and state law enforcement capacity, the use by politicians and policymakers of crime as an electoral tool and as a way to address deep social changes, in particular regarding race relations.

Before the creation and expansion of the carceral or penal state,5 criminality was viewed as a problem of defective or poorly adapted individuals and families, or as a symptom of need, social injustice and the clash of cultural norms in a pluralistic but still hierarchical society. The central explanation for crime was that of social deprivation, and the solution was searched in individualized correctional treatment and welfare measures, in particular education and job creation. Nowadays, according to Garland

(2001), crime and delinquency are seen not as problems of deprivation but rather the consequence of inadequate mechanisms of control. In what could be seen as a return to Cesare Lombrosio’s theories of criminality, which argued that certain individuals were genetically prone to commit crimes,6 new criminal theories argue that some individuals will be strongly attracted to self-serving, anti-social, and criminal conduct unless inhibited from doing so by strong and effective controls. In other words, there are individuals who, given the chance, would commit crimes. Socio-economic explanations for crime have been abandoned for causes based on personal irresponsibility and immorality of the criminal. The welfare of deprived social groups is much less central to

5 Most authors refer to the “penal” state as “carceral” state, and both terms are interchangeable. However, I prefer the term “penal” rather than “carceral,” as the latter is associated more with the end-result of the process, which is mass incarceration, while I believe that “penal” captures better the series of crime control and law and order policies adopted.

6 Lombrosio believed that certain physical characteristics of the individual, such as the shape of his head, the asymmetry of his face, the arms’ length, can help determine if an individual is a born criminal or not.

the new criminal justice approach. Communities should improve their surveillance and internal controls and be able to police themselves, to prevent these criminals to destroy the community’s moral fiber. In Löic Wacquant words:

Everywhere resound the same praise for the devotion and the competence of the forces of order, the same lament over the scandalous leniency of judges, the same avid affirmation of the sacrosanct “rights of crime victims,” the same thundering announcements promising, here to “push the crime rate down by 10 percent every year” (a promise that no politician dares make about the ranks of the unemployed), there to restore the hold of the state in “no-go-areas,” elsewhere to increase the capacity of the prison system at the cost of billions of euros (2009b, p. xii).

The expansion of the penal state in the last decades of the twentieth century was not just driven by criminological considerations. There were historical and political forces that promoted a series of economic transformations as well as criminal justice ones, which led, in the second half of the twentieth century to the rapid expansion of state’s penal capacity and the use of penal policies to address social problems.

The Political Development of the Penal State

Business interests in the United States reacted to the inflationary crisis during the

Johnson administration (1963-1969) and later to the effects of stagflation and state intervention in the economy during the Nixon administration (1969-1974), by rejecting state intervention in the economy and favoring the promotion of free private market

(Blyth, 2002). In 1971 the Campaign Finance Reform Act allowed for the creation of political action committees (PACs) and by 1978 business PACs were financing politicians who favored the free market ideology. With the victory of Ronald Reagan in

1980, the state continued to rapidly recede from welfare policies and a series of reforms at the National Labor Relations Board shifted the balance from labor to business. The passage from a Fordist economy, based on relative well-paid, unionized, industrial jobs,

into a post-Fordist economy with few high-wage managerial jobs on the upper side of the scale and low-wage jobs without benefits or union protection on the lower-side, has created a series of socio-economic ills, which were augmented by the fact that those most affected by these changes were nonwhites. Furthermore, the welfare state policies, developed during the first half of the twentieth century, which mitigated some of the socio-economic difficulties faced by working-class people were slowly eliminated.

Reagan’s reforms were not limited to the economy. As David Harvey (2005a) argues, neoliberalism is not only an economic policy but a social theory, which envisions the way in which a proper state and society should work. One of its main elements is the sanctity of individualism, individual freedom in the marketplace is to be guaranteed, and each individual is held responsible and accountable for his or her own actions and well-being. Reagan saw welfare policies as creating individuals who become dependent on the state and are unable to develop individual responsibility for their actions. Reagan believed that social ills were a product of individual choices and the state should not reward these individuals by providing them with social services.

Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug campaign “Just Say No,” exemplifies this commitment to individual choice. This approach favored the retreat from penal-welfarism, based on the idea of rehabilitation, towards the adoption of policies based on incapacitation and tight social control.

However, while the penal state expanded rapidly throughout Reagan’s administration (1981-1989), it began much earlier. Vesla Weaver (2007) situates this transformation to the midst of the civil rights movements in the 1960s. Those opponents to the civil rights movement were able to reframe the civil rights protests, in particular

the urban uprisings of the mid-1960s, as criminal activities or as promoting criminal activities. Taking advantage of the rising fear of crime across the United States, and the anxieties generated in the South with the dismantling of Jim Crow, these politicians used crime as an electoral tool and pushed for an expansion of state’s criminal justice capacity. According to Weaver (2007), when Democrats reacted to this situation, they were unable to reshape the public discussion and ended adopting a tough-on-crime approach, which favored the development of the penal state.

Yet, as Marie Gottschalk (2006) and Naomi Murakawa (2014) show, there were other forces apart from conservative politicians who favored the expansion of the penal state. Gottschalk demonstrates how the victims’ rights movement, and also progressive social movements, such as the women’s movement, the anti-death penalty movement, and the prisoners’ rights movement unintentionally promoted the penal state. The women’s movement attack on rape and domestic violence for instance, was reframed as a crime problem and not as a social welfare or health problem, generating as a response the increase in harsher punishments and expanded law enforcement capacity.

Furthermore, both Gottschalk and Murakawa show that law and order campaigns were always part of United States’ politics. While previous campaigns did not have the effects that the 1960s’ campaign had, they did increase state law enforcement capacity. The institutions created by each campaign remained in place after the campaign ended.

With the political and socio-economic changes that were taking place from the mid-

1960s onwards, it became easier to respond to these social problems through law enforcement institutions and tough-on-crime policies. As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (1997) and Heather Schoenfeld (2018) indicates, the racial structure and the changes in race

relations played a fundamental role in this story. Schoenfeld develops the concept of racial projects, which refers to “collective actors’ response to historic racial hierarchies guided by their shared beliefs and commitments around the meanings of race and racial inequality” (2018, p. 14). Racial projects are intentional actions in response to challenges and changes in the racial structure. The challenges posited by the civil rights movement to Jim Crow in the South and to de facto segregation in the North and West, led policymakers to develop a new racial project, which fed in the historical associations of blackness with criminality, and promoted the expansion of the penal state.

In other words, the rise of the penal state responded not so much to an increase in crime, but to the dislocations provoked by the retrenchment of the welfare state and the imposition of precarious wage labor as the new norm of citizenship for those trapped at the bottom of the class structure, who happened to be disproportionately nonwhite.

These responses were not a natural consequence of socio-economic transformations, but rather a result of policymakers’ choices, and the intended and unintended consequences of social movements, in a specific historical and institutional context.

The Expansion of Police Powers

The expansion of the penal state led to a reformulation of the role of policing in modern societies. An approach that focused on surveillance and control, risk management and the reduction of opportunities for actual or potential criminals to commit crime, in which social problems are to be dealt through a law and order framework, led the police came to play a central role.

One of the main theoretical developments during the expansion of the penal state has been George Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s (1982) “broken-windows” theory.

These scholars argued that signs of urban decay, such as a building with broken

windows, indicates that nobody cares and invites people to continue “breaking windows.” According to these authors, the same happens with crime. If disorderly or unsocial behavior goes unpunished, then actual or potential criminals understand that they can continue with their disorderly behavior and commit crime. Henceforth, there should be a greater police presence and develop a zero-tolerance policy to prevent the broken windows effect. The broken windows theory and the zero-tolerance approach became the centerpiece of community policing, which rebranded broken windows as

“quality of life policing.” As a response to the urban riots of the 1960s, police departments across the United States began to deploy community-policing units in order to improve relations between the police and low-income nonwhite communities across the country. Part of the new responsibility of the police is to shape community norms and standards, identify “problem people,” increase the surveillance and control over these people, and expel them from the community if necessary.

This new role of the police as administrators of communal and social life is not new. As Mark Neocleous (2000) explains, the concept of police and policing, since its origins as part of Western political discourse in the fifteenth century, revolved around the instructions and activities considered necessary for the maintenance of good order.

Police, as an institution, never dedicated itself exclusively to crime control. Police was about the fabrication and protection of different social orders, the administering of social life, and well-being of society. With the advancement of bourgeois society and capitalism, Neocleous contends, the laboring poor appeared as a threat to the establish social order, and needed to be policed. It was not only their potential activities against the bourgeois order, but all forms of disorderly behavior associated with this class, such

as begging, gambling and drinking, which presented a risk to the social order (2000, pp.

16-17).

With the advent of liberalism and the fear of state encroachment on citizens’ liberties, the rule and power of police were limited and supplanted by the rule of law. It would be the law and its different administrative branches, which would defend the social order, and the role of the police in administering society’s well-being would be limited. As bourgeois society and capitalism expanded, and with it the different ills generated by capitalism, a series of institutions developed to administer the lives of the laboring poor. From charity associations to different type of welfare policies, depending on the development of working-class politics, were created to ameliorate the conditions of the working-poor.7 The police came to play a less central role in the creation and maintenance of social order, and shared this function with the factory, the church, the family, and the welfare state.8

In the 1970s, together with the development of the penal state, the role of policing was once again redefined. The police would still focus on providing security, protecting private property, and enforcing the law, but now the police would again be in charge of administering social life, in particular in low-income communities of color.

However, contrary to its origins, the police would not intervene in the economy in order

7 Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990), in his seminal work on the development of the Welfare State, explains how the political power of labor and their ability to form political coalitions led to the development of different welfare policies, ranging from a liberal welfare state in the United States, to a corporatist welfare state in parts of Europe, Germany in particular, and a social democratic welfare state in the Scandinavian countries.

8 These institutions are not the only ones in charge of creating and maintaining a bourgeois-capitalist social order. As Michel Foucault demonstrated, the hospital, the prison, and the disciplines have played a central role as mechanisms of social control (Foucault, 1977, 1990, 1991).

to guarantee the welfare of the poor. In the framework of the penal state, the problems low-income communities face, are assumed not to be a product of the socio-economic structure, but a product of the lack of control and deterrence as expressed in the broken-windows theory, and it is the police which needs to develop strategies to increase control and deterrence, by shaping communal norms, by expelling “strangers,” and becoming community leaders, social workers, mental health workers, neighborhood conflict mediators, and educators.9

As Alex Vitale (2017) argues, the presence and participation of the police in low- income communities of color has expanded exponentially with the development of the penal state. In many ways, the police have gone back to their original conceptualization as the administrator of social life and society’s well-being. In this process, they have become a key institution in the lives of São Paulo’s periphery residents and South L.A., influencing the way these residents define their racial identity, their sense of space and place, and their second-class citizen status.

The Export of the Penal State to Latin America

Löic Wacquant (2009a) demonstrates how the policies developed in the United

States in the context of the penal state have been adopted across Latin America.

Broken-windows and zero tolerance, the campaigning on tough-on-crime platforms, the enactment of tougher sentencing laws, the construction of prisons, and the expansion of prison population, in other words, the main components of the penal state have spread across Latin America since the 1990s. In the late 1990s, politicians in Mexico,

9 Many of the programs for children and youth in Watts, Newton, or Southwest L.A. are directed and funded by LAPD, or have been developed by police officers in the framework of community policing, such as the BtoG (Boys to Gentlemen) program in Watts, developed by Officer Linton.

Argentina, and Brazil were promoting broken-windows and zero-tolerance policing as a response to the social problems faced by Latin American cities. In the first years of the twentieth century, Rudy Giuliani’s consultant company, Giuiliani Security and Safety, was hired to develop crime control strategies in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro,

Guatemala, Costa Rica, and other Latin American countries (Lasusa, 2015). Apart from these policing strategies, the penal state in Latin America led to the toughening of existing laws; the lengthening of sentences; the introduction of mandatory minimum sentences for activities related to organized crime, such as kidnapping or drug trafficking; and the creation of new laws targeting informal activities associated with low- income sectors, such as street vending, informal parking attendance, or vagrancy.

The import of the penal state to Latin America was a result of three interrelated processes: the development of neoliberalism; the rise of crime and insecurity and the use of “tough-on-crime” approaches as part of the political repertoire; and the development of the war on drugs (Müller, 2012). The war on drugs played a prominent role in the expansion of the penal state. Countries across the region were categorized as compliant or non-compliant with the United States’ efforts in this war, and US development aid was tied to cooperation with the war on drugs. The rise of the left in

Latin America did not transformed the tough-on-crime approach, which has now become the new common sense regarding the management of low-income communities in the region. In the case of Brazil, some of this has to do with the hierarchical racial structure that is still in place. While after the abolition of slavery, there was no legal segregation in Brazil, as it did happen in the United States, the racialized

social system that developed in Brazil posited Afro-Brazilian at the lower-echelons of society and a process of criminalization of blackness also took place.

The Penal State, Mass Incarceration, and Policing Literature: Contributions and Shortcomings

With few exceptions, much of the literature on the carceral or penal state has not focused on policing. Many authors have concentrated on the end result of the expansion of the penal state, that is, mass incarceration. Scholars have highlighted the constant increase in imprisonment rates in the United States, the racial bias that exists in incarceration, and the terrible effects it has had on communities of color, and democracy in general in the United States. For instance, Todd Clear (2007) demonstrates how mass incarceration has increased crime and other social ills in low- income, nonwhite communities. Stephany Ewert and colleagues (2014) have shown how the high levels of incarceration among African-American men affect their educational level, reducing even more their opportunities to overcome the levels of poverty they suffer. Ernest Drucker (2011) has gone as far as comparing mass incarceration to an epidemic disease. As other diseases, such as AIDS, Drucker illustrates how mass incarceration affects disproportionately the poorest urban ghettos of United States’ cities and, as AIDS during the 1980s and 1990s, has been subject to intense cultural and political conflict. Finally, Bruce Western and Christopher Muller

(2013) argue that the emergence of mass incarceration means that the penal system has become a pervasive and substantial influence on the life chances of the urban poor, increasing the prevalence of poverty and social ills among communities of color.

Several scholars have analyzed the origins of mass incarceration and the carceral state. Marie Gottschalk (2006) has shown how periodic law-and-order

campaigns before the modern development of the carceral state left the public inured to greater penal development. More important, Gottschalk demonstrates how different interest groups and social movements facilitated the growth of the carceral state. The victims’ movement, for instance, helped penal hard-liners by creating a zero-sum game between victim rights and criminal rights. These campaigns, together with the weakening of the United States’ welfare state and a strong rights-based political tradition, allowed for the expansion to take place. Naomi Murakawa’s 2014, The First

Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, for instance, explores the policy and political support for mass incarceration. Murakawa argues that the racial conflict facing the United States in the 1960s was criminalized, and that postwar racial liberalism, which conceptualized racism as psychological and specific instead of structural and systemic, led liberals to attribute black lawlessness as a reaction to white racism. By blurring the line between political protest and crime and riots, liberals blended together organized civil protest with street crime, as conservatives did. By ignoring the socio- economic and racial structures that lead to racism and racist outcomes, liberals developed a series of procedural protections against racial inequality, such as mandatory sentence, ended backfiring and assisted the development of the carceral state. For example, Michael Tonry’s 1995 Malign Neglect, explained how sentencing policies were to blame for the rapid increase in incarceration rates.

Later, in his 2011 book Punishing Race, Michael Tonry demonstrates how mass incarceration cannot be justified with reference to any crime control goal. Policing strategies and sentencing policies are responsible for the severity and racial disparities within incarceration. Torny argued that this is because of the lack of white empathy for

nonwhites affected by mass incarceration, and that mass incarceration has assisted white U.S. citizens maintain social, economic, and political dominance over blacks.

In one of the most important works in this area, Michelle Alexander (2012), has shown how the criminal justice system in general and mass incarceration in particular has become the new Jim Crow, oppressing and disenfranchising African-Americans and relegating them to a second-class citizenship status. By showing how law has historically been used to criminalize, oppress, and relegate African-Americans to a second-class status, Michelle Alexander situates mass incarceration as history repeating itself, both as a tragedy and a farce. Finally, Heather Ann Thompson (2010) argues that the historical criminalization of African-Americans, their concentration in inner cities, and the further criminalization of these urban spaces, led to the expansion of the carceral state and mass incarceration. During the 1960s, at the zenith of the civil rights movement, a series of laws and policies, in particular those related to the war on drugs, created a legal network trapping African-Americans in impoverished ghettoes and more specifically in prisons across the United States.

Several authors have highlighted the effects the expansion of the penal state has had in areas foreign to criminal justice. Jonathan Simon (2007) examined the ways crime and crime control, have become the political rationale for many public policy developments since the 1960s onwards. Katherine Becket and Naomi Murakawa (2012) contend that the expansion of the carceral state has been followed by the emergence of what they call the “shadow carceral state.” This shadow carceral state refers to the spillover of penal policies into areas beyond criminal justice, such as civil and

administrative law, and the creation of civil and administrative pathways to incarceration.

Moreover, authors have indicated the ways in which the penal state has diminished democracy in the United States. Marie Gottschalk (2014, 2015) for instance, claims that the penal state has grown so massive that it has cut off millions of U.S. citizens from the American Dream. The U.S. carceral state, Gottschalk states, is distinctive not only for the mass incarceration of certain groups, but also for “its enthusiastic embrace of harsh and degrading punishments that would be unthinkable in most other industrialized countries” (2014, p. 289). The penal state has altered how public services and benefits operate, the way society and politics is organized, and has limited opportunities for millions of low-income, nonwhite U.S. residents. Similarly, Vesla

Weaver and Amy E. Lerman (2010), show how apart from mass incarceration, citizens have become much more likely to experience other state interventions that are disciplinary in nature. This is true in particular for low-income, nonwhite U.S. residents, and has made the United States less democratic as these two authors further show in their book Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime

Control.

While many of these important works mention the police and policing as part of the problem, none of them fully examine the prominent role policing has taken as a result of the expansion of the penal state. Whereas millions of U.S. citizens, in particular nonwhite citizens, have been incarcerated, many more are affected by the expansion of police powers, and this needs to be examined in the context of the development of the penal state.

The Penal State and Policing

Few authors have examined certain aspects of policing in the context of the penal state. For instance, Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert (2010), analyze the use of trespass laws by the police to banish, through trespass admonishments, certain people accused of being gang members or having some type of association with gangs, from specific areas of the city.10 This has given the police extensive powers in the area of spatial control. Alex Vitale (2017) has also examined the expansion of police powers in the context of the penal state. Vitale addresses the problems of police’s warrior mentality, which portrays residents of low-income communities as enemies, argues against the militarization of policing, the problems in police training, and the existence of weak mechanisms of accountability. However, Vitale makes the important claim that unless communities of color are empowered politically, socially, and economically, they will be impotent in their attempts to fight police abuse.

However, most of the work analyzing policing and the relation between the police and low-income communities has been done through an institutional approach not always fully considering how the socio-economic context and the expansion of the penal state affect community and police relations. Steve Herbert, Katherine Beckett, and

Forrest Stuart (2017) acknowledge the problem police officers face in policing areas that experience high levels of inequality. The authors contrast three general approaches, aggressive patrol, coercive benevolence, and officer-assisted harm reduction, concluding that the latter faces better chances of improving community-police relations

10 It is the police prerogative to give trespass admonishments. If the person enters that area, she could be arrested and taken before a judge, who would have to decide on the trespass warning.

in this context of inequality. While this approach may improve community-police relations and reduce police violence, which would be a very important achievement, it still frames the problems facing low-income communities in a law-and-order framework and forgets that the expansion of the penal state is a product of political decisions in a context of socio-economic changes and a racial hierarchical structure. Many other authors argue that the problematic relations between the police and low-income communities of color are mainly due to the institutional practices, which promotes a warrior, militarized, and sometimes even racist culture inside police departments

(Barlow & Barlow, 2000; Bass, 2001; Champion, 2001; Epp, Maynard-Moody, & Haider-

Markel, 2014, 2017; Geller & Toch, 1996). Charles Epp and colleagues (2014), for instance, explain how the regular use of investigatory stops as an institutionalized practice accros police deparments in the United States, is responsible for the development of a sense of second-class citizenship among African-Americans who suffer these regular stops.

This institutionalist approach to policing provides important insights regarding police work and the tense relations between low-income communities and the police.

However, it posits the institutional practices of policing as the cause of the tense and negative relations that exists between nonwhite residents of low-income communities and the police. There is need for a more careful consideration on how the advancement of the penal state allowed for some of these problematic institutional practices to develop. The restructuring of the state, which took place in the last decades of the twentieth century, meant the substitution of welfare policies for penal policies, putting the police at the forefront of this process in particular regarding the control of low-

income communities of color. The conflict between the police and communities of color has been reshaped by this restructuring, and they are a symptom of the new era of social control rather than its cause.

Moving Beyond the United States and into Latin America

As we can observe, the vast majority of the works done regarding the expansion of the penal state, and many of the works addressing the problematic relations between the police and low-income communities are based on the United States’ experience.

Very few works directly address the expansion of the penal state beyond the United

States. David Garland (2001) in his seminal work explaining the origins and causes behind the development of this new penal approach, explains how this phenomenon took place not only in the United States but in Great Britain too, strengthening the argument that the advancement of neoliberalism, the retrenchment of the welfare state, and the consequently cultural changes, including an increase in crime, led to this new penal approach. Similarly, Löic Wacquant (2003) examined the expansion of the penal state in Brazil, arguing that the export of U.S. criminal justice and policing models have had a particular detrimental effect, due to the higher levels of poverty and inequality found in Brazil. Wacquant (2008) further compared the advancement of the penal state in the United States and France, arguing that while there are similarities in both cases, there are also important differences between these two countries. Contrary to France,

Wacquant argues, in the United States not only there were socio-economic changes that led to the penal state, but an actual policy directed to the abandoning of inner-city ghettos, leading to higher levels of repression compared to France.

French ethnographer, Didier Fassin (2011), closely examined the work of a police unit in the Paris’ banlieue, connecting the negative experiences residents of

these areas have with the police, with the broader socio-economic changes that took place in the last decades of the twentieth century. However, Fassin concentrates his work on the institution and culture developed inside Paris’ police rather than the experiences of banlieue residents. He highlights the warrior mentality inside this police unit and the criminalization of nonwhite residents of the banlieue, together with the tediousness of police daily work, which leads police officers to search for action in these areas.

Many of the scholarly work done on policing in Latin American in general, and in

Brazil in particular, suffers from the same institutional bias as the work done on policing in the United States. Scholars explain the issue of police violence and brutality by referring to institutional designs and failures of these designs, which allow police abuse to take place and go unpunished. These institutional problems include the lack of internal and external accountability, the insulation of the police from civilian overview, the military structure of the police, and the lack of investigative powers by the Courts

(Adorno, 2002; Adorno & Pasinato, 2009; Alvarez, Salla, & Souza, 2004; Brinks, 2003,

2006, 2008; Misse, Cristoph Grillo, Pinheiro Teixeira, & Elbas Neri, 2011; Pereira, 2008;

Trindade Maranhão Costa, 2011). Other works have pointed out to the legacy of authoritarian regimes as the reason behind police violence (Cano, Ribeiro, & Meireles,

2010; Cardia, 1997; Human Rights Watch, 2009). These works partially explain the reasons behind police violence in Brazil; however, they fail to address the effects of the socio-economic and racial structure, which has allowed for police violence to continue to exist, despite decades of democracy, and attempts at institutional reform, including the creation of mechanisms of accountability, such as the formation of Ombudsman offices

across Brazil. While many of these authors mention the socio-economic and racial context in which police violence takes place, as Daniel Brinks (2008) for instance does, they do not give these elements the central place it has played in transforming the police into a central actor in the lives of residents of low-income communities. A further example is the United Nations Introductory Handbook on Policing Urban Spaces (2011), developed by the United Nations Office on Crime and Drugs, which aknowledges the difficulties in policing areas with high levels of poverty and inequality, and the expansion of the informal market, but suggests solutions based on policing approaches, in particular those approaches developed in the United States, rather than addressing the structural conditions which led to the expansion of the penal state.11

Furthermore, these authors concentrate on the extreme cases of police killings and torture. While this is very important, and it represents the most blatant abuse by state agents, they do not represent the most regular encounter nonwhite residents of low-income communities have with the police. Several scholars justify their focus on police killings because this are the most egregious violation an indivudal could suffer, but also because quantifying police killings is much easier than quantifying the effects of more regular encounters individuals have with the police (Brinks, 2006, 2008; Chevigny,

1995; Trindade Maranhão Costa, 2004). This tendency to quantitfy, may lead authors to ignore the more routinary negative experiences residents of low-income communities have with the police, and the detrimental effects they have on the lives of these residents.

11 It is important to recall that the United Nations Office on Crime and Drugs still operates under the paradigm of the War on Drugs and has been very critical to Latin American countries’ attempts at drug legalization, in particular against Uruguay’s marihuana legalization program.

A further shortcoming in the literature on policing and police violence in Brazil and Latin America, has been the fact that scholars have analyzed this problematic phenomenon by positing the United States as a model to follow. A problem highlighted by Wacquant (2009a), who argues that the export of the U.S. penal state into Brazil and other parts of Latin America, has been facilitated, albeit unintentionally, by academics.

For instance, Mark Ungar (20011) argues that part of the problem regarding the police in Latin America is due to the incident-driven policing approach,12 in contrast to the community-oriented policing approach developed in the United States. Ungar suggests

Latin American countries should move towards the community-oriented policing. Similar conclusions and prescriptions were given by authors participating in the two edited volumes by Joseph Tulchin, Hugo Frühling, and Heather Golding (2003), and Joseph

Tulchin and Meg Ruthenburg (2006). Despite the fact that scholars have analyzed Latin

America’s police problems through U.S. policing lenses, there are very few works that explicitly compare the United States with Latin America. Paul Chevigny (1995) and

Arthur Trindade Maranhão Costa (2004) have done such work. Notwithstanding the fact that these two works address the ways in which socio-economic and political contexts affect policing, recognize the high level of police abuse in the United States, and have criticized U.S. police forces, their focus on police killings has led them to consider both cases as contrasting, or even opposite, cases, without considering the many similarities

12 Incident-driven policing approach indicates that the police will intervene when an incident requiring its attention takes place and the police is either called or police officer act when they see this happening. This contrasts with the community-oriented policing, in which the police are an active member of the community, learns the problems the community faces, and acts to prevent criminal behavior.

these two countries have when we expand our analysis to include the more regular encounters between the police and the community.

By expanding the analysis and considering the wide range of encounters between residents of São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A. have with the police, I show how these residents share similar negative experiences. Furthermore, as we have seen, and as Rod Brunson and Jody Miller (2006) state, while there is a large body of research that has examined police practices and police-community relations, the perspective of the residents of the communities most affected by the expansion of police powers is missing. Some authors have focused on the lives of nonwhite residents of low-income communities and their life-experiences (Denyer Willis, 2015; Feltran,

2011; Penglase, 2014; Vargas, 2006), and have addressed the tense and violent relations with the police, but these relations were not central to their work. In this work, following Victor Rios (2011), I attempt to close the gap in the literature by examining the effects of policing through the experiences and voices of residents of São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A.

Furthermore, similar to Victor Rios’s work, I situate the police at the center of the expansion of the penal state, showing how the retrenchment of the welfare state and the passage from a Fordist economy to a post-Fordist economy led to a reconfiguration of the state generating the development of the penal state. Moreover, I examine this by comparing the cases of São Paulo and Los Angeles in order to understand how similar changes in the socio-economic structure, influenced by the existence of a hierarchical racial structure, has led to the development of the penal state and the expansion of police presence and powers inside the communities most affected by these changes,

allowing us to better understand the reconfiguration undergone in the last decades with the development of global cities. By situating the police at the center of the penal state expansion, we can understand why, despite many instutional reforms, residents of these areas continue to go through regular negative experience leading them to redefine their racial identies, associating blackness with deviance, construct the notion of periphery as a place of lawlessnes and crime, and reinforce their second-class citizenship status. Furthermore, by analyzing the regular negative encounters residents of São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A. have with the police, I describe the systematic violations of rights these residents suffer, arguing that it is in peripheries were the penal state takes its most repressive forms, and, consquently, they should be considered as authoritarian enclaves.

Why São Paulo and Los Angeles?

In the second half of the twentieth century, Saskia Sassen (2001, 2014) argues, a series of changes inside the capitalist system greatly affected the configuration of particular urban spaces. The increase of displaced people in Sub-Saharan Africa and the growth of unemployment and incarceration in the United States, Sassen (2014) indicates, are local expressions of systemic dynamics that connect what may in the surface seem unconnected. The previous stage of global capitalism, during the first half of the twentieth century, while creating injustices, allowed for the growth of working- class and middle-income sectors that achieved social protections from the ills of capitalism. However, this new neoliberal capitalist stage, Sassen contends, is dedicated to the logic of expulsion. Through austerity programs, deregulation of labor and capital markets, as a result of global and national financial crises, people are expelled from employment, housing, and social protections. In the most extreme cases of war, millions

of people are displaced from their homelands. In less extreme, but not less tragic contexts, thousands are criminalized, left to live in impoverished and segregated ghettos, abused and killed by the police, and imprisoned. Alongside luxurious office buildings and expensive gated communities, a planet of slums continues to grow (M.

Davis, 2006).13

While oppressed and oppressors may seem to be separated by great distances, there are places, according to Sassen, where all comes together and where the oppressed are part of “the social infrastructure for power” (2014, p. 11). These places are what she calls global cities, which São Paulo and Los Angeles are examples of.

These global cities have acquired a new strategic role in the organization of the world economy, concentrating financial and managerial services, as well as high-tech development. At the same time, these global cities have become places in which the contradictions of the system and the ways these contradictions are managed can be fully appreciated. It is in global cities, such as São Paulo and Los Angeles, that we can observe the expansion of the penal state and the role the police play in this expansion.

The construction of walls, the privatization of public spaces, and the proliferation of surveillance technologies, Teresa Caldeira (2000) highlights, are transformations which many global cities have gone through. Many of the instruments used to enforce segregation in cities around the world have first developed in Los Angeles, Caldeira

(2000, p. 323) sustains, and these mechanisms have been exported into places like

13 “The cities of the future,” Mike Davis states, “rather than being made out of glass and steel… are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay” (2006, p. 19).

São Paulo. Juxtaposing both cases, Caldeira argues, can illuminate the different ways in which these processes of segregation and surveillance took place. Furthermore, Los

Angeles, as a consequence of a series of urban uprisings, has been at the forefront of police reform, including the development of community-policing strategies, and the creation of new mechanisms of accountability, including regular community-police meetings, gang task forces, and police overview boards. Practices that have been exported to many cities, including São Paulo.

Nonetheless, Los Angeles and São Paulo seem to be quite different. While discrimination and segregation of African-Americans took place in Los Angeles, slavery never took hold in the city, and there was no landed-oligarchy as the coffee planters were in São Paulo. The United States had no military dictatorship, and while a process of militarization of its police force has taken place in Los Angeles (Balko, 2013; M.

Davis, 1990; Lasley, 2012), LAPD was never part of an official military corporation, its officers lived in military barracks, nor did they operated inside the military judicial system. The police reforms developed in Los Angeles to improve police-community relations have been exported to São Paulo, but the reforms in São Paulo’s police has not been as widespread as in Los Angeles. However, as we shall see with greater detail in the next chapter, Los Angeles and São Paulo share a series of similarities which explain why residents of South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery share similar negative experiences with the police.

Both São Paulo and Los Angeles were insignificant towns until the second half of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century. A combination of natural resources, improvements in infrastructure, and the promotion by local elites of

their city’s capacity for development, led to a rapid industrialization process in both cities. With industrialization and the economic boom came immigration, creating a large working-class and a vibrant labor movement. At the same time, slavery in São Paulo and the increase migration into Los Angeles of African-Americans escaping Jim Crow and open segregation in the North, created a complex racial structure. This racial structure was made even more complex with the arrival of different groups of immigrants, in particular Mexicans in Los Angeles, forging a multiracial working-class, which went through attempts to construct a multiracial low-class coalition, and instances of racial and ethnic competition for work in the bourgeoning manufacturing sector.

Politicians and business elites responded to working-class demands through repression and cooptation. Labor leaders and organizers were persecuted and repressed by the police and their employers, and efforts were made to divide the working-class along racial and ethnic lines. At the same time, federal, state, and city authorities, together with business owners, offered different types of welfare programs to ameliorate the difficulties faced by the working-class. The presence of this large and multiracial working-class was always a source of tension in the city. Yet, the expansion of the manufacturing sector, the increased strength of unions, and the enactment of welfare programs, together with the regular repression, was able to control the pressure, despite a couple of working-class uprisings.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s in Los Angeles, and during the 1980s and

1990s in São Paulo, a series of socio-economic changes took place, which complicated the social situation of the lower-classes. Both cities went through a process of industrial transformation, in which traditional industries closed, giving way to new specialized

industries with low wages and meager social benefits. An increase in the service sector pushed many of the industrial, unionized, workers, into low-paid, nonunion jobs. The welfare programs receded, giving place to the expansion of penal policies as the response to the increase in social insecurity, the rise of crime and gang activity, and the growth of the informal sector. Inner-city ghettos and periphery areas suffered from greater abandonment, segregation, and the flight of those who had achieved some minimum of economic security. As economic insecurity and racial tensions grew, the state reconfiguration continued, leaving the criminal justice system, and the police in particular, to deal with the social ills created by this new stage of capitalist development.

It is the similarity in the historical evolution of these two global cities which allow us to study them together and observe how, despite some differences, similar effects are seen.

Method

In order to examine the consequences of the advancement of the penal state and the expansion of police powers in São Paulo and Los Angeles, I conducted extensive fieldwork across both cities during 2014 and 2015. In Los Angeles, I focused on South

L.A., in particular the areas of Watts, Newton, University Park, Leimert Park, Crenshaw, and Jefferson Park.14 In São Paulo, I concentrated my work in Jardim Ângela, Capão

Redondo, Osasco, and Jandira.15 These areas have been historically considered

14 These areas are low-income areas, with a majority of its population being Latino and African-American. The Latino population has greater percentage in all areas with the exception of Leimert Park and Crenshaw, in which African-Americans are still the majority.

15 These areas are low-income areas, part of São Paulo’s periphery or its greater metropolitan region, as it is the case with Osasco and Jandira to the West side of the city. These regions have an important concentration of favelas too.

dangerous regions,16 in which intensive policing has taken place and where recently attempts of new forms of policing, such as community policing, have been deployed.

Furthermore, scholars have shown that police violence and abuse is generally concentrated on low-income urban communities, where most of its residents are nonwhites (Alves, 2014, M. Davis, 1990, Feltran, 2010, 2011, Vargas, 2006).17 I spend almost six months in each city,18 in which I interviewed residents of these areas, as well as community leaders, activists, and police officers working in the region.

In Los Angeles, I began my fieldwork by attending community-police meetings as well as Neighborhood Council meetings.19 In these meetings I recruited the first participants for my research and through them I was introduced to other residents of these communities. Furthermore, I interviewed random people participating in public and community events in the different areas. Finally, I contacted police stations and interviewed officers working in the area, as well as neighborhood prosecutors. In São

Paulo, I conducted a similar approach. I attended community meetings and contacted community organizations, such as Santos Mártires, Sou da Paz, Fórum da Defesa da

16 Jardim Ângela, for instance, was considered one of the most violent regions in the world in the 1990s (Ponciano, 2004). The other regions in São Paulo have also been documented by different authors as being sites of high levels of violence including police violence (Feltran, 2010; Telles, 2010). The same can be said about the different areas of South L.A. (Schiesl, 1990; Vargas, 2006).

17 Zaid Jilani (2015) has analyzed D. Brian Burghart’s database on police killings in the United States and concluded that most police killings take place on low-income neighborhoods.

18 In the case of São Paulo, I conducted an exploratory fieldwork research for three months in 2014.

19 Neighborhood Councils are city-certified local groups made up of people who live, work, own property or have some other connection to a neighborhood. They receive public funds to support their activities, which include events and programs that respond to the needs of each specific community. The Neighborhood Council needs to have at least 20,000 residents inside its boundaries and to be created it needs to have between 200 to 500 residents’ signatures.

Vida, and the Human Rights Office at São Paulo’s Defense Attorney’s Office. I recruited participants at the meetings and through the different organizations above mentioned.

Participants would later suggest further informants. The demographic characteristics of the participants in both cities are as follow:

Table 1-1. Demographic characteristics of interviewees in Los Angeles (108 total interviews) African-Americans Latina/o White/Other Female (under 35) 10 (13.2%) 14 (18.4%) 1 (1.3%) Female (over 35) 5 (6.6%) 5 (6.6%) 1 (1.3%) Male (under 35) 9 (11.8%) 12 (15.8%) 1 (1.3%) Male (over 35) 6 (7.9%) 10 (13.2%) 2 (2.6%) Total 30 (39%) 41 (54%) 5 (7%) Police Officer/State 8 12 12 Official

Table 1-2. Demographic characteristics of interviewees in São Paulo (122 total interviews) Afro-Brazilian/Brown White/Other Female (under 35) 20 (23.8%) 10 (12.5%) Female (over 35) 8 (8.8%) 6 (7.5%) Male (under 35) 18 (21.3%) 9 (11.3%) Male (over 35) 9 (10%) 4 (5%) Total 55 (65%) 29 (35%) Police Officer/State Official 18 20

As a qualitative study, I do not claim to have a perfect sample of the community, but the interviews reflect the racial and ethnic distribution of the population in these areas.20

Most interviews took place in the area of residence of the participants, mostly in their homes or in a bar or coffee shop nearby. Some interviews took place in the locale of a community organization or school, and sometimes, especially if it was a group of

20 According to The Los Angeles Times, Mapping L.A. Project, in 2015, 56.7% of South L.A.’s population is Latino, 38% African-American, 1.6% Asian, and 2.2% white. Unfortunately, in the case of São Paulo’s periphery there is no official data regarding racial/ethnic distribution.

people, in the streets or parks. Most public officials were interviewed in their workplace or in a coffee shop. I interviewed many of the police officers in Los Angeles in the police station they worked. With some of them I participated in ride-along, where I spend between two to four hours with them during their work shift. In some occasions, I interviewed police officers outside South L.A., in particular those officers who preferred to remain anonymous. In São Paulo, after interviewing a couple of officers at the police station they worked, I decided to interview all police officers outside the area in which they worked. This was done in order to protect myself, as being seen entering a police station in areas in which I conducted interviews with residents could be dangerous.

More important, police officers did not feel comfortable to speak freely about their experience in their workplace, and they preferred to meet in other areas and remain anonymous.

Work Outline

In the following chapter, I will explain the process and reasons behind the development of the penal state, how this development led to an expansion in police powers, transforming the police into a central player in the lives of nonwhite residents of low-income communities. Next, I will review the history of São Paulo and Los Angeles, showing how these two insignificant cities became the most important industrial centers in their countries. The chapter will illustrate how this industrial development led to the formation of a complex class and racial structure. It will reveal the socio-economic transformations that took place in the second-half of the twentieth century, marking the passage from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economy, the retrenchment of welfare programs, and the development of the penal state. Chapters four to six will explain the different ways the negative encounters with the police affect the lives of São Paulo’s

periphery and South L.A. residents, and how residents of both cities share similar negative experiences. Chapter 4 will focus on how encounters between residents and the police affect the way residents define their racial identity; how blackness is associated with crime and deviance, and how police actions define who is a respected member of the community and who is a threat for the community and should be excluded from it. Chapter 5 concentrates on the ways in which violent police action defines space, constructs the notion of periphery, and determines residents’ place in society, both physically and symbolically. Furthermore, the chapter demonstrates that it is in peripheries where the penal state develops its most repressive features and consequently, they should be considered as authoritarian enclaves. Chapter 6 develops this last argument further. It examines the ways in which negative encounters with the police reinforce residents’ sense of second-class citizenship. It examines different police practices, from the most extreme cases of police killings, to more regular, lawful and supposedly benign encounters, such as police stops, and demonstrates how these practices generate a systematic violation of residents’ rights, reinforcing the description of peripheries as authoritarian enclaves.

Drawing on these chapters, the final chapter connects the empirical evidence with the first two theoretical chapters and shows how the expansion of the penal state has led the police to acquire a central role in the lives of São Paulo’s periphery and

South L.A. residents, generating the effects described in chapters four to six.

The mass imprisonment of low-income nonwhite individuals, the high levels of police violence, the constant harassment and abuse suffered by poor, nonwhite, residents of São Paulo and Los Angeles at the hands of the police, the criminalization of

poverty and blackness going on for decades in both cities, calls for significant and urgent changes. While criminal justice and police reforms are welcomed, they are not enough. Unless we address the socio-economic and racist roots, which have led to the development of the penal state, we will fail in our attempts at reform. More important, we need to hear the voices of those who are suffering the consequences of the penal state, if a solution will be found, it will come from them.

CHAPTER 2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PENAL STATE AND THE EXPANSION OF POLICE POWERS

“If the 55 percent of the estimated 800,000 current… prisoners,” James Wooten wrote in 1994 in the Heritage Foundation State Backgrounder, “were subject to serving

85 percent of their sentence, and assuming that [these prisoners]… would have committed 10 violent crimes a year, then the number of crimes prevented each year by truth in sentencing would be 4,000,000… 2/3 of the 6,000,000 crimes reported” (cited in

A. Y. Davis, 1998, p. 63). This rationale, which believes that by increasing prison terms crime would be reduced, became a central component of the new common sense that surrounds the development of the penal state. From a criminology perspective, it assumes that the response to crime and social disorder is to strengthen the punitive arms of the state by increasing the control, surveillance, and imprisonment of those deemed as a threat to the social order. The ideals of rehabilitation, which dominated criminological discourses in the first-half of the twentieth century, were replaced by a belief in incapacitation and just deserts, which led to a rapid increase of prison population, and developed new ways to manage millions of people, in particular members of low-income communities. This new approach has led the United States to become the country with the most amount of people in prison, 2.3 million people in

2017, above China, Brazil and Russia, and with the highest prison population rate with

666 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants.1 Furthermore, the overrepresentation of African-

1 These numbers have been compiled by the World Prison Brief and the Prison Policy Initiative.

Americans and Latinos in the prison population, shows how the hierarchical racial structure has influenced the development of the penal state.2

Mass incarceration has been one of the most salient outcomes of the development of the penal state. Yet, the penal state includes new modes of governing marginalized populations. It implies what Heather Schoenfeld (2018) calls a “carceral ethos”. This ethos is based on the idea that the risk of victimization is enough to sacrifice the liberty of a criminal offender; that criminals cannot be rehabilitated, and society has no responsibility in rehabilitating offenders; that crime is the consequence of individual choice and moral failing; that the protection against crime is worthier than civil liberties; and it includes long mandatory sentences, victims’ rights, community notification laws, a strong belief that prison works, and the expansion of police power and police presence, in particular in low-income communities of color. What explains the formation and development of this penal state? What is the role of race in the expansion of the penal state? And how has policing has been affected by this expansion? These are the questions this chapter will address. Furthermore, answering these questions helps us explain why the police has become a central actor in the lives of residents of São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A.

The penal state, with its particular approach to address the social problems created by the socio-economic transformations of late twentieth century capitalism, was developed in the United States and was later exported to other contexts going through similar structural changes, taking certain particular features according to each specific

2 According to the US Census Bureau, African-Americans represent 12.1% of the population but represent 37.9% of prison population. Latinos represent 17.6% of the population and 32.9% of the prison population according to data compiled by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

context. Consequently, this chapter will focus on understanding the penal state as it expanded in the United States, how it affected the development of policing, and the ways in which the logics of the penal state were exported to Latin America in general, and Brazil in particular. In the next chapter, we shall see how the historic evolution of

São Paulo and Los Angeles led to the development of the penal state in each city and the expansion of the police role in each city.

Defining the Penal State

David Garland (2001) explains that the field of crime control is more than society’s response to crime. It includes ways of controlling behavior and doing justice, an idea of social order and social control, and avenues to keep social cohesion and managing group relations. To analyze the penal state is not only about understanding the ways in which we can control crime, it is primarily about the remaking of society and its institutions for the production of order. The penal state, Garland contends, is the result of political choices and administrative decisions grounded in new structures of social relations and cultural sensibilities. Today’s practicing of policing, prosecution, sentencing, and penal sanctioning draw upon new forms of knowledge, very different from the ways in which the field of crime control operated during much of the twentieth century. Sentencing law, for instance, is no longer shaped by rehabilitation goals, and the rehabilitative possibilities of criminal justice measures are routinely subordinated to other penal goals, particularly retribution, incapacitation, and the management of risk.3

3 For most of the twentieth century, harsh and retributive penalties were widely criticized as practices that had no place within a modern penal system. In the last decades of the twentieth century, Garland (2001), shows, we have seen the reappearance of “just deserts” retribution as a generalized policy goal. This has established the legitimacy of an explicitly retributive discourse, which has made it easier for politicians to express punitive sentiments and to enact more draconian laws. Forms of public shaming and humiliation

The penal state is not only about the practices of law enforcement and crime control, it includes new ways of thinking about crime, social threat and social order.

Consequently, defining the penal state becomes a complex enterprise.

Furthermore, the particular features the penal state adopts depend much on the socio- historical context of each place. At a very basic level, we can define the penal state as the expansion and use of the punitive arms of the state as the almost exclusive way of governing the problems of social insecurity, which includes crime, but also deals with urban unrest and protest, unemployment, drug consumption, homelessness, mental health, social and racial hierarchies, among other similar phenomena. In other words, it refers to the restructuring of the state away from welfare provision into the use of punishment and law enforcement as the main tool for dealing with the social ills created by the socio-economic system and the racial structure.

As mentioned above, one of the main problems of the literature on the penal (or carceral) state is that it is almost exclusively based on the United States. The reason behind this, is that it was in the United States where the penal state developed.

Henceforth, much of the description in this section will be based on the United States example. Nonetheless, many of the features of the penal state have been reproduced in other places, and the essential feature of addressing social insecurity through punishment and repression can be seen in all places where the penal state has expanded.

that for decades have been regarded as demeaning are now valued because of their unambiguously punitive character (2001, pp. 8-9).

The penal sate includes an urgent emphasis upon the need for security, the containment of danger, the identification and management of risk. Protecting the community has become the dominant theme of penal policy. The prison has been restructured as a means of restraint, targeted in theory against violent criminals, but mostly affecting masses of minor offenders, in particular young people of color.

Probation and parole have become ways of control and risk-monitoring, rather than programs for re-entry, as the goal of rehabilitation was substituted by incapacitation.

“The call for protection from the state has been increasingly displaced by the demand for protection by the state” (Garland, 2001, p. 12 italics in original). The risk of unrestrained authorities, of arbitrary power and the violation of civil liberties are of less concern when it comes to deal with actual and potential criminals.

The assumption by criminologists and policy-makers that crime was a problem of social deprivation or relative deprivation, by which an individual became a criminal because they were deprived of proper education, or family socialization, or job opportunities, or proper treatment for psychological disorders, was abandoned. The theories that now shape official thinking and action are based on the belief that crime and delinquency are problems not of deprivation but of inadequate controls. Crime is conceived as a consequence of individual irresponsibility and immorality of the criminal.4 In this new framework, what is needed is better control, we need to reduce the opportunities criminals have to produce harm, and this includes greater surveillance and policing, stronger community controls, harsher punishments, and the incapacitation of

4 For Löic Wacquant there is a close link between the rise of neoliberalism and the theories that portray crime as individual choice (2009b, p. 1).

individuals by the prison institution.5 These new theories have a much more negative view of the human condition, they assume that certain individuals will commit crime if given the opportunity to do so. Crime is seen as normal, part of everyday life, and only through strengthening the mechanisms of control, can crime be prevented or at least reduced. The welfare of deprived social groups or the needs of maladjusted individuals are less important for this new way of thinking.

The penal state has become part of a new common sense, supported by a highly charged political discourse, where politicians compete for who is tougher on crime.

Before the appearance of the penal state, criminal justice was part of the welfare state, and the criminal subject was seen as a subject of need as well as guilt. Punishment was not the only tool available, social reform and welfare provision were seen as essential towards crime reduction by improving the conditions of the poor and enhancing social justice. Today, welfare provisions are seen as creating dependency problems, reinforcing anti-social behavior, and unrelated to crime reduction. Through a web of laws, regulations, and informal rules, all reinforced by social stigma, those incarcerated in the context of the penal state, are confined to the margins of society and denied access to mainstream economy (Alexander, 2012). Incarceration is far from being the sole or main expression of the penal state. As we shall see, the police have become a central institution in this new state of affairs. Vast numbers of people are swept into the criminal justice system through the actions of the police. In the context of increased

5 Community policing, crime prevention panels, Safer Cities programs, Crime Prevention through Environmental Design projects, Business Improvement Districts, Neighborhood Watch, are some of the examples brought by Garland to explain this new approach of crime control. This new infrastructure is oriented towards prevention, security, harm-reduction, fear-reduction (Garland, 2001, p. 16).

punishment and mandatory sentences, many of those arrested are convicted and incarcerated for long periods of time. Once incarcerated, as Michelle Alexander (2012) demonstrates, a set of controls and sanctions, formal and informal, are imposed outside of prison walls. “The carceral state,” Marie Gottschalk tells us, “includes not only the country’s vast archipelago of jails and prisons, but also the far-reaching and growing range of penal punishments and controls that lie in the never-never land between the gate of the prison and full citizenship” (2014, p. 289).

As a new mechanism of social control, the penal state expands beyond the confines of the criminal justice system. Jonathan Simon (2007) has described how crime has become the rationale for governing different aspects of social life. Criminal law and criminal justice institutions represent only the visible powers of the penal state.

Different forms of punishment have been developed in areas beyond criminal justice, including civil and administrative authorities (Beckett & Murakawa, 2012), or youth and school programs (Gascón & Roussell, 2016). The penal state has, according to Marie

Gottschalk, metastasized, altering the ways in which key government and public institutions operate, “from elections to schools to social programs such as public housing and food stamps” (2014, p. 289). In other words, the penal state is not only about law and punishment, it is about social policy writ large (Loury, 2013).

The Structural and Political Changes Leading to the Formation of the Penal State

The development of the penal state was not the inevitable consequence of uncontrollable natural and social forces. The penal state was the product of a series of political decisions, intentional and unintentional consequences of social movements and scholarly work, in the context of deep socio-economic transformations. The reconfiguration of political power in the United States in the second half of the twentieth

century, led to the restructuring of the state, receding from its welfare commitments and substituting them with a criminal justice juggernaut, which criminalized the social ills created by the advancement of capitalism and the existence of a hierarchical racial structure. As Löic Wacquant states (2009b), the criminalization of poverty was not an evil plan pursued by omnipotent rulers, or that systematic need led to the glorification of the penal sector. The construction of the penal state involved a myriad of agents and institutions seeking to reshape the state in accordance to their material and symbolic interests, not all of them favoring more and harsher punishment.

Angela Davis coined the term prison-industrial-complex to describe the phenomenon of mass incarceration and the penal state in the United States. Davis linked the development of mass incarceration with the economic interests behind it.

“Prisons,” Davis argues, “are identified for their potential as consumers and for their potential cheap labor” (2005, p. 21). The expansion of surveillance and policing, increases the pool of potential bodies for the punishment industry, rising the number of bodies to be exploited by that industry. Löic Wacquant (2009a) rejects the concept of the prison-industrial-complex as a reductionist way of understanding the expansion of the penal state. Mass incarceration, Wacquant indicates, is just one of the many new forms of governing “problem populations.” It is not the economic interests of a group of corporations tied to the prison industry that was, or is, the driving force behind the penal state and mass incarceration, and, while prison labor is severely exploited by different industries, no economic sector heavily relies on convict laborers.6 The economic

6 On September 9, 2016, the 45th anniversary of the Attica uprising, over 24,000 prisoners began a strike in approximately twenty prisons across the country, protesting the unfair use of prison labor, poor wages, and grave working conditions. The strike was coordinated by the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Free Alabama Movement. In January of 2018,

interests of those tied to the prison industry developed as a consequence of mass incarceration rather than being the driving force behind it.

To understand the formation and expansion of the penal state, we need to consider the socio-economic transformations that generated a restructuring of the state away from welfare programs, relying on judicial and penal institutions as a way of curbing the problems produced by the transformations inside the capitalist mode of production. Furthermore, we need to understand the cultural and political changes that favored this approach as a way of communicating norms and shaping collective representations and subjectivities. In short, as Wacquant (2009b) suggests, we should bring Marx and Durkheim together in order to comprehend the transformation and expansion of the penal field. Following this, Wacquant (2009b, pp. xvi-xvii) explains that the explosive growth of scope and intensity of punishment serves three interrelated functions. The penal state and mass incarceration has physically neutralized and warehoused millions of dispossessed members of stigmatized groups. At the same time, it imposed the discipline of unstable wage work among the working-class and the declining and insecure elements of the middle class. Finally, for the upper class as well as society as a whole, the penal state has served the symbolic mission of reaffirming the authority of the state and the will of political elites to emphasize and enforce the separation between commendable citizens and deviants, the “deserving” and

“undeserving” poor.7

Florida prisoners attempted to strike on Martin Luther King Jr’s Day protesting prison condition and prison labor. While the “prison-industrial-complex” may be misleading, prison labor exploitation is real for many inmates around the United States.

7 The penal state is not only about managing and oppressing a mass of displaced laborers, in particular nonwhite workers. Marx himself recognized the productive, moral and symbolic force of crime and criminal law (see Wacquant, 2009b, p. 30). The penal state has attempted to impose a neoliberal

During much of the twentieth century, in particular the first half of the century, a complex web of social control mechanisms worked to cope with the upheavals of commercial society. The development of working-class communities, the impact of work discipline, the presence of strong unions, as well as religious revivals, together with the law enforcement apparatus and welfare programs, are some of the factors mentioned by David Garland (2001) as the institutions which allowed the state to claim a measure of success in handling the dislocations of urbanization and industrialization. The social mores of the period, and the new apparatus of law enforcement tended to reinforce each other, despite the hostility between working-class communities and police. During this period, penal-welfarism, with its absolute commitment to rehabilitation, was the hegemonic policy framework.8 Two axioms marked this approach: first, social reform together with economic development would eventually reduce crime; and second, the state was responsible for the care of offenders as well as their punishment and control.

The criminal justice was part of the welfare state, and the criminal subject, especially if he was young, was seen as someone of need as well as guilt. By improving the conditions of the poor and enhancing social justice, crime could be controlled.9

discipline and has created new categories, such as “superpredators” or “feral youth.” It has created new bodies of knowledge about the city and its troubles, and how to manage and control the “dangerous zones.”

8 Penal-welfarism was based on the belief that penal measures ought, when possible, to be rehabilitative interventions rather than negative, retributive punishments.

9 Penal-welfarism focus on problems of individual maladjustment that were heavily concentrated among the poorer sections of the population, and which it attributed to poverty, poor socialization, and social deprivation. The problems it addressed were the classic pathologies of industrialized, unequal, class society. For Garland, it was these problems of destitution and insecurity, and the socio-political problems it engendered that brought the development of the social state in the early years of the century (2001, p. 44).

Penal-welfare policies, like the welfare state, were developed against a background of economic conditions that were favorable to welfare provision, public spending, and a measure of redistribution. The economic growth of the post-war decades, the improved standards of living enjoyed by many, the development of labor unions, which protected and advanced working-class interests, were important elements for the development of the penal-welfare approach. Social unrest and racial conflict were present, but there was a belief that these problems were temporary and could be solved through social spending and political reform.

A series of economic changes began challenging the socio-economic and political order created by the New Deal. Mark Blyth (2002) situates the beginning of these transformations during the Johnson administration (1963-1969) when inflationary pressures, reflected in wages and price increases, began challenging the nation’s social and economic approach. Business representatives, Blyth explains, began to develop a feeling of uncertainty fueled by the changing macroeconomic environment, the growth of grassroots organizations such as Common Cause,10 and the consumer rights movement. By the end of 1969, stagflation hit the economy, creating even more fear for business interests. Nixon’s announcement of a series of controls on wages and prices, conservatives and liberals alike were struck by the degree of government intervention and regulation proposed. Inflationary pressures, regulatory initiatives, hostile tax legislation, and general policy paralysis combined to create a sense of threat for business interests. Consequently, business reacted by seeking to replace the New Deal

10 Common Cause was created in 1970 by former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, during Johnson’s administration, John W. Gardner. Its goal was to promote civil and voting rights, and limit business influence in government.

order and favored a series of economic ideas that rejected state intervention in the economy in favor of the private market. Businessmen began creating a series of institutions to promote their economic ideas and interests. With the 1971 Campaign

Finance Reform Act, which allowed the formation of political action committees (PACs), facilitated business associations’ lobbying mechanisms. Beginning in 1978, in response to criticism from pro-market figures, business PACs began to shift resources from incumbents to challengers with a clear free-market bias (Blyth, 2002, p. 155).

Following Jimmy Carter’s 1980 electoral defeat, Reagan established economic task forces whose purposes were to come up with a package of economic reforms that would promote the cut of federal spending, would reduce government imposed barriers to investment, would transform social security and welfare spending, and at the same time it would build a strong national defense (Blyth, 2002). Part of this policy package was a full blow attack on labor. In 1983, Reagan was able to change the balance of power at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in favor of business interests. In

1984, the NRLB ruled constantly against labor, eliminating workers’ rights and weakening collective bargaining provisions of union contracts.11 While, labor was regulated, business was deregulated. Government intervention in the economy and welfare was defined as unquestionably bad. When the economy began to recover in the late 1980s and 1990s, the industrial recovery was concentrated in service sectors and high-tech industries. Employment was now divided between many low-paid, part-time,

11 On March 22, 1984, for instance, the NRLB ruled that a worker who left the place of employment to fetch medical assistance for another worker was voluntarily terminating employment. On June 7, 1984m the board found that an employer, or the employer’s agent, taking pictures of workers involved in union activities so that the employer could have a picture “to remember them by,” was not in any way guilty of harassing those workers. On June 13, 1984, the NRLB found that firing laid-off union supporters was legal (Blyth, 2002, p. 182-183).

low-skill, nonunionized jobs, and very few highly skilled, highly paid jobs. The life-time job security that industries and the public sector offered was gone, and workers were forced to become more mobile, more used to retraining and relocation. As we shall see in the next chapter, both in Los Angeles and São Paulo, traditional manufacturers transferred their production sites to areas in which labor costs were low, and new industries (high-tech, financial, and service) installed their plants creating the divisions just mentioned in the employment sector. The new economy created a distinctively stratified labor market, with high levels of inequality. At the top, there was a small workforce with high salaries and lucrative benefit packages, and at the bottom end of the market a mass of low-skilled, poorly educated, jobless people, many of them young, urban, and nonwhite, for whom unemployment became a long-term prospect. This was accompanied by a regressive tax structure and declining welfare benefits.

The changes brought by this new economic order known as neoliberalism are not only in the economic sphere. 12 Neoliberalism, as David Harvey (2005a) explains, is also a social theory; it envisions the way in which a proper state and society should work.13

One of its main elements is the sanctity of individualism.14 Personal and individual

12 David Harvey defines neoliberalism first as a political economic approach which argues that human well-being can be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices (2005a, p. 2).

13 The first experiment in the formation of a neoliberal state took place in Chile after Pinochet’s military coup on September 11, 1973. Backed by the US corporations, the CIA, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Pinochet not only developed a terror machine, killing, torturing and forcibly disappearing thousands of people, but developed the first neoliberal state. For more on the global development of neoliberalism see David Harvey’s (2005a) A brief history of neoliberalism.

14 As Margaret Thatcher, Great Britain’s Prime Minister (1979-1990), declared “[there is] no such thing as society, only individual men and women” (cited in Harvey 2005a, p. 23).

freedom in the marketplace is to be guaranteed, and each individual is held responsible and accountable for his or her own actions and well-being. This principle, as Harvey

(2005a) explains, extends into the realms of welfare, education, and health care. The success or failure of the individual is due to her abilities or lack thereof. This approach resonated well with the new approach in the criminal field, by which crime was seen as the choice of individuals and not the product of socio-economic structures, therefore, what was needed was greater deterrence, more control, and incapacitation. In the same way as new economic ideas were promoted by social and political actors favoring business, as Blyth (2002) demonstrated, new ideas regarding crime and crime control, began to make their way transforming the field of criminal justice.

The Attack on Penal-Welfarism

The challenge to penal-welfarism began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is interesting to notice that the initial attack on penal-welfarism came from critical thinkers and not conservatives. They criticized the arbitrary powers of criminal justice bureaucrats, which reinforced discriminatory tendencies and imposed the values of

Western capitalism and white middle-class.15 However, contrary to the conservative attack on penal-welfarism, some of the critics from the left advocated for broader social and economic change, empowerment of oppressed communities and abused groups, the decriminalization and use of voluntary, non-state methods for dealing with social problems. What some of these critics wanted was a radicalized version of social

15 Michel Foucault and Michael Ignatieff for instance, argued that the correctionalist approach was rooted in the structures of modern Western society. The report of the Working Party of the American Friends Service Committee, entitled Struggle for Justice, which was published in 1971, considered the individualized treatment model, the ideal reformers wanted to achieve, was theoretically faulty, systematically discriminatory in administration, and inconsistent with the basic concepts of justice (Garland, 2001, p. 54-55).

democracy, not less. At the same time, the call for reform, in particular the call to end indeterminate sentences, was also adopted by conservative scholars, such as James

Q. Wilson, who rejected the idea that crime could be reduced through social programs or economic redistribution, and advocated a neo-conservative approach to social issues

(Garland, 2001, p. 59).16 Wilson proposed harsh punishment as deterrence and would later be the mind behind the development of “broken windows” theory, which emphasizes the idea of harsh punishments and the elimination of criminogenic situations that allow criminals to commit crimes.17 In the following decade, the left-wing critique was overcome by the conservative approach which promoted more hardline policies of deterrence, predictive restraint and incapacitation, mandatory harsh sentences, and mass imprisonment.

Crime came to be regarded as a regular form of behavior, as a routine risk to be calculated. As mentioned before, the consequence of this approach, was the promotion of policies that limit the opportunities to commit crime, assuming that it is opportunity which creates the criminal, and not the other way around; and disconnecting the socio- economic structure from crime rates.18 The criminal cannot be changed, cannot be rehabilitated, he can only be incapacitated. And crime became strongly associated with specific urban spaces. The ghettos in the United States, the banlieue in France, the villa

16 Indeterminate sentencing and individualized treatment regimes came under heavy attack by mid- 1970s. In 1976 California passed a determinate sentencing law. Over the next two decades, fifteen states established sentencing guidelines, ten eliminated parole, and twenty-five enacted parole guidelines. Other countries began adopting the “just deserts” rationale too, as the 1990 White Paper and the Criminal Justice Act of 1991 in Britain show (Garland, 2001, p. 60).

17 Wilson believed that U.S. crime rates were high because the prospects of being caught, convicted and severely punished had become very low (Garland, 2001, p. 59).

18 Wacquant (2008) sustains that the availability of handguns, the exclusion from good jobs, and the prevalence of the drug trade have fuel the violence in these neighborhoods.

miseria in Argentina, or the favelas in Brazil, where the socio-economic problems concentrate, Löic Wacquant (2008) reminds us, are depicted as lawless zones or no-go- areas, in which vice and violence concentrates.19 As such, these places need to be put under constant surveillance and control. In the changes depicted above, these areas, already segregated by class and race, suffered from the dual movement of welfare retrenchment, followed by a budgetary backlash against programs directed to improving the living spaces and life of inner city residents, and the advancement of an intrusive and repressive state, with its expanded penal apparatus and police presence.20

In short, what took place in the last decades of the twentieth century was a series of trends that kept feeding each other. The privatization of public goods, the rise of unemployment and underemployment, precarious work conditions and working poverty; the dismantling of social protection provisions, including the fight against labor unions and collective bargaining; and finally, the development and expansion of the penal state apparatus, specially directed against the poor living in urban inner cores or peripheries, which concentrate disorder and despair produced by the restructuring of the state.

The claim from the left that rehabilitation was overly coercive did not imagine the shift towards the penal state, in the same way that the first proponents of fixed sentencing reform never imagined that a political competition of who would produce the longest mandatory sentences would take place. Progressive social movements, left

19 Löic Wacquant contends that the violence existing in these poor areas, is not the expression of the senseless pathology of its residents, but a response to the way in which the state enters and regulates these areas. It is a by-product of the state abandonment of these spaces (2008, p. 54).

20 Federal resources for urban development were cut during the Reagan administration (1981-1989) and Bush Sr. (1989-1993), including the end of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act job training program, the end of General Revenue Sharing, and of Urban Development Grants (Wacquant, 2008, p. 84).

radicals, and race liberals, unintentionally pushed forward the penal state, due to the historical and institutional constraints they faced when criticizing penal-welfarism and pushing for reform. They were outmaneuvered by political conservatives, helped by a wider reaction against the welfare state and the socio-economic transformations that took place in the 1970s. While many of the demands of these progressive groups could have been answered through an expansion of welfare policies, the dismantling of the

United States’ weak welfare state eliminated this possibility, and the demands were answered through harsh penal policies. It was reinforced by a discourse that portrayed poverty, in particular among African-Americans, as the result of culture and not of structural conditions. These discourses, which characterized poverty and crime as a problem of specific sub-cultures and individual responsibilities, completely detached from the socio-economic structure, became the hegemonic political discourse in the

United States and later in other places where similar socio-economic changes took place.21

The dramatic break in the approach to crime control, which took place in the

1970s, is product of a long process of political development, institutional change, and the United States evolving conflict over whether and how to incorporate African-

Americans into social, political, and economic life.

21 Michelle Alexander (2012) shows how Clinton adopted the discourse that portrayed poverty and crime as individual failures rather than systemic problems. Adolph Reed Jr. (2014) reaffirms Alexander’s claim and as Keeanga-Yamattha Taylor (2016) does, he demonstrates how Obama continued this approach, reinforcing racist stereotypes regarding African-American males’ responsibility for their communities’ problems, in particular crime and imprisonment, and poverty, as it was expressed by Obama during his campaign and his presidency.

The Politics Behind the Development of the Penal State

Vesla Weaver (2007) argues that the punitive policies of the penal state were the product of a process in which opponents of civil rights formed a powerful elite countermovement that framed the uprisings of the 1960s as crime issues, blamed the civil rights movement for promoting lawlessness across urban communities, and was able to set the political and electoral agenda around the issue of crime. While Weaver recognized that tough-on-crime campaigns predate the 1960s, the 1960s’ campaign for more punitive policies was unique. The 1964 Civil Rights Act ended Jim Crow, but those who had supported Jim Crow were able to move crime and criminal justice into the agenda by focusing on crime and riots. They were able to define racial disorders as criminal, connected black activism with criminality and asked for tougher crime control measures. Playing on the anxieties of white southerners, political brokers, in particular

Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, were able to push the federal government to expand their involvement in crime control. In March 1965, Johnson issued his first speech on crime and sent an anti-crime program to Congress. The most important proposal was the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which provided a three-year pilot program of federal aid to states and localities for improving crime control practices.

However, Johnson remained committed to the framework of penal-welfarism and rehabilitation.

The urban uprisings of 1965 gave fuel to those promoting the tough-on-crime agenda. These uprisings coincided with the popular perception that crime rates were rising. Conservatives accused civil rights leaders of producing this crime wave arguing

that their promotion of civil disobedience led to lawless behavior in urban areas.22 At the same time, they were able to claim that the urban uprisings had nothing to do with civil rights but that they were street lawbreakers looting and rioting. Furthermore, they contended that the urban uprisings had nothing to do with poverty, as they took place in those cities in which African-Americans enjoyed civil and political rights as well as better economic conditions as it was the case in Los Angeles. What was needed, these politicians argued, was better crime control and harsher punishments.

The success of conservative politicians to establish the connection between crime and riots and civil rights activism with lawlessness left political liberals with a complex dilemma. According to Weaver (2007), liberals could reject the conservative paradigm, arguing that the riots were legitimate protests against inner-city conditions, which risked the appearance of accepting violence, or attempt to separate the urban uprisings from the civil rights movement. They chose the latter strategy, which ended serving the conservative agenda of pushing for more crime control policies. Taking advantage of the anxieties produced by the salience of crime, the urban unrests, and the challenges to the hierarchical racial structure; conservative politicians offered a clear and straightforward message, what is needed is more crime control. In a 1968 pamphlet entitled “Crime and Delinquency – A Republican Response,” Republicans argued that improved economic and social conditions, as proposed by the Great Society approach, will not reduce crime (Weaver, 2007, p. 251). By the 1970s, the welfare approach to crime and urban decay was abandoned by Democrats in favor of a more punitive

22 Herman Talmage (D-GA), for example, declared that “mob violence such as we have witnessed is a direct outgrowth of the philosophy that people can violate any law they deem to be unjust or immoral or with which they don’t agree” (cited in Weaver, 2007, p. 248).

approach. Having learned from Ronald Reagan’s use of law and order in his campaign in California, Nixon transformed law and order as the centerpiece of his campaign.

The problem with Weaver’s argument is that it does not fully consider the institutional development which allowed for the penal state to develop with little political opposition. It was not only the opposition to incorporate African-Americans as full citizens that created the penal state. Political opportunism and ideological zeal, Marie

Gottschalk (2006) explains, were mediated by interest groups and movements, not all of them conservatives, and by an institutional context that was highly receptive to the establishment of the penal state.

According to Marie Gottschalk (2006), the preoccupation with law and order and tough-on-crime campaigns in the United States are as old as the early days of the state.

However, early appeals against lawless or deviant behavior lacked the state capacity to produce the effects they produced in the 1970s.23 Over time, “as each campaign receded, the institutions it created did not necessarily disappear. Rather, the institutional capacity of the government expanded” (Gottschalk, 2006, p. 7). Central to this expansion was a series of federal policies in the 1960s and 1970s that increased the state’s penal capacity. In 1968, for instance, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe

Streets Act was passed, which created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration

(LEAA). The LEEA provided grants for states and local authorities to develop law enforcement programs, allowing law enforcement agencies to “go on huge shopping

23 Throughout the history of the United States, there were campaigns against alcohol, prostitution, gambling, and other disorderly behaviors.

sprees as they purchased all kinds of policing and military hardware and established special units, most notably SWAT teams” (Gottschalk, 2006, p. 86).

At the same time, a series of social movements affected the way in which crime policy was shaped. The 1970s victims’ rights movement played an important role in expanding the penal state. The weakness and weakening of the welfare state did not allow the state to respond to the victims’ movement through welfare policies, as it did happen in Britain, Germany and the Netherlands (Gottschalk, 2006). Instead of promoting victims’ wellbeing through welfare programs; or regarding crime as a conflict between two parties, both of whom need to be treated, and incorporating victims in the rehabilitation process of the offender; a more punitive approach was favored. Penal conservatives, Gottschalk (2006) demonstrates, successfully framed the issue as a zero-sum game that posited the rights of victims against the rights of offenders. The approach to victims’ claim was one based on the idea of just deserts, that offenders should be punished based on how much punishment they inflict on society and on individual victims; and that the criminal justice system should be more responsive to the plight of victims. Gottschalk also shows how more progressive movements, such as the women’s movement, which fought to reduce rape and gender violence got funneled through a political and institutional context which sought in punitive measures the answer to these social problems. The historical underdevelopment of the welfare state; the development of the public prosecutor in the United States, where many of them are elected and were forced to respond to the victims’ movement or risk being voted out of office; and the long history of moral crusades that helped build the law enforcement

apparatus, all helped create the institutional context that favored the expansion of the penal state.

This context combined with the dismantling of the welfare state and the development of a neoliberal governance, which posited that social problems, poverty, and crime were the product of individual choices and individual immorality, as well as the lack of control mechanisms, in particular in low-income communities, which developed a culture of dependence on the state, helped expand the penal state.

Race and the Penal State

In a similar way in which capitalist development was associated with slavery and racism,24 the development of the penal state had a strong connection with the evolution of race politics in the United States. Several authors have argued how racism has been used to fuel divisions among the working class and avoid the formation of any possible broad interracial working-class coalition, which could challenge the system.25 As

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2016) argues, racism has been one of the most fundamental challenges to the development of class consciousness in the United

States.26 In a similar way in which racism was used to divide the working-class, racism

24 Marx, for instance, explored the connection between the U.S. South cotton plantations and the development of the textile industry in Britain (1990 [1867], 2016 [1862], 2016 [1864]). In an article published by Die Presse, on February 4, 1862 Marx states that “Liverpool’s commercial greatness derives its origins from the slave trade. The sole contribution with which Liverpool has enriched the poetic literature of England are odes to the slave trade” (2016 [1862], p. 74).

25 W.E.B. Du Bois (1998) mentions the use of racism as one of the mechanisms to bring down radical reconstruction, rally support behind the implementation of the Black Codes and later to implement Jim Crow. Similarly, Manning Marable (2000), in his work on how capitalism underdeveloped black America, argues that racism was used as a tactic to avoid any interracial working-class coalition. Stanley Greenberg (1980) demonstrates who the use of racism to break possible working-class interracial coalitions was used as a way of reducing the bargaining power of labor.

26 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2016) explains that capitalism, as an economic system based on the exploitation of the many by the few, it requires various political, social, and ideological tools to divide the majority of the oppressed, and racism is a strong ideological tool to provoke these divisions.

was central for the development of the penal state. Contrary to the times of slavery or

Jim Crow, racism was purposefully concealed and hidden, but very much present, in the politics behind the penal state (Alexander, 2012; Russell-Brown, 2004, 2009; Weaver,

2007).

While the penal state affects society as a whole, it particularly affects poor and working-class communities. Blacks and browns are overrepresented among the ranks of the poor, henceforth they are particularly affected by the expansion of the penal state.

Vesla Weaver (2007) argues that the development of the penal state was not about crime fighting, but rather responded and moved the agenda on racial equality. As we saw above, the defeat of the opponents of civil rights created a countermovement that was able to play into white anxiety generated by the urban uprisings of the mid-1960s and tied the rise in crime and riots to the lawlessness promoted, according to these accounts, by civil rights activists, and forwarded draconic criminal laws and criminal policy, which became the basis for the expansion of the penal state. They disassociated the urban riots from its racial and socio-economic roots, equated it with crime, and asked for federal intervention to protect law and order. The 1968 pamphlet on crime and urban disorder, produced by Republicans argued, between other things, that improved socio-economic conditions would not reduce crime (Weaver, 2007, p. 251). By 1970s the Democrats echoed similar arguments.27 By framing racial uprisings as criminal and arguing for criminal legislation as a response, they promoted the development of the penal state increasing law enforcement resources, augmenting punishment, and mass

27 Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) stated that “Along with the civil right to vote, go to school, and have a job is the right not to be mugged, robbed, or assaulted” (cited in Weaver, 2007, p. 252).

incarceration. Racism, embedded in the social structures, has always served as a rationale for reactionary policies. The fear of crime, Angela Davis (1998) argues, has attained the same status as the fear of communism had in the 1950s. The representation of the criminal in a racialized manner representing society’s enemy has been mobilized to rally the support for more punitive actions.

The “punitive containment of the black (sub)proletariat” Wacquant indicates

(2008, p. 3) appears as the most salient cause of urban marginalization. The racially skewed and market-oriented policies promoted since the 1970s, aggravated and trapped poor blacks at the bottom of the spatial order, and it was the penal state which developed as the way of coping with these urban outcasts.

Yet, as Heather Schoenfeld (2018) argues, the fact that the penal state serves as a way of controlling poor black people is not enough for us to understand how race or racism has led to the development and maintenance of the penal state. Race has shaped policymakers’ attitudes and understandings of the problem of crime and urban uprising. Race has been central to the way in which society is organized and rule. The argument that conservative politicians in the 1960s favored harsh crime policies as a way of reconstructing Jim Crow, not only misses some important points in the development of the penal state, but ascribes to these politicians an overarching power that they did not have. As we saw, the penal state was the product of policymakers’ decisions and social movement activism in a particular institutional and political context which led to the construction of this penal state. However, not all policymakers involved in the construction of the penal state were conservatives, and not all federal policies developed to increase the nation’s capacity to enforce the law were directed against

African-Americans. For instance, during the 1920s and 1930s, Marie Gottschalk (2006) shows, the federal government developed a series of anti-lynching campaigns and legislations, fiercely opposed by Southern politicians and even from anti-lynching and civil rights group, which saw federal intervention as a violation of state rights. However, the kidnapping of the son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh, in March 1932, changed the public view on the role of the federal government in crime control and allowed for the expansion of federal and state law enforcement which would take place during Franklin

D. Roosevelt’s administration.

Henceforth, rather than thinking of race and racism exclusively on terms of racial resentment, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (1997) suggests, we should think of it in structural terms or “racialized social systems.” This term refers to the ways in which the economic, political, social, and ideological levels are partially structured by the placement of actors in racial categories. “The placement of people in racial categories involves some form of hierarchy that produces definite social relations between the races” (Bonilla-Silva, 1997, p. 469). Those at the top of the racial hierarchy benefit economically, socially, culturally, and politically more than those at the bottom. The particular expressions of this hierarchical structure change through time. During slavery and Jim Crow it was achieved through dictatorial means, but in the post-civil rights period this domination has been hegemonic, going from overt and eminently racist to covert and indirectly racist. Changes and challenges to the racial hierarchy receive different responses, but they are influenced by the previous context. In other words, the early criminalization of blackness as part of the development of white supremacy led to the use of criminal justice as part of the response to the incorporation of African-Americans into society.

For instance, Naomi Murakawa (2014) demonstrates how liberal Democrats crime control policies in the 1940s fostered the notions of black criminality providing part of the foundation for national crime control policy. At the same time, the link produced between blackness and criminality continued to be reproduced through the penal state, even when politicians or activists sought this policies to assist African-American communities. The support by members of the black community for tougher laws against crack-cocaine, for example, was in response to what they saw as a deep problem affecting their communities. Due to the penal state ideology that social problems are to be solved through criminal policy, and the influence of the racial hierarchical structure, the policies designed affected African-Americans disproportionately.

The Penal State and the Expansion of Policing

With the approach promoted by the penal state, in which social problems are framed as law and order problems, where the focus has been on increased surveillance and control, risk management, and reducing the opportunity for actual or potential criminals to commit crimes, the police have come to play a central role.28 The fading away of the state in the promotion of social programs has given place to an increase role of the punitive arms of the state.

As mentioned above, the new approach to criminality and crime control was based on the notion that crime was a consequence of inadequate controls. James Q.

Wilson, for instance, advocated for a new approach to crime control based on harsh

28 From broken windows, to hot-spot policing, to community-policing, the new policing approaches, developed in the context of the penal state, emphasize the idea that crime is inevitable and it is the role of the police to surveil those areas in which crime has greater probabilities of taking place, due to its physical decay, gang presence, homelessness, and other social problems. Police goal is to learn about the space and its residents, and develop mechanisms of surveillance and control to reduce the threat these places posit to society at large.

punishment as deterrence. Together with conservative criminologist, George Kelling, they developed the theory that would guide much of policing in this new era. In 1982, these authors published an article in The Atlantic titled “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” In that article, Kelling and Wilson analyze why the presence of patrol officers in the streets of Newark led residents to feel safer, even though crime rates remained unchanged. The authors argued that people are afraid of “disreputable or obstreperous” people, and patrol officers pushed these people away, elevating the level of public order in these neighborhoods. Officers would divide the community between “regulars” and “strangers,” and would punish anyone who violated a series of informal rules: talking to or begging from people waiting at the bus stop was forbidden and they would be arrested for vagrancy; if a dispute between a business owner and a customer identified as “stranger” broke out, business owners would be protected by the police; noisy teenagers were told to be silent. Kelling and Wilson linked these disorderly behaviors with crime, and sustained that by punishing these behaviors and expelling the

“strangers” the community would not only feel safer but would be safer. Moreover,

“regulars” should also be punished if they violate the social order.29

In the same way as an unrepaired broken window is a sign that nobody cares and would lead to more broken windows, Kelling and Wilson argued that unless minor crime or disorderly behavior is punished, more violent criminal activities would take place.

29 On chapter 4, we shall see how the police constructs the idea of community by defining who is a respectable member of the community and has the authority to participate in the creation of communal norms, and who is not a respectable member of the community, and, therefore, should be surveilled, controlled and even expelled.

Unattended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things… Because of the nature of community life in the Bronx – its anonymity, the frequency with which cars are abandoned and things are stolen or broken, the past experience of “no one caring” – vandalism begins much more quickly than it does in staid Palo Alto, where people have come to believe that private possessions are cared for, and that mischievous behavior is costly. But vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers… are lowered by actions that seem to signal that “no one cares” (Kelling & Wilson, 1982).

Kelling and Wilson’s analysis resonated well with the new approach to social problems and criminality in particular. Crime was not anymore a problem of absolute or relative deprivation but was the product of lack of surveillance and deterrence. It disconnected crime from the socio-economic structure, and, following conservative tropes, argued that the breakdown of communal and family control, and the lack of punishment for minor offenses allow for criminal activity to take place. What is needed is more police presence and harsher punishment for minor offenses as a way of crime deterrence. In other words, what is needed is a zero tolerance policy for any behavior considered as deviant.

This approach to crime control combined well with the development of community-policing strategies across police departments in the United States, which began in the 1970s and continues until today. Community-oriented or problem-oriented policing, commonly referred to as “community-policing,” emerged as a response to the social conflicts of the 1960s. The civil rights movement protests and the urban uprisings of the 1960s led to violent clashes with the police. Police departments were looking for new avenues to improve their work in low-income communities of color and sought the answer in the development of community-policing strategies.

Community policing meant that police officers would move beyond their role as crime fighters, and take a variety of roles in the community, promoting a more positive presence in these areas by promoting order maintenance, service, and seeking solutions to solve community problems. As James J. Chriss (2016) explains, this new approach meant that officers should not only learn the last policing techniques, but also receive training on how to become counselors, psychologists, social workers, and sociologists if needed. As Kelling and Wilson (1982) sustained, efforts should be directed not only to reduce crime, but to reduce the fear of crime. Chriss described four basic elements in community policing under the acronym SARA, which stands for

Scanning, meaning the identification of community problems to be addressed; Analysis, which requires collecting information and analyzing the data; Response, which implies developing a strategy to address the underlying conditions of community problems; and

Assessment, which examines the effectiveness of the intervention or response (2016, p.

37). Beyond these four basic components, community policing attempts to actively shape the community norms and standards in coordination with the community and become community leaders.

Framed as law and order issues, the social problems affecting the community are to be solved through policing. If, as Kelling and Wilson (1982) contended, the breakdown of communities was related to the failure of existing mechanisms of control to establish order and generate deterrence, then what was needed was the expansion of police presence and powers in order to produce this order and deterrence. And this was developed through community-policing strategies, which transformed the police into administrators of communal life.

This supposedly new role of policing as administrators of social life is far from novel and can be found in the origins of the concept of policing back to the collapse of feudalism (Neocleous, 2000). With the growth of trade and industry, the development of towns, and the weakening of traditional forms of authority, an overall concern with the increasing social disorders, led to the search for new means and practices for the constitution of political order. The idea of police, as the concept denoting the necessary regulations to promote the general welfare and the good order of the community, was developed first in France and then across Continental Europe. In its concern with social order amidst the breakdown of traditional authority, the police encompassed a wide array of affairs, including the means of comfort, public health, food, weddings and funerals, clothing codes, the behavior of citizens, the performance of trades, and public security, among other things. From its origins, the police’s main concern was not with criminal activity but with activities potentially damaging to the community. Included in these damaging activities, was the welfare of the population. The poor were seen as a threat to the social order and as such they needed to be policed. 30 This meant the police would intervene in society’s economy in order to prevent artificial shortages and price oscillations, satisfy basic subsistence needs of the population, and avoid riots.

With the advent of liberalism, the role of police would begin to be limited, and the rule of law became the new way of constructing and imposing social order. Afraid of state encroachment into individuals’ lives, different liberal thinkers began to limit the concept of police and its role. Kant, for instance, argued that the main role of the police

30 The poor were associated with a series of disorderly behavior, such as begging, crime, gambling, and drinking; consequently, they needed to be under surveillance (Neocleous, 2000, p. 17).

was “to prevent the violence of which citizens stand in mutual fear, in order that each may pursue his vocation in peace and security” (cited in Neocleous, 2000, p. 30).

Establishing the rule of law over police became a common theme in the United States.

Madison and Hamilton proposed a vision of the state which gave prevalence to law over politics and thus limited the role of police within the framework of the rule of law

(Neocleous, 2000, p. 31). The old idea of police as the administration of good order and development of social life, became replaced by an idea of police as the enforcer of law, limiting its role in society. The concept of police, which included the view that the population needed to be protected from the ravages of commercial society and that policing the means of subsistence would achieve order, was replaced by one in which the police focused on crime prevention and internal security, allowing self-interested and economically independent individuals to pursue their own happiness.

For liberals, capital-labor relations, were presented as free and independent.

However, as Marx (1978 [1844]) taught us, this freedom and independence is only an appearance, as the need for subsistence forces the worker to sell his labor-power in the market. Liberalism was able to ignore the fact that private property was an exercise of power, which created a hierarchical system, hidden under the formal equality given by the rule of law. The disciplinary logic of police was being transferred by the disciplinary logic of the market. What was needed in this new society was a force able to provide security and implement the law, in particular, the protection of private property established in the law. The mechanisms and practices by which the police would enforce and protect the law and attempt to achieve security would vary across time and place. However, the idea of the police as provider of security, protecting private

property, and enforcing the law, would continue throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.

In the 1970s, together with the development of the penal state, the role of policing in society was reformulated. The police would still focus on providing security, protecting private property, and enforcing the law, but now the police would again be in charge of administering social life, in particular in low-income communities of color.

However, contrary to its origins, the police would not intervene in the economy in order to guarantee the welfare of the poor. In the framework of the penal state, the problems low-income communities face are assumed not to be a product of the socio-economic structure, but a product of the lack of control and deterrence as expressed in the broken-windows theory, and it is the police which need to develop strategies to increase control and deterrence, by shaping communal norms, by expelling “strangers,” and becoming community leaders, social workers, mental health workers, neighborhood conflict mediators, and educators. Broken-window theory has been rebranded as

“quality-of-life” policing, by which the police are in charge of addressing the problems affecting the quality of life of the community, defined not as socio-economic, but as issues of disorder and deviance. Those same disorderly “strangers” who needed to be punished under the broken-windows theory, are now being punished under the “quality of life” rubric. As Alex S. Vitale (2005) explains, quality-of-life policing is based on the same premises of broken windows theory, which believes that strategic and sustained targeting of disorder and minor quality of life violations are key to prevent more serious crime. Stop and frisk, zero tolerance, investigatory stops, increased surveillance, the

creation of new laws, rules and regulations, are all tactics used by the police in the quality-of-life approach.

The new police approach works through expulsion and exclusion, as much as it works through an ongoing effort to build internal controls of neighborhoods and to encourage communities to police themselves. As municipalities and local governments cut social services intended to reduce the detrimental effects of poverty, the police are deployed to control those most affected by these measures. In the segregated urban ghettos and peripheries, black and brown residents live under the dual fear of crime and police violence, not knowing to whom to ask for protection. For the young residents of these areas, the police have become the middle-man between them and a society that rejects them.

In the context of the development of the penal state, the police have become a destructive and productive force, in particular across low-income communities. Through a series of behaviors, some of them violent some of them not, the police have disrupted communities by killing, abusing, or massively arresting community members, and in this process, they have contributed to the construction of race, space, and citizenship status, as I shall explore in the following chapters.

The Export of the Penal State to Latin America and Brazil

Löic Wacquant (2009a) argues that the policies developed in the context of the penal state, in particular the zero tolerance and broken windows approach, have propagated across the globe. In 1998, Mexican President, Ernesto Zedillo, launched a

“National Crusade against Crime,” with a series of tough-on-crime measures with the goal “to imitate programs like ‘zero tolerance’ in New York City” (cited in Wacquant,

2009a, p. 20). In 2002, a group of businessmen, with the support of local politicians,

hired Rudi Giuliani and his consultant team to come to Mexico City, investigate the causes of crime, in particular in downtown area, and developed a program to reduce criminal activity (D. E. Davis, 2007). Giuliani’s proposal for Mexico City was the development of broken windows and zero tolerance policies, together with the creation of new private police initiatives, to eliminate street dwellers, illegal vendors, and allow, according to Diane Davis (2007) the development of real estate business in the downtown area.31 Moving further south, in September 1998, the minister of justice and security of the province of Buenos Aires, León Arslanian, declared that the province would begin applying “the doctrine elaborated by Giuliani,” (cited in Wacquant, 2009a, p. 20), and will transform a series of abandoned industrial warehouses into detention centers. A year before, in 1997, William Bratton, a firm proponent of zero tolerance and broken windows, was offering his expertise in Brazil and in Venezuela in 2001

(Goodman, 2013). In 2009, Giuliani Security and Safety consultant company, created by

Rudy Giuliani in 2001, formed a partnership with the Investigative Management Group, led by former DEA agent and Giuliani campaign advisor Robert Strang, and began working in Rio de Janeiro in preparations for the 2016 Olympic Games hosted at that city (Lasusa, 2015). Broken-windows and zero tolerance, the campaigning on tough-on- crime platforms, the enactment of tougher sentencing laws, the construction of prisons, and the expansion of prison population, in other words, the main components of the penal state have spread across Latin America since the 1990s.

31 Since he left office in 2001, Giuliani and his consultant company, Giuliani Security and Safety, have been travelling the Americas promoting his tough-on-crime approach. He has given seminars on security issues in Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, and Puerto Rico (Lasusa, 2015).

Similar to what happened in the United States, the development of neoliberalism in Latin America, which began to take shape in the 1970s and 1980s first in Mexico and

Chile, and later during the 1990s in the rest of the continent, included the reduction on social spending and the dismantling of social programs and corporatist state structures, the privatization of state enterprises and services, the rise of the informal market, was followed by a rise on crime and insecurity. Following the belief that crime can only be fought through tough on crime policies, penal populism emerged across the continent, with politicians calling for, and enacting harsher crime control measures (Chevigny,

2003). According to Markus-Michael Müller, many cities across Latin America developed “urban renaissance projects to recuperate public spaces in the historic city centers and other urban areas that are considered to be of tourist or economic interest”

(2012, p. 61), and part of the strategies to do this were articulated under “quality of life policing,” meaning the application of zero tolerance or broken windows policing strategies.

The expansion of the penal state in Latin America has not only included the extensive policing of marginalized sectors of the urban population. It has also led to the toughening of existing laws; the lengthening of sentences; the introduction of mandatory minimum sentences for activities related to organized crime, such as kidnapping or drug trafficking; and the creation of new laws targeting informal activities associated with low- income sectors, such as street vending, informal parking attendance or in some Central

American countries, having a tattoo (Müller, 2012, p. 62).

Markus-Michael Müller (2012) adds a further element in the emergence and development of the penal state in the region, the export of the war on drugs. This

development has contributed to the growing militarization of policing, and the conditioning of US development aid to the introduction by Latin American countries of mandatory minimum sentences and new drug laws into their penal codes. The 1986

Omnibus Anti-Drug Abuse Act, for instance, established an annual process of certification by which countries are to be classified as cooperating with United States counter-narcotic goals and practices or not. By being classified as a non-cooperating country, the country risks not only losing U.S. aid, but also U.S. sanctions through international agencies. In 1988, the United Nations Treaty on Narcotic and Psychotropic

Substances required signatories to criminalize possession of illicit drugs for consumption (Corva, 2008), which further develop the penal state in the region.32 The

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, for instance, has been instrumental in developing urban policing tactics with the assistance of U.S. based scholars (United

Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2011).

While the dramatic welfare cutbacks that took place in the United States, as highlighted by Garland (2001) and Wacquant (2009b), did not take place in Latin

America, and social expenditures in the region rose with the arrival of left-wings governments in countries such as Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil, there was no reversal of the penal state. The penal state, and in particular its policing approach, have come part of a new common sense, in which, despite increase in social programs, the conception that crime and urban violence should be solved through tough-on-crime policies

32 Uruguay’s recent legalization of marihuana has been harshly criticized by the International Narcotics Control Board, which was created to monitor countries’ compliances with drug laws, and has served as an instrument, and the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime; both instruments in the international war on drugs.

continues to be reproduced and reinforced. The institutional arrangements and practices developed through the expansion of the penal state are resilient, and the social policies created have not generated broad social coalitions to produce a critical challenge to the penal state.

In the case of Brazil, some of this has to do with the hierarchical racial structure that is still in place. While after the abolition of slavery, there was no legal segregation in

Brazil, as it did happen in the United States, the racializes social system that developed in Brazil posited Afro-Brazilian at the lower-echelons of society and a process of criminalization of blackness also took place (Alves, 2014; Andrews, 1991; Bastide &

Fernandes, 2008 [1959]; Hasenbalg, 1999; Vargas, 2011).

As Peck (2003) and Wacquant (2009a) explain, while Latin America’s development of the penal state shares similar features with the United States, some of its characteristics are contingent to the political, institutional, social and racial structures of each place. As we shall see in the case of São Paulo, for instance, policing has taken much more violent features than in Los Angeles, although residents of these two cities share similar negative experiences.

In the next chapter, I will explore the historical development of São Paulo and

Los Angeles, showing the process by which these two cities became centers of industrial development, emphasizing the formation of their class and racial structures, and the late twentieth-century socio-economic changes, which led to the expansion of the penal state in both cities. The chapter will also analyze the progress of policing in each city. The following chapters will examine how the negative encounters residents of

São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A. have with the police, have influenced the manner

in which they define racial (and communal) identities, their sense of space and place in society, and the reinforcement of a second-class citizenship status.

CHAPTER 3 FROM SMALL TOWNS TO MEGACITIES: THE URBAN DEVELOPMENT OF SÃO PAULO AND LOS ANGELES

How did two small irrelevant towns, far away from the political and economic centers of their respective countries during colonial times, became economic and political centers for their nations and the world? What were the political, social and economic changes that allowed the police to have such a prominent role in the lives of many of these two cities residents? Concentrating on the political economic history of these cities, as well as the evolution of their racial structures and its urban development, this chapter will attempt to answer both of these questions.

It was argued in the previous chapter that the political, economic, social, and cultural changes produced in the 1960s, led to an important economic dislocation of the lower-classes, increased the levels of violence, segregation, and informality, and reduced or eliminated traditional mechanisms of social control. All of these changes contributed to the expansion of the penal state. As we saw, many of the authors analyzing these processes, concentrate their analysis on the increase of penal policies, the expansion of penal elements to areas foreign to criminal justice, and mass incarceration. In this work, I show how these changes transformed the role of policing, leading the police to have a much more central role in constructing and reproducing social control and social order. Furthermore, much of the work on the expansion of the penal state focuses on the United States. Here I will demonstrate how these processes, as part of global economic transformations, affect two global cities in different regions.

In order to do so, this chapter will examine briefly how São Paulo and Los

Angeles went from irrelevant colonial towns to global economic centers. This process of rapid economic transformation brought important social and urban changes, leading to

the formation of a vast working-class, with an intense labor movement, as well as the surge of a mass of unemployed population, which was spatially concentrated near the factories in poor living conditions. Economic development also favored the arrival of millions of foreign and national migrants, which created a more complex racial and ethnic structure, in which black and brown people formed the lower echelons of society.

Violence, and police violence, was always present in the lives of the lower-classes. As we shall see in the case of Los Angeles, the segregation, the lack of opportunities that followed this segregation, and the violence enforcing this, led to uprisings, such as the

1965 Watts uprising and the 1992 uprising after the Rodney King trial.

Yet, the factory jobs, the unions, and different types of welfare programs, gave residents of these urban ghettos a sense of hope, belonging, and pride. The 1980’s economic crisis, the shift from a Fordist economy to a post-Fordist economy, and the elimination or reduction of welfare programs, generated great economic despair and insecurity for many of the residents of these areas. The rise in the levels of inequality, the increase of the informal job market, in particular the illicit drug market, the surge in violence, the appearance of a large gang organization in São Paulo for example, and the continuing segregation, generated important social upheavals. The punitive approach taken to solve these social issues led to the expansion of the role of police becoming in managing the social conflicts generated by this new economy. While the police had always played an important role in managing low-income, nonwhite populations, it shared this role with the factory, the unions, or the welfare programs.

Once these other institutions became less relevant, the police came to occupy an even

more central role in defining residents’ racial identities, sense of space, or citizenship status.

In order to understand this process, this chapter will study the history of both cities.

São Paulo: From Frontier Town to Megacity in the Global South

In 1927, upon leaving Congress to assume the presidency of the state of São

Paulo, Júlio Prestes declared:

I am off to São Paulo… a State… that is the exemplar of our progress, of our culture, of our civilization, and one that produces, not only for its own consumption, but also to furnish the wealth that all of Brazil requires for the satisfaction of its needs (cited in Weinstein, 2015, p. 1).

With more than twenty-one million inhabitants, São Paulo’s metropolitan region is today one of the largest global cities. It has become a production, distribution, and management center for a network of global firms acting in regional and international markets.1 This megacity includes vast and varied landscapes marked by a web of interconnected and separated neighborhoods and regions inhabited by different populations. As a financial capital and the economic engine of Brazil, the city is connected to the virtual and real world of economic activity. In addition, São Paulo has been the birthplace of important social and political movements. In many ways, understanding the history of Brazil is understanding the history of São Paulo, and vice- versa. Still, São Paulo is a broken city, divided by visible and invisible walls hiding ghettos and luxurious fortresses, creating many of its public spaces as areas under

1 According to the Brookings Institute, São Paulo ranks 6th in the world in GDP. It has the largest GDP in Brazil, according to the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística. According to Forbes, São Paulo ranked 6th in Forbes top 10 billionaire cities and has approximately 50% of the participation in Brazilian banking system and Latin America’s largest Stock Exchange (Geromel, 2013).

siege and war zones. It is a city of contrasts: greatness, opulence and poverty; cart loads travel side by side with armored SUVs, mansions and shacks, shopping centers and street vendors. It is also a fragmented city, which seems to be the daughter of chaos, of fierce competition for success and survival, a place which was and is the dream of generations of immigrants in search for a second chance, who came from far away pursuing the Brazilian version of the “American Dream.”

The city, according to Raquel Rolnik (2001), is the product of millions of individual and collective actions of generations of residents. Rather than being a chaotic process, this process was directly influenced by urban policies designed during critical times in the city’s history. São Paulo was as much a product of its residents’ actions, business interests, and social forces, as it was the product of successive models of urban administration designed to administer a city which in a century (from 1854 to

1954) went from thirty thousand to 2.5 million inhabitants, growing to more than twenty million in the next decades and becoming the main urban region of a country marked by high levels of inequality, segregation and violence.

São Paulo has been the largely uncontested center of Brazilian progress and modernity since the early twentieth century. By the 1880s São Paulo’s booming coffee economy had already established it as Brazil’s leading agricultural producer, and by the

1920s, it had emerged as the leading manufacturer as well. Although it occupies less than three percent of Brazilian territory, São Paulo today accounts for well over a fifth of the national population and nearly a third of Brazil’s GDP. If it were a sovereign nation,

São Paulo would rank fourth in terms of population and third in terms of wealth among countries of Latin America (Weinstein, 2015, p. 3).

The village of São Paulo was founded in 1554 by Jesuit priests. Until the mid- nineteenth century, the city had no real economic relevance for the country. Since the seventeenth century, the village served as the starting point for Bandeirantes expeditions with the goal of capturing indigenous inhabitants, taking control of their lands, and search for precious metals.2 West of the city of São Paulo, there was a rich agricultural soil, which was to become, and still is, the richest agricultural area in Brazil.

Sugar was planted there quite early, and once established it would sustain itself for the next three hundred years. The capital generated by sugar production would be fundamental in opening the forested zone of the state to new agriculture, and the history of this area form the late eighteenth century through the end of the nineteenth century would be one of continuous expansion of the frontier.

The economic importance of the city was transformed with the expansion of coffee trees in the province. Introduced initially in the Paraiba Valley, around 1850, coffee plantations began occupying the western regions of the province. The coffee culture transformed the city, which became the connecting point between the producing areas, the port of Santos, and Rio de Janeiro, the Empire’s capital (Rolnik, 2001).

Coffee planters used African slaves as their main labor force, and coffee production came under the control of an elite of slave owners.3

2 For more on the Bandeirantes and the exploitation of Indian slavery, as well as the expansion of São Paulo’s frontier and agricultural development see Vidal Luna & Klein 2003.

3 The expansion of African slavery and coffee production is analyzed by Vidal Luna & Klein (2003), as well as George Reid Andrews (1991).

Coffee and Early Industrialization

Since the 1830s, coffee would fuel Brazil’s export economy for the next one hundred and forty years. It was coffee which dominated São Paulo’s economy and population for most of the nineteenth century. The construction of the railroad to the port of Santos strengthen coffee production, and São Paulo became the world’s largest coffee producer as well as one of the most important African slaves’ society. The abolition of the slave trade in the 1850 and the mounting pressure against slavery, led

São Paulo planters to experiment with European immigration. By 1855 there were about three thousand five hundred immigrant laborers working on thirty plantations in the province side by side with slaves.4 These first experiences with immigrants were disappointing. Accustomed to dealing mainly with slaves, planters tended to treat their immigrant employees in the same coercive manner. Planters were taken aback by the immigrants’ resistance to the rigid plantation discipline, and where horrified when

Europeans began organizing and protesting working conditions.5 Support for immigration was suspended and planters’ commitment to maintaining slavery was reinforced.

One of the many transformations that took place in the city due to the expansion of the coffee industry, was the configuration of a spatial segregation defined by social groups. This was the result of the appropriation by the elites of the urban center, the

4 Regarding these first experiences with foreign immigrants in São Paulo in general and in the coffee plantations in particular, see Verena Stolcke (1988), Thomas Skidmore (1999), and George Reid Andrews (1991).

5 In 1856 Swiss and German immigrants revolted against the working conditions. Many planters were terrified that the revolt would not only spread to free laborers on other plantations, but worst of all might incite the slaves (Stolcke, 1988).

discriminatory nature of public investments and urban regulation, which excluded the lower-classes from this area and confined them into specific lower-class neighborhoods with low living standards. These popular areas were characterized by overcrowded housing, creating favelas together with industrial workshops, occupying the swamp areas near the railroads. These neighborhoods had no paved streets, lighting, or sewage, very similar to the conditions in the favelas nowadays. On the other side of town, the upper-class neighborhoods were characterized by large enclosed mansions near the wide and illuminated avenues, with open spaces for a selected population. The

1886 health codes prohibited lower-class tenements in the central areas of the city, and favored the construction of “healthy” working-class villas outside of the urban core.6 A new segregated urban model began to take shape during these years, with luxurious, secluded upper-class neighborhoods, expensive real estate, elegant shops, and high- level of public investments promoting elite consumption juxtaposed with and a periphery for the lower-classes, with lower levels of public spending, low quality housing, poor health conditions.7

It is during the expansion and consolidation of the coffee production that the first large industrial impulse took place. It was mainly based on textile and food manufacturers, which built their workshops near the railroads, creating the first working- class neighborhoods.8 It is during this era that the discourse of São Paulo’s

6 Raquel Rolnik (2001) explains this process of segregation in the last days of the Empire and early days of the Old Republic.

7 For a general history on the last days of the Empire and the transition to the Republic, see Leslie Bethell’s 1989 edited volume Brazil: Empire and Republic, 1822-1930, in particular Emilia Viotti da Costa’s chapter “1870-1889,” and Thomas Skidmore (1999) Brazil: Five Centuries of Change.

8 The initial industrial development in São Paulo was tied to the success of the coffee exports. According to Warren Dean (1969), coffee planters were able to accumulate enough capital, which allow them to

exceptionalism, as the place of modernization and productivity, the place that would bring Brazil out of its backwardness and into civilization began to develop.9

The end of slavery in 1888, had a very strong impact in São Paulo’s socio- political and economic development. What would happen with the millions of black freed slaves? How would the plantations survive in a new “free-labor” market? These were some of the questions the Paulista elite faced. One of the fears the former masters had, was not so much the prospect of physical violence as it was the empowering of Brazil’s former slaves to negotiate their working conditions or worse, to abandon the plantations completely, which many former slaves did. Many planters resorted to violent means to force freemen back to the plantations without much possibility of negotiating their working conditions.10 Other planters accepted the new situation and, while they

invest in industries. From the beginning of the twentieth century until the outbreak of World War I, planters received excellent returns for their coffee; however, they were reluctant to reinvest in coffee due to unfavorable experiences a decade earlier, and state laws that sought to limit supply. It appears that much of the planters’ profits were transferred to other sorts of enterprise, particularly industry. The planters’ ability to control the government allowed them to enact policies which helped their investments (Dean, 1969, p. 44). During the first decades of the twentieth century, nearly all Brazilian entrepreneurs came from the plantation elite; by 1930, there was not a single manufacturer of native-born lower- or middle- class origins. This class of planter-entrepreneurs was complemented by importers, who were almost always immigrants. These immigrants were different from the working-class immigrants who arrived in masse to São Paulo searching for work. This immigrant bourgeoisie came to São Paulo with resources, some of them were hired by planters in technical and administrative capacities, they had capital and knowledge, as well as connections abroad that allowed them to develop industrial businesses in the city (Dean, 1969).

9 Barbara Weinstein (2015) analyzes the development of São Paulo’s regionalism and the construction of São Paulo as a region of modernity, productivity, civilization, and whiteness in contrasts with the darker and backward Northeast.

10 Some landowners, for instance, sent hired gunmen to local train stations to remove black passengers and force them into accepting employment. Other planters, working closely with local law enforcement officials, convinced the police to round up freedmen, charge them of vagrancy, and force them back to the plantations. A further tactic was the threat by local officials to draft freedmen into the army or police, which they could escape only by signing a labor contract with a local landowner (Andrews, 1991). The planters and the big manufactures needed to assure the cooperation of a cheap labor force in this period of transition. The police became an important mediator in imposing this new order. In doing so, it assured that the new freedmen knew their place in society (Rosember, 2010).

bargained with their former slaves, they also searched for alternatives for the workforce.11

One such alternative was the promotion of European immigration. The planters in coordination with the newly established Republican government, began a policy of immigration promotion, supposedly to cope with labor shortage in the plantations and the nascent industry.12 After 1888, the Republic, which cemented landowner rule, embarked on a national campaign to “Europeanize” Brazil, a campaign in which the

“whitening” of the population, and the replacement of African heritage with European, would assume a prominent role (Andrews, 1999).13 However, in the case of São Paulo, where immigration initiatives were high, this white supremacist discourse was expressed in regional rather than racialized terms. Paulistas explained their exceptionalism based on their common European and white heritage in contrast to the rest of Brazil, which was black.14

11 The main concern for freedmen was to establish conditions that had no resemblance with slavery. For many former slaves, this meant not accepting employment on plantations where they had been slaves. Whipping was to be forbidden, and women and children were to be free of labor demands. Lacking any working skills outside of agriculture, many freedmen remained in the countryside and were willing to accept work on the plantations, if minimum conditions were met.

12 According to George Reid Andrews (1991), the feared labor crisis which was to follow emancipation, according to pro-slavery arguments, failed to materialize. The harvest of 1888 and 1889 were brought in without disruption. For Petrônio Domingues (2003), the supposedly labor shortage in the coffee plantations, the idea that European immigrants were culturally superior, and the supposedly lack of ability of black workers, which could not contribute to the industrial development, were ideological discourses used by the elites to justify the exclusion of black workers from the productive system.

13 The 1891 Constitution, for instance, banned African and Asian immigration, and the national and state governments made the luring of European immigration a priority. São Paulo developed a massive state program to subsidize European immigration into the state. Half of the Europeans who came to Brazil during the early years of the Republic came to São Paulo (Andrews, 1991). For a general outlook on the demographic transformations during this period in Brazil, see Boris Fausto’s chapter “Society and Politics” in Leslie Bethell’s 1989 Brazil: Empire and Republic, 1822-1930.

14 See Barbara Weinstein’s work on the development of São Paulo’s regional identity as a hidden racialized identity (Weinstein, 2015).

Beyond the goal of Europeanizing the state, one of the main objectives of the immigration program was for landowners to restore control over the labor force. The bargaining between former slaves and slave-masters was altered by the flood of

European immigrants coming to São Paulo.15 This massive immigration program helped create a racially and nationally diverse working force, it reduced the bargaining power of former slaves, and, as we shall see, pushed Afro-Brazilians to the lower echelons of the socio-economic structure. The immigration program allowed São Paulo planters to transition out of slavery with moderate inconveniences. Planters continued to employ coercion and violence to keep laborers on the plantations and to extract profits, but in general they came to deal with the problem of keeping down labor costs by increasing supply.

Brazil’s first labor unions appeared in the 1880s, among the dock workers and the railway workers. They emerged at the same time as the arrival of immigrant workers who had union experience in Spain and Italy. The planters who brought Europeans to

São Paulo as workers had not foreseen the fact that these workers would plant the seeds of São Paulo’s labor movement, which, by 1910, formed a serious challenge to the established order.

Between other things, labor organizers, aware of the tactical opportunities which an ethnically and racially divided working class offered to employers and the state, attempted, without much success, to build bridges between white and nonwhite

15 Between 1888 and 1900 approximately 900,000 immigrants passed through the city, seventy percent of them came from Italy. In the next two decades, another 900,000 Europeans would pass through the city, mainly Portuguese, Spanish, and Italians. Between 1903 and 1930 50,000 Syrians and Lebanese as well as 35,000 Jews from East Europe arrived in São Paulo; the last large immigrant group came from Japan (Rolnik, 2001).

workers.16 For Afro-Brazilians the conditions were dire. Preference for Europeans and white Brazilians affected them directly. Blacks were almost completely barred from factory work, and back artisans had virtually disappeared from São Paulo by 1920. Poor and working-class black people found their job opportunities restricted to domestic service, the armed forces, and the informal sector (Andrews, 1991, p. 68). As Bastide and Fernandes argue, black people remained at the lowest level of São Paulo’s socio- economic and racial structure (2008 [1959], p. 91). Furthermore, blacks suffered as much police repression as they did during slavery.17

São Paulo’s police force was created in 1831 by São Paulo’s president, Brigadier

Rafael Tobias de Aguiar.18 This militia was assigned as a reserve force for the Imperial

Army and its duties were the defense of the Empire as well as having policing functions.

Officers received militarized training and were under military discipline.19 As guardians

16 Employers continued to exploit racial divisions between the working class by using black workers as strikebreakers. The exclusion of black workers from industrial employment created an army of unemployed who could be called up at any time to break strikes, undermine efforts to unionize, and keep wages low. Opportunities were so low for black workers that the employers’ appeals to break strikes sounded as good opportunities (Andrews, 1991).

17 George Reid Andrews shows that between 1880 and 1924 pretos and pardos17 were arrested by the police at a rate more than double that of their representation in the population as a whole. In the city of São Paulo, Afro-Brazilians comprised 28.5 percent of all arrests, but where between eleven and twelve percent of the total population. However, the number of black people brought to trial was much smaller. The discrepancy reflects, according to Andrews, the tendency of police to arrest black people even in the absence of sufficient evidence to prosecute and the relatively innocuous nature of their crimes. Blacks appeared infrequently in cases of violent crime, and when they did, it was usually as victim rather than aggressor, suggesting a disparity between reality and the popular images of the “violent black man” (Andrews, 1991, p. 78).

18 The first police force was named Corpo de Guardas Municipais Permanentes (Permanent Municipal Guard) and had 100 infantry men and 30 cavalry men. This militia force is considered as the institution that gave origin to São Paulo’s present Military Police, and Tobias de Aguiar is considered the Military Police’s patron. The connection between the Corpo de Guardas Municipais and the Military Police is a tenuous one as André Rosember (2010) and Flávio Tadeu Ege (2015) show.

19 The discipline was so hard, that police-soldiers received extremely harsh punishment for any administrative fault. Punishment included prison and physical punishments. Police-soldiers would have

of the law in a slavery-based society, police officers found themselves oftentimes in the role of slave-hunters or controlling the movement of freedmen, who could not enter the city without proper permits. During the first years of the Republic, this militia would change its name several times, until in 1891 it became known as Força Pública (Public

Force), a name it would hold until the 1970s.20

Beyond their role as maintenance of the law in a slave-regime, police officers during the last years of the Empire and beginning of the Republic had wide administrative functions. Police was defined as the “good administration of the State, citizens’ safety, health, subsistence, etc.” (Rosenberg, 2010, p. 26), and this meant that it was in charge of dealing with a vast array of social problems beyond the narrow conception of security.21 Industrialization and modernization were welcome processes by the economic and the political elites, but the changes brought by them were seen with suspicion, especially regarding the formation of a mass of working-class people from different national and racial backgrounds.22

The Companhia de Urbanos (Urban Corps), created in 1875, was the main police force in charge of providing security and order in the city. These police, in the early days of the Republic, were expected to protect the social order and to be a moralizing force,

their liberty under constant threat for any administrative issue, a situation that remains in place even today (Ege, 2015).

20 São Paulo’s police/militia force would play a significant role in the transition period between the Empire and the Republic, participating in the Paraguayan War with more than 500 men, and in the War of Canudos too (Ege, 2015).

21 This conception of policing aligns with Mark Neocleous (2000) explanation of the early conceptualization of policing as the administration of public life.

22 As a police chief from that time stated, a civilized nation needed a force to control disorder and punish agitators, who need to be put in place and respect the social hierarchies (Rosenber, 2010, p. 32).

together with the school and the Church, able to calm the most revolutionary spirits

(Rosemberg, 2010, p. 33). Yet, the police force was understaffed and the working conditions for its officers were inadequate for a police force that was in charge of policing São Paulo. Furthermore, under a military discipline and training, policing was seen as a continuation of war inside the state territories. Those who violated the law or challenged the social order, were seen as enemies and oftentimes treated as such.23

Police officers shared three demographic characteristics, two of them were required for joining the force: you had to be male and formally free; the third one was poverty. As is it still the case today, most people who join the police force come from the lower-echelons of society and the see the police force as a way of moving up in the social ladder. However, this social mobility was limited by the hierarchical structure established by the police force then and now.24 Patrol officers came from the same social context as those whom they generally patrolled. This led to a complex relation between police officers and society in general, in which officers felt the need to assert the authority through violence to distance themselves from members of their same social class. At the same time, police officers’ local knowledge allowed them to

23 The militarization of this police force continued during the Republican period and was intensified with the coming of a French military mission, invited by the São Paulo’s state authorities to assist in the professionalization of their police force (Ege, 2015). André Rosemberg, in his book on São Paulo’s police force during the end of the Empire and beginning of the Republic, analyzes the effects of the French mission in São Paulo’s security forces, and the adoption of the Gendarmerie model in the state (Rosember, 2010).

24 Even nowadays to become a high-ranked officer in the Military Police the candidate needs to have a university education and go through the Military Police Officers’ Academy. You cannot become a high- ranked officer by moving up the ladder from a private to an officer. While the Military Police praised itself of being an inclusive force, incorporating the lower-classes into the corporation, the reality is that those coming from the lower-echelons have limited possibilities of moving up the ranks.

navigate, manage and solve local conflicts.25 These conflicts were exacerbated by the economic crisis suffered during the World War years.

During World War I, the sudden surge of inflation and the scarcity of foodstuffs caused great hardship to city residents. Unions grew rapidly in number and militancy, and provoked numerous strikes, including general strikes in 1917 and 1919. The plight of the workers aroused a certain amount of sympathy on the part of the urban middle class. This allowed workers to achieve a few minor pieces of legislation by the state and federal governments. Brazilian factory owners, like their capitalist counterparts everywhere, faced the need to enforce worker discipline. Labor union organizers were constantly repressed by the government and the police, who supported the employers regardless of the particular issue of the moment was. In a crisis such as a strike, employers relied upon the power of the police bludgeon to maintain worker discipline.

“The coercive world of the plantation big house had given way to the almost equally coercive urban workplace” (Skidmore, 1999, p. 87-88).26 At the same time, employers attempted to co-opt workers by offering them a series of welfare benefits, from housing,

25 André Rosemberg (2010) thoroughly analyzed the experiences of beat officers during the early days of the Republic and shows the complexity of police work for those having to police their fellow neighbors or people from their same social class.

26 During the 1917 strike, for instance, São Paulo’s police increased their presence around factories and industrial neighborhoods, mounted police roamed the industrial districts breaking up gatherings of workers. The state military authorities set up machine-gun nests and blockades at the entrances to the areas where industrialists and coffee barons lived (Wolfe, 1993). The general secretary of the industrialists’ association, O. Pupo Nogueira, developed and operated a well-coordinated intelligence network directed against the unions during the 1920s. Nogueira complied dossiers on all workers, so that their reliability could be tracked and workers who participated on a strike in one factory would not be able to find jobs in another factory. More effective than any of his spying systems, however, was the harmonious relationship which Nogueira established with the police. Being blacklisted meant that as soon as the worker was seen in another plant, employers would call the police and had the worker arrested. The police were also employed against pickets (Dean, 1969). Furthermore, between 1917 to 1920, the federal government deported thirty-nine of Brazil’s forty-eight major labor leaders (Wolfe, 1993).

to health care and even childcare. Despite the meager working conditions,27 being a factory worker meant having access to a salary, some type of welfare, and the possibility of participating in the labor movement. Factory workers enjoyed better access to government services and better prospects for their children’s mobility, even if they were still limited.

In 1926, São Paulo’s Civil Guard was created to police and surveil the city and help cope with the changes just mentioned. Inspired by the London Metropolitan Police, authorities attempted to create a less militarized force more attuned to the needs of the city’s residents. Yet, the prejudices of Paulista society were still present in this force, especially regarding blacks and browns.28

While industrial growth brought the expansion of wealthy areas for those who benefitted from the industrialization process, it also brought massive numbers of workers into the city, who established near the factories in tenements with poor living conditions. At the same time, the political authorities saw these working-class neighborhoods as a menace to the modernizing and Europeanizing process the city was going through, at least in the so-called noble areas. The housing situation for working-class people deteriorated to the point that even the governor told the state legislature that “the shortage of healthy housing for the poor in the capital is constantly

27 Workers in general earned meager salaries, four milreis a day, and worked for ten hours or more, six days a week. Considering that four milreis barely sufficed to buy basic food supplies, it is not surprise that whole families, including young children, enter the workforce (Dean, 1969).

28 For instance, Afro-Brazilians were not allowed to join the force. Discrimination was such that the Frente Negra Brasileira plead President Getúlio Vargas to force the Civil Guard to accept black people. In 1932, two hundred Afro-Brazilians were accepted in the force, but formed a segregated unit (Ege, 2015, p. 74).

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growing, as a result, they dwell in basements with unhealthy conditions, or in tenements which have the worst sanitary conditions” (Wolfe, 1993, p. 29).

The tactic of combining repression and cooptation was not only used by employers but also by state and federal authorities. In 1926, Brazil’s president,

Washington Luís, increased the national government’s tools for social control and repression. Instigating a strike became a crime; and laws were enacted allowing the government to close unions and pro-union newspapers. At the same time, laws to improve working safety were legislated.

In the context of World War I, with the collapse of the international commercial links, São Paulo would witness an important industrial growth beginning a process of import-substitution-industrialization. From 1900 to 1920 the industrial plant of São Paulo expanded quite rapidly.29 A slowdown was experienced during the 1920s and 1930s, but São Paulo continued to be Brazil’s leading manufacturing center. United States investment continued to be high during the 1930s, and both Ford and General Motors began the assembly of their products in their São Paulo plants. This industrialization process accelerated the formation of an urban proletariat, and generated an important demographic expansion, which increased the demand for housing, food, and clothing, leading to an inflationary period and at the same time to a rapid accumulation of wealth.

The pressure produced by industrialization and the surge of an urban proletariat, with its labor movement, the segregation and exclusion felt by the lower-classes, as well as important sectors of the middle-class, fueled the political crisis that would lead to

29 Besides new plants producing pig iron and cement, the Paulistas began to manufacture electric hardware, electric motors, textile machinery, sugar-processing equipment, automobile parts, accessories and tools (Dean, 1969).

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Getúlio Vargas and his Estado Novo. In 1930, after a complex election process, the military took over and installed Getúlio Vargas as dictator.

Getúlio Vargas and the Estado Novo

The Vargas period was very important for the continuing expansion of São Paulo as the industrial engine of the country, and also to the changes in the working conditions and the workers’ movement. As we shall see, the factory, with the introduction of the Worker’s Card and the state benefits that followed the industrial workers, became the symbol of citizenship status for many working-class Brazilians. On the other hand, for those excluded from the formal work force, citizenship and citizenship benefits became an elusive notion. Despite the increased benefits workers would gain through this period, the Vargas years were years of violent repression against any political opposition, including labor organizers, as well as a period in which the militarization of policing in urban areas was consolidated.

Vargas would rule Brazil in two periods, from 1930 to 1945 and from 1951 to

1954. During much of his first period, Vargas dedicated his efforts to building a corporatist state based on a hierarchical, organic view of society; a corporatist labor movement, with symmetrical associations of employers and workers and the state as arbiter between them, which provided an important part of the built-in support he needed to remain in power.30 Despite the constant interference by the Estado Novo in

30 Warren Dean (1969) and Thomas Skidmore (1999) provide thorough analysis on Vargas construction of this corporatist state. Warren Dean in particular analyzes the effects of the corporatist state regarding industrial relations in São Paulo. Vargas’s plan was to establish separate corporate entities representing specific economic sectors. The coordination of relations between these corporate entities was the national government’s responsibility, eliminating conflict between competing syndicates and leaving the last word on wages, benefits, and working conditions to the central government. Over the course of the 1930s officially established labor unions at the local level were organized. The Ministry of Labor collected and channeled all union dues and exercised veto power over all union elections. Strikes were illegal

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the operations of private business, the attitude of industrialists was increasingly favorable to the dictatorship. According to Warren Dean, not only did it provide them with a whole new range of incentives and favors, but it also assured them a docile pool of cheap labor and permitted them a considerable sphere of influence in the formation of economic policy (Dean, 1969, p. 227).

Industrial development and urban growth continued to take place in São Paulo during the Vargas period, especially in the last years of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s.31 The city’s rapid economic development posed innumerable challenges, especially regarding the working and living conditions for the lower classes.32 While the wealthy areas continued to develop with tall buildings, luxurious residences, green areas, and commercial and service centers with restricted access, the lower-class neighborhoods continued to suffer from high density, lack of proper housing, and precarious sanitary conditions. Massive migration from rural areas profoundly altered the social composition of the urban working class, resulting in political and cultural changes, which increased the already acute housing problems. New industrial areas began to develop in the southeast and northeast region, concentrating the metallurgic

between 1937 and 1946 and no direct bargaining existed between unions and employers (Skidmore, 1999).

31 Brazil’s economy had emerged from the Depression sooner than that of either the United States or England, a recovery that, after slight setbacks in 1940 and 1942, was sustained by World War II. As production rose, Brazil benefited from receiving war-related US technology and equipment. Meanwhile, the disrupted shipping lanes had cut Brazilian consumers off from imports, forcing them to turn to Brazilian producers. A further effect of the war was a surge in inflationary demand as the general mobilization led to an overheated economy. Cost of living in São Paulo, for instance, almost tripled, creating a significant problem for postwar economic policy (Skidmore, 1999).

32 Paulo Fontes (2016) describes the challenges workers faced during these years of rapid industrial growth and urban development. Living conditions in the working-class neighborhoods were precarious and unhealthy; and the state-led unions not always favored workers during the tripartite negotiations between workers, employers, and the state, in regard to working conditions.

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industry as well as the electric industry. This process will intensify during the 1950s, with the coming of the automobile and the petrochemical industries, inserting the city definitively into the multinational industrial production circuit.33

One of the many problems faced by the popular classes had to do with the precarious and irregular living conditions. As a response to the social pressure asking for public services, it was necessary to regulate the irregular housing situation existing in the popular neighborhoods. The irregular territorial allotment and constructions needed to become officially recognized. The path chosen was the introduction, in 1932, of a special mechanism in the Construction Code, which recognized the irregular houses and allotments in the periphery. The legal recognition was a fundamental step for residents to demand the development of public infrastructure and services into their areas. For Raquel Rolnik (2001, p. 36), this meant the inauguration of an era of “granted citizenship,” by which public officials granted full citizenship status to these residents according to their prerogative. As long as their houses and lots remained unrecognized their rights of access to public services were limited, only once they were recognized would they acquire their rights as full city residents. In this sense, the popular masses, residents of the periphery, were, in Rolnik’s words, incorporated into the political game through the “favors” of public officials, who would come back to claim their dues (2001,

33 Already in the 1950s, São Paulo is the largest industrial center in Brazil, and will become the most important financial center in the country. São Paulo had already two million residents, growing on an annual rate of more than 5% during the 50s, 60s, and 70s, arriving at the six million mark in 1970 (Rolnik, 2001). In the fifteen years between 1945 and 1960, Brazil’s industry underwent a process of simultaneous rapid growth and extensive diversification. Brazil moved from being a primary product supplier to an industrial manufacturer. The main geographical area in which this transformation took place was São Paulo. This became the epicenter of far-reaching environmental, social and economic changes associated with rapid industrialization. The average growth rate of total output for Brazil during this period reached a 7.5% annually, São Paulo was very much the engine of this process (Colistete, 2001).

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p. 36). With the inauguration of the Estado Novo in 1937, the “granting” of regular and official status came not from the State, but from Vargas himself.

A famous popular saying in Brazil, generally attributed to President Washington

Luis, stated that the “social question was a matter for the police” (French, 2006, p. 379).

With Vargas’s corporatist state, there was a growing expectation that the social problems, especially those related to the working-class, would be dealt by the State.

Police repression against the lower-classes did not end, and even took more repressive forms.34 However, labor legislation increased significantly during Vargas’s administration, creating a series of de jure protections for workers, as part of Vargas’s cooptation practices. In 1932, for instance, the Workers’ Card was established, which employers had to sign, and guaranteed a series of social benefits for workers.35 For

Brodwyn Fischer (2008), the Vargas era forged an idealized form of Brazilian citizenship, which created a wide array of political, social, and economic rights that gave working people hope in the possibilities of law and politics. Yet, that citizenship extended only partially to the urban poor, creating an urban underclass whose position in society became extremely precarious, developing a second- or third-class

34 Much of the police repression during the Vargas era was conducted by his Police Chief, Filinto Muller, a notorious sadist, who sought cooperation with the Gestapo. Torture of political suspects was frequent and even concentration camps were created in places far away such as the Fernando de Noronha island. With the support of employers, the police infiltrated labor unions and arrested and tortured those members who questioned the government’s positions. (Skidmore, 1999).

35 The coexistence between the advanced workers' legislation and the fact that it continued to be a "matter for the police," characterized the two sides by which the dominant classes exercised power regarding the majority of the population in Brazil. For Vargas regime and his successors, the labor laws, supposedly paternalistic and highly protective, did not contradict police repression, but rather complemented it. According to John French (2006), the violent, corrupt, and arbitrary actions of the police, which syndicalist, militants, and workers had to confront; help explain why the popular classes in Brazil never believed in the idea of the "benevolence" of the law as the expression of their rights as citizens.

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citizenship.36 It is in this era that the distinction between “trabalhador” and “bandido” begins to take shape. The ability to have a job and have the work-card signed, gave a sense of citizenship and social worth, in contrast to those “undocumented” citizens, who made no contribution to society.37 In this sense, the labor legislation during the Vargas regime transformed the factory and industrial work as important elements of social control and stratification by dividing the lower-classes into worthy “workers,” and worthless “bandits.” São Paulo’s industrialists welcomed Vargas’s policies, and the regime’s approach to reshape the “dangerous classes. Industrialists sought to rationalize capitalist production by marshaling their workers through Fordist policies.

And for their commitment to the Estado Novo, Vargas publicly guaranteed the working class continued benefits such as an eight-hour work day and state-run social services if they eschewed “exotic and subversive dogmas” (Wolfe, 1993, p. 72).

The period between the coup that ended the Vargas regime and his Estado Novo in 1945 and the 1964 military coup, saw a flood of political changes in Brazil, including the establishment of democracy and free elections. The post-war juncture witnessed the emergence of an industrial working class large enough to become a key player in electoral politics. For industrial workers in São Paulo, the immediate post-war years represented an opportunity to assert rights and demand rewards long postponed by

36 According to Brodwyn Fischer, Varga's labor, social security, and social welfare laws were new, radical, and wide-ranging. Yet, their technical details belied their inclusive goals. Social and economic citizenship were not birthrights or even rewards for patriotism, hard work, or familial duty. Rather, they were privileges won through narrowly circumscribed forms of labor, morality, loyalty, and bureaucratic agility; in many ways, they were more akin to patronage than to rights (2008, p. 116).

37 By “undocumented,” I refer to those who had no Work-Card or had no formal job were the card was regularly signed. In her analysis on slender trial in Rio de Janeiro during the 1930s, Brodwyn Fischer (2005) shows how personal honor and virtue was defined - the ability to hold a job, maintain a marriage, establish a place of residence, and, above all, recognize the state's authority to define and legitimize personal worthiness - would translate into full social, political, and economic rights.

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successive political interventions and economic hardship. Repression against workers continued to take place during the Dutra administration (1946-1951).38 Vargas returned to power as a democratically elected president in 1951, and industrialization again became again the main economic mantra.39 In the following years, union activity increased due to the strengthening of labor organizations and the recognition by politicians of the value of union-support for their political aspirations. Industrialists and conservative members of the political elite, wary of the threat that an assertive working class and labor based political parties could pose, worked hard to avoid the formation of a widespread labor movement, continuing to work with the government and the police to curtail this threat, using Cold War rhetoric as a new political tool against the workers’ movement. Under the flexible labor policy adopted by Kubitschek (1956-1961), the militant sections of the trade union movement expanded their influence in São Paulo.

São Paulo’s rapid growth through industrialization increased the problems of urban infrastructure, transportation, lack of housing, and intensification of urban crime and

38 The economic crisis during Dutra’s tenure led to large-scale worker strikes in São Paulo in 1947, which aggravated the situation, alarming both the Dutra administration and São Paulo’s economic establishment. The Dutra government denounce the strikers as tools of Moscow, which helped justify the almost universal rejection by employers of wage demands by their workers. Under pressure from business owners and the US government, Dutra’s administration resorted to repression. The Supreme Electoral Court outlawed the Communist Party in 1947, and labor union leaderships were systematically purged of Communists and militant leftists. The Dutra government's crackdown on trade unions and militants gave companies the upper hand and enabled them to revoke advances which labor had made during previous years (Skidmore, 1999).

39 In 1952 the National Bank for Economic Development was created for this purpose. State enterprises in oil and electricity were established to overcome energy shortages. In 1953, under pressure from the IMF and the US government, Brazil launched a stabilization program to correct the balance-of-payment deficit. After the failure of Vargas’s economic policy and the application of an IMF-recommended stabilization plan, a massive industrial strike shook São Paulo in 1953 (Skidmore, 1999). Between 1945 and 1960, the country’s industrial sector grew an average of 9.5% per year. By 1959, almost fifty percent of all Brazilian factory employment was concentrated in the state of São Paulo. The 1950s witnessed a major shift in the industrial structure of São Paulo with the rise of the metallurgic sector as the largest and most important employer, accounting for approximately thirty percent of all manual labor in the state by the end of the decade (Fontes. 2016).

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misery (Fontes. 2016). Four years after Kubitschek’s presidency had ended, the inflation kindled by his growth policies led to a political crisis so grave that the military intervened, taking power for themselves in 1964.

The Military Regime

The military regime ended any hope of improvement for workers, the labor movement, and the lower-classes. Repression intensified, as imprisonment and torture of political enemies became common.40 At the same time that political repression was increasing, the country was operating under another economic stabilization plan. This plan succeeded in reducing inflation and stimulating vigorous economic growth. The industrial boom stimulated by the easing of credit soon improved industrial wage levels.

This also had the effect of increasing the earning gap between industrial and non- industrial workers. Furthermore, it stimulated rural to urban migration, especially from

Minais Gerais and the Northeast towards São Paulo. Yet, the benefits from the economic boom were unequally distributed.41

40 An interesting change during the military dictatorship is that state violence extended beyond the lower- classes, to include members of the middle-classes and the elites. In the Brazil of the early 1960s, physical mistreatment of ordinary citizens by the police was still commonplace. In part, this was a legacy of the violence that surrounded slavery. But it was also inherent in maintaining the highly hierarchical society that the Brazilian Republic inherited. From the beginning of the Republic in 1889, governments had repeatedly resorted to declaring a state of siege, thus allowing the suspension of judicial guarantees. Police mistreatment of the elite, on the other hand, was rare, not least because the police were members of the non-elite classes and were in awe of their social superiors. This differential treatment was established by law, for example, any arrestee who held a higher university degree is entitled to better jail quarters than common detainees. This system of differential justice was well understood by all Brazilians. It reinforced a hierarchical social structure that was tight but not impermeable. When Brazil grew economically, its elite expanded. Yet this mobility did not alter the hierarchy itself. The authoritarian regime partially changed this, and, ironically, democratized state repression to a certain level. The guerrilla movement was led primarily by disaffected youth from the elite, not by workers, and these elite members suffered military and police torture, usually reserved for the lower classes. This led part of the elite to withdraw their support for the military regime, including two main elite institutions such as the Catholic Church and the Bar Association (Skidmore, 1999).

41 At least half the labor force fell outside the formal labor market making them, in addition to earning very low cash wages, ineligible for the corporatist system of health care, vacations, and pensions created by

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The economic expansion of the 1970s, especially the production of durable consumer goods for the internal market, was able to create, until the early 1980s, a considerable number of new jobs.42 Yet, this same economic development led to the expansion of an informal and poorly paid labor market based on intensive labor and low productivity and on the proliferation of sub-employment. The economic expansion of the

1970s aggravated the already unequal distribution of income, at the end of the decade the poorest fifty percent of the population received only fourteen percent of the total income (Caldeira, 2000, p. 43).43 The housing crisis in the popular neighborhoods increased during the 1970s. The government’s response was the construction of public housing projects in the periphery, pushing the lower-classes further away from the city’s centers. These housing ghettos became the spearhead of an urbanization policy based on exclusion, segregation, and the creation of irregular land occupation and favelas, for those who were not “lucky” enough to gain access to public housing.44 The lower- classes were concentrated in areas with poor housing conditions, little employment opportunities, low quality education, and far from the network of opportunities São Paulo offered to the wealthier population. According to Rolnik, there is no doubt that the roots

Getúlio Vargas. The existence of a large surplus labor force, together with the tight military control of unions, did not allow for the labor movement to rise (Skidmore, 1999).

42 In 1970, the state of São Paulo contributed 58.2% of the national value of industrial production (Rolnik, 2001).

43 According to Vilmar Faria, São Paulo’s society was divided into three broad segments: first, occupational groups of very high or high incomes, few in number but with high purchasing power and political and social influence in a society that became more authoritarian and elitist; second, significant contingents of blue- and white-collar workers incorporated into the most dynamic and modern productive sectors; and finally, a mass of poor underemployed people (cited in Caldeira, 2000, p. 43).

44 Most of these housing complexes were located in inappropriate lands, suffering from sediment problems, which led to flooding and subsequent poor health conditions (Rolnik, 2001).

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of the explosion of urban violence during the 1990’s can be found in this exclusionary urban development (2001, p. 51).

One of the most important changes that took place during the military period, which directly concerns us, was the police reforms directed by the military government.

The process of militarization and the linkage between the states’ military police and the army strengthened during this era. At the same time, daily urban policing was left almost exclusively in the hands of the military police. This is important because, as we will see, with the socio-economic dislocation of the 1990s, and the increased role the police came to play as an institution of social control and order, the police would be a strongly militarized and violent institution.

Already in the early 1960s the State (civil) police was dismantled, opening the path for the military police to assume the role of urban policing.45 In 1969, all states’ military police came under the aegis of the Brazilian army and were assigned the duty of fighting against the urban guerrillas.46 A few years later, the Brazilian military regime also created specialized mobile shock units to fight the “internal enemy.” In São Paulo

45 In 1932 São Paulo’s elite orchestrated an uprising against the Vargas regime and his interventionist policies in business and industry. The state police forces joined the elites and organized what is known as the Constitutionalist Revolution, since they saw themselves as the defenders of the Old Republic Constitution violated by Vargas 1930’s coup. Since then, the federal government saw the state police forces with caution. Vargas made the first amendments to centralize and control state police forces. The preferred avenue was to favor the military police, which, organically, was tied to the final control of the Armed Forces. The disbanding of the Civil Guard during the military regime consolidated the dominion of the Military Police over urban policing (Ege, 2015; Pinheiro, 1991; Skidmore, 1999; Trindade Maranhão Costa, 2011).

46 The Decree Law 667, of July 2, 1969, established that all military police units are a reserve unit of the Armed Forces and as such, the final authority is the General Staff. The military police forces were put under the supervision of an inspection, a post assigned to an army brigadier general on active duty. By assigning the military police to fight the urban guerrilla, it allowed the Brazilian armed forces to avoid the inconvenience of a prolonged presence in urban centers. The Military Police continued, and continues, to be under the institutional framework of the state’s Secretariat of Security, its budget comes from this Ministry and the State’s treasury; however, as a reserve unit of the Armed Forces its final authority continues to be the General Staff Command (Pinheiro, 1991).

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this unit was called ROTA;47 it was created in 1972 under the pretext that regular police units were impotent in fighting terrorist actions, especially the assaults on banks carried out by the urban guerrilla. ROTA, organized into small groups of heavily armed and mobile men in modern armored vehicles and excellent communication capabilities, became the vanguard of political repression during Brazil’s military government. Once the urban guerrilla was eliminated in 1974, instead of being dismantled the ROTA unit took charge of fighting common crime. These units, trained to fight an “internal enemy” through methods of urban war, were now using the same methods against common criminals and the territories where, supposedly, these criminals find refuge; in other words, ROTA was now turned against the lower-classes residing in the city’s peripheries. After 1974, national security principles were transferred to civil policing, and crime control became a matter to be dealt through military tactics and methods.48

Furthermore, at the same time that political repression was being expanded in

Brazil to fight common crime, the military police began developing and expanding the

“vigilante” practices that have characterized policing in Brazil throughout history. Since, according to the military regime, crime could not be controlled through civil police methods, it came to be handled through military strategies. For the military police, preventive policing meant offensive military action. The expansion of the military police’s

47 ROTA stands for Rondas Ostensivas Tobias de Aguiar, in honor of the founder of São Paulo’s first militia and police unit and patron of the state’s Military Police.

48 The Doctrine of National Security provided, and still provides, the rationale for urban policing in Brazil. The doctrine sees armed confrontation as the only solution to social turmoil. Criminals are considered state enemies, who need to be eliminated. According to the national security ideology, any other explanation to crime, whether sociological, psychological, or economic, is seen as illusory and false. Criminals are internal enemies, who posit a threat to the nation’s social fiber and need to be neutralized. In the end, the only good bandit is a dead bandit (Pinheiro, 1991).

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role and its insulation from any civilian control was consolidated through the 1977 legislative Amendment No 7, which created a privileged arena for the military police.

The military police were brought under the Military Penal Code, and were to be judged by Military Courts.

As the second oil crisis took place in 1979, the economic situation became more complicated, and in 1981 Brazil defaulted on its foreign obligations. By this time, the transition to democracy had begun. The economic crisis, the victory by soft-line military leaders inside the government, the elites’ desire to improve Brazil’s image abroad, and the pressure exercised by civil society’s mobilization for democracy, pushed the military regime to seek a coordinated transition. Elections were held in 1985 and Tancredo

Neves became the first elected president since Jânio Quadros.49

Democratization and the Transition to a Post-Fordist Economy

The transition to democracy saw an expansion of political citizenship and rights.

A new, more independent workers movement had emerged in São Paulo’s metropolitan region, where industries were still concentrated, and became an important force in transition towards democracy. A series of neighborhood-based social movements emerged in the poor urban peripheries, advancing the idea that they had rights to the city. In the early 1980s, a coalition of labor unions and popular social movements formed the Workers’ Party (PT). As Margaret Keck (1992) explains, the PT emphasized the development of a democratic and participatory organization. This new coalition and public sphere offered a new space for popular movements to make demands and

49 Tancredo Neves would never assume Brazil’s presidency. Neves fell gravely ill on the eve of his inauguration and died days later on April 21, 1985. Neves running mate, José Sarney, a right-wing conservative political boss from the state of Maranhão, would assume as the first civilian president after twenty-one years of military dictatorship.

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increase the democratic space. However, thirty years later this expansion of democratic space is still limited, despite important advancements, including the formation of protests movements across the country, and in São Paulo’s periphery in particular. The explosion of violence, the increase in structural unemployment and socio-economic insecurity, the bureaucratization of the political demand after the municipal and national experiences of the Workers’ Party in power, increased the distance between formal/legal democracy and substantive democracy. Margaret Keck (1992) argues that once in power, party leaders realized that PT mayors needed greater autonomy from the party, but also from the grassroots organizations that brought them into power. This had the effect of solidifying the Workers’ Party as a strong electoral contender, but at the same time, it transformed the politics from below into a more top-down approach, and coalition building, frustrating some of the ground activists.50

Until the 1980s, progress appeared to be São Paulo’s destiny. However, the deep recession, high inflation, poor economic performance and the impoverishment of the population, led many to see the 1980s as a lost decade. Brazil’s GDP dropped

5.5%, and the real minimum wage decreased 46% between 1980 and 1990 (Caldeira,

50 In 1988, for instance, Luiza Erundina, one of the founders of the Workers’ Party, and active supporter of favela social movements, was elected as São Paulo’s mayor. For the first time, São Paulo had a woman and a member of the left-wing as mayor. Acknowledging the support of the favela residents’ movements played in her campaign, Erundina brought them into their government and attempted to develop a series of urban development projects in the peripheries, some with more success than others. At the same time, the relation between favela residents and their leaders became more bureaucratized, as these leaders became part of the political power. When municipal elections were lost against right- wing conservative candidate Paulo Maluf, suspended many of Erundina’s administration projects, and put almost an end to the effervescent social mobilization that had taken place in the favelas. When the PT returned to power in São Paulo with Marta Suplicy, new development projects for the poor areas were retaken; yet, the favela movement, which was central in elevating the demands of favela residents to the government, inverted its positon and became the government’s spokesperson in these areas, limiting popular participation (Feltran, 2007). Furthermore, the control of the State government by conservative parties, limited the ability of the left-wing sectors in enforcing changes, especially in the area of security.

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2000, p. 45).51 In addition, the economic recession generated high unemployment.

Hyperinflation was controlled only after 1994 with Fernando Henrique Cardozo’s Plano

Real, the aggressive privatization of public companies, and a radical reform of the social security system.

Since the 1990s it is common to hear among São Paulo’s residents the notion that the city is in crisis: factories closed, homeless people in the streets, violence, unemployment and underemployment. On the other hand, the omnipresence of multinational capital is reflected in the quantity and diversity of financial institutions, shopping malls, consumer products and services. Rather than an economic crisis, what can be observed in São Paulo since the 1990s is the substitution of the old Fordist model for a neoliberal, post-Fordist global city. Public investment in the city continues to grow, as well as private investments. In the context of a global economic change, the city went through a process of decadence and vitality at the same time. On the one hand, you have a city with the two most busy airports in the country, concentrating near

70% of Brazil’s air cargo transport; a city with nearly fifty shopping malls, more than twenty inaugurated during the 1990s; a city where the most important financial institutions, including the main stock market, have their headquarters. On the other hand, violence grew significantly during the same period, as well as unemployment, and the favela population increased by more than fifty percent during 1996 and 2000

(Rolnik, 2001). São Paulo still concentrates most of Brazil’s industrial production, and the city is still Brazil’s industrial engine. New industries, especially in the areas of high-

51 One of the main problems was high inflation, which went from 99.7% in 1980 to 1,863.6% in 1989, went down to 475.1% in 1991 and up again 2,489.1% in 1993 (Caldeira, 2000, p. 46).

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tech, chemical-pharmaceutic, and food production, were established in São Paulo in the last years of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. São Paulo’s new industrial sector is a highly specialized one, extremely mobile, globally interconnected, in which different elements of the production process are outsourced, and occupies less physical space but moves more capital. This growth was followed by an increase in the precariousness of employment conditions and the end of the big industrial plants which concentrated the proletariat masses and was central to the development of the state and Brazil’s workers movement.52

During most of its history, São Paulo was characterized by the existence of work.

Its immense capacity for absorbing an increasing workforce explained the unparalleled population increase. The industrial transformation towards a post-Fordits model, which began in the 1980s, explains the demographic stagnation and the increase in unemployment.53 The service sector, while increasing rapidly, has no capacity nor is destined to absorb the workforce. There is an increase in the demand for well-paid executive jobs, consultancies, specialized services, and financial market operators; while the poorly paid, non-unionized service jobs have become the almost exclusive

52 The concentration of wealth, and, consequently, the levels of inequality, have gone up in the city since the 1980s. The GINI coefficient grew from 0.516 in 1981 to 0.566 in 1989 and to 0.5748 in 1991 (Caldeira, 2000, p. 48); and kept going up to 0.6182 in 2001 to 0.6453 in 2010 (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografía e Estatística, 2010).

53 Unemployment in São Paulo went from 8% in 1991 to near 11% in 1996 (Ramos & Almeida Reis, 1997). If we look at the employment distribution by age, those most affected were younger residents in the city (ages eighteen to twenty-four), for whom employment went down from 22.5% in 1988 to 19.7% in 1995 (Gutierrez Alves, Ferreira Amorim, & de Moura Cunha, 1997). The passage from a Fordist economy to a post-Fordist economy can be appreciated by the increase in employment participation of the service sector and the decrease in the industry sector. From 1991 to 2015, industry employment decreased from 30.7% to 13.3%; while the service sector went from 45.2% to 62.8%. The post-Fordist transformation can be seen aslo when comparing the contribution to the GDP by sector: industry went from 30.6% in 2004 to 22% in 2014; while the service sector increased from 66.7% in 2004 to 76.2% in 2014 (Fundação Seade, 2017).

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formal alternative for poor residents of the city.54 This has led to an increase in informality, poverty, and social tension. São Paulo’s economy produces more capital and income but less and less jobs. While industrial employment created a sense of social mobility until the 1980s, the 1990s was the decade in which this feeling of opportunities was crushed. Brazil’s industrial locomotive now became now the country’s node to the globalized world. Segregation and exclusion, which were always part of São

Paulo’s history, have increased in recent decades too.55

The socio-economic crisis of the 1980s was reflected, among other things, by a upsurge in crime in all major cities, including São Paulo.56 Several authors have analyzed the reasons behind this increase in crime, all highlighting the socio-economic transformations as the main elements behind this violence.57 The existing economic

54 Defining and measuring informality is an extremely complex enterprise. The sociological literature on São Paulo refers to informality as temporary unregistered work, street illegal vending, or engaging in illegal activities, such as the drug business (this includes selling drugs, but also performing other tasks for drug dealers) or selling stolen items (Caldeira, 2000; Feltran, 2011; Holston, 2008; Telles, 2010). Economists generally measure informality by comparing the percentage of workers with their cards signed and those without, as well as self-employed people who do not regularly contribute to revenue services. When we look at the economic data we observe that in Brazil’s main metropolitan areas employment informality grew from 40.9% in 1991 to 50% in 2000 (Ramos, 2002). According to Lauro Ramos (2002), informality is more prevalent in the service sector; the increase of the sector economy, indicates also an increase in informality.

55 In 2010, for instance, 11% of São Paulo’s population lived in favelas; a 1.1% annual population growth in the first decade of the century, compared to 0.8% of the general population. The number of houses in favelas grew 2.2% annually, compared to 1.9% for the rest of the city (Ferreira, 2017). In 2017, 1% of property owners concentrated 25% of all properties registered in the city, which amounts to 45% of the municipal real estate value. Considering only this data, these property owners have, in real estate investment, an average of 34 million Reais per person, six hundred times more than the average national patrimony distribution (Rede Nossa São Paulo, 2017).

56 Homicide rates in São Paulo went from 18.1 per 100,000 inhabitants, to 44.1 in 1991, peaking in 1999 with 63.5 homicides per 100,000 residents (Waiselfisz, 2011).

57 Nancy Cardia (2000) argues there is a correlation between fast urban population growth, the percentage of favela residents and rising homicide rates. Luis Mir (2004) indicates that the growth in youth unemployment explains the rise in homicides. For Alexandre Carvalho and his colleagues, homicides are positively correlated with income inequality, the percentage of youth in the population, the degree of urbanization, the extent of economic vulnerability, including the increase in informal employment, especially of the youth (2005). As Anthony Pereira concludes, “the market’s scant

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inequality and spatial segregation is also reflected in the spatial distribution of urban violence. In the beginning of the 2000s, for instance, the risk of being killed in Jardim

Ângela was thirty-four times higher than in Moema (Rolnik, 2001, p. 68). Urban segregation and violence feed one another: middle- and upper-classes tend to live in fortified enclaves with their exclusive shopping centers, slowly abandoning the public spaces and having less and less contact with their fellow citizens from the lower- classes, with the exception of those who enter the gated communities and buildings to provide domestic services. Public spaces are abandoned and earn an image of criminality, danger, and vice, which need to be under constant police surveillance.

Together with this, the increase in drug trafficking and the reliance of many favela residents on the drug business as a means of subsistence, increased the sense of insecurity, disorder, and social anomie (Caldeira, 2000; Feltran, 2011; Telles, 2010).

The appearance of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) in the 1990s, a large and well-organized criminal organization, fueled the sense of desperation that affected São

Paulo’s poor neighborhoods.58

It is important to recall that most of the residents of the favelas and low-income neighborhoods are Afro descendants. As we have seen, they have been systematically victimized, discriminated, and segregated from the labor market, the education system,

production of well-paid, stable jobs, and the Brazilian state’s very limited ability to redistribute income and address poverty and inequality, are relevant in explaining this problem” (2008, p. 189).

58 The history of the PCC is still to be written; however, it is believed that it was created on August 31, 1993, by prisoners at the Tabueté Prison. In its beginnings, the PCC included a political agenda, which was to fight the oppression inside São Paulo’s penitentiary system, especially in response to the 1992 Carandiru massacre, when Military Police killed 111 prisoners. By the late 1990s, the PCC had taken command of most of São Paulo’s favelas and interestingly was the main responsible for reducing the number of homicides in these areas by acquiring the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence in the favelas. For more on the PCC see Camila Nunes Dias (2013) book PCC: Hegemonia nas Prisões e Monopólio da Violência.

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housing, and have been the main targets of police violence. In this situation, the economic transformations of the 1990s affected this group in particular.

The closure of factories, the weakening of labor unions, the reduction of welfare service, despite the recent important social initiatives enacted by twelve years of

Workers’ Party government (2002-2015),59 eliminated many of the institutions that gave periphery residents a sense of citizenship, of pride and honor of being a “trabalhador,” and the hope for social mobility. Those few who were able to benefit from the Workers’

Party social policies, in particular the affirmative action policies in higher education, ended leaving these areas for better ones, increasing the class and racial segregation.

The response by São Paulo’s authorities to these social problems was to return to the mantra “social problems are a matter for the police.” A highly militarized police, with special tactics units, trained under the doctrines of national security, insulated from civilian control, became the central state response to the social troubles generated in the 1990s, and, as we shall see, it began to play a crucial role in defining residents racial identities, sense of space, and the development of a second-class citizenship status.

Los Angeles: From Pueblo to Global City

Los Angeles, similar to São Paulo, has become a global city, concentrating financial, managerial, and the coordination and servicing operations of international firms. “Los Angeles’s magnetic force,” Edward Soja writes, “is illustrated by the fact that,

59 For periphery residents, the most important programs enacted by the Workers’ Party were Bolsa Familia, a conditional cash transfer program, which helped many overcome their extreme levels of poverty. Furthermore, the enactment of affirmative action policies in higher education, which allowed a small amount of periphery residents get into universities. However, most of these academics ended leaving the peripheries, which was left by those who could not overcome the lack of opportunities, formal employment, and a weak education system.

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over the past one hundred years or so, more people… have moved into the urban region of Los Angeles than into any other urban region in the United States and probably anywhere else in the Western industrialized world” (2014, p. 3).60 Analogous to

São Paulo, Los Angeles was transformed from a small, irrelevant town during colonial times, into a large and extended megacity. “Seen from outer space,” Edward Soja describes, “[Los Angeles] is one of the most visible human creations on the planet”

(2000, p. 120). Los Angeles has not only become a global economic center, it is one of the most economically and culturally heterogeneous urban regions in the world. Mike

Davis describes the city as “the most dynamic center of ethnic family capitalism on the planet” (1990, p. 104).61

When California joined the Union in 1850, nothing about Los Angeles predicted its emergence as one of United States’ largest and most important metropolises. Robert

Fogelson describes the town as an agricultural village with no more than 1,600 people, no railroads, few streets, isolated, geographically and economically, from the large centers both in the United States and Western Europe. It lacked a natural harbor and natural resources to attract commerce and industry. Yet, during the next eighty years,

Los Angeles underwent one of the most extraordinary expansions in urban history, becoming by far one of the largest settlements on the Pacific coast (Fogelson, 1993).

This history of Los Angeles incredible urban development begins most effectively in

60 According to the Brookings Institute, Los Angeles ranks third in world cities GDP. Following the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the U.S. Department of Commerce, Los Angeles has the second largest GDP in the country and the second largest GDP in the finance industry behind New York.

61 The U.S. Census Bureau indicates that, in 2010, more than 70% of Los Angeles population is nonwhite (53% Latino, 7% African-American, and 16% Asian); 35% of Los Angeles population was born outside of the United States.

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1870, after two decades of ethnic cleansing, which erased much of the

Spanish/Mexican heritage of what was the small town of El Pueblo de Nuestro Señora la Reina de Los Angeles founded in 1791. Southern California historian, Carey

McWilliams, has argued that the history of Los Angeles can be characterized as one continuous boom punctuated at intervals with major explosions (cited in Soja, 2000, p.

122).

The impressive urban and economic growth underwent by Los Angeles, together with the image of a city of luxuries and dreams symbolized and promoted by Hollywood,

Beverly Hills and Sunset Boulevard, hides the deep contradictions this city has had throughout its history. A few miles drive from the mansions of Beverly Hills and West

Hollywood, behind the high and renovated office buildings of Downtown L.A., one can find Skid Row, with its near 18,000 homeless population roaming the streets of the city; a city that has more than forty thousand homeless people.62 While Los Angeles has had a constant urban expansion, even in times of economic crisis, the city has seen some of the most violent urban social outbreaks in United States history.63

The Early Transformation of Los Angeles

In mid-nineteenth century, most Americans rightly considered Los Angeles a remote, violent, lawless, unprofitable, and almost undesirable frontier village. This picture could have condemned Los Angeles to oblivion if the Southern Pacific railroad

62 According to the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority 2017 tally, there are near 43,000 homeless people living without shelter in L.A. County. However, the real estate research firm Zillow reported that Los Angeles was undercounting its homeless numbers, and estimated a homeless population of 61,000 (Holland, 2017).

63 From 1870 to 1990, Los Angeles’s population constantly grew at an impressive rate. It went from 19,000 residents approximately in 1870 to 14,531,000 in 1990 (Soja, 2000, p. 123).

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had not connected the city to the rest of the country in the late nineteenth century. This led to an advertising crusade by the owners of South Pacific railroad and Los Angeles’s businessmen to bring people to the city. Proud of their fertile countryside, hospitable society, and mild climate, the Southern California Immigration Association, founded by the Los Angeles Board of Trade and supported by prominent property owners, tried to divert the westward movement to their region.64 The pastoral image promoted by Los

Angeles’s boosters, proved most alluring to white, rural, and relatively prosperous

Midwesterners.65 What the booster propaganda did not tell was that many of the workers who arrived to Southern California discovered that wages were sometimes lower than in other industrial cities, and that many of the city’s employees were under the thumb of the powerful anti-union Merchants and Manufacturers Associations

(Laslett, 2012).66 Like most U.S. citizens, Los Angeles’s white migrants shared a belief in the racial superiority of white people of European descent. As the city’s economy developed in the early twentieth century, its white population became fragmented along class-lines, while at the same time, it segregated between ethnicities (Sides, 2003).

64 Lured by available land, adequate water, and improved transportation, eastern farmers sold their property and moved to Southern California. Between 1860 and 1880, the population more than doubled. The influx precipitated wild land speculations, and within a year real estate transfers increased from 6,000 to 14,000 and from $10 million to $28 million (Fogelson, 1993, p. 67).

65 The propaganda machine of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce promised the newcomers high wages, pleasant working conditions, and accommodating employers. The booster literature was distributed through railroads, shipping companies, and newspapers all over the country, and was highly successful. Partly as a result of this propaganda, the city grew from a population of ten thousand in 1890 to well over two million in the 1930s (Laslett, 2012, p. 6-7).

66 As John Laslett shows, much of the boosters’ narrative was misleading. The downside of living in Los Angeles included political corruption, primitive working conditions, land grabs by investors intent on driving up prices, and the spread of industrial blight to large parts of the downtown area. The majority of companies opposed any form of trade unionism and recruited members of the LAPD to help them keep the unions at bay (2012, p. 16).

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Early in its history, Los Angeles’s urban development was marked by class and race segregation, which would fuel much of the social upheavals the city went through.

The development, expansion and maintenance of the Southern Pacific railroad and Harry E. Huntington’s Pacific Electric Railway,67 with its vast interurban railway, depended heavily on Mexican labor. Beginning in the eighteenth century, continuing through California’s admission to the Union, and peaking in the 1920s, Mexican immigration was indispensable to the growth of Los Angeles. African-Americans also headed west attracted by the city’s history of minimal anti-black violence, the possibility of climbing the socio-economic ladder and purchase homes.68 Yet, Mexicans, Mexican-

Americans, and African-Americans suffered constant discrimination in housing, schools, and especially in employment.69 Los Angeles’s business elites, in their attempt to bring people, especially workers, into the city, promoted the myth that Southern California was the “white spot of America” (Laslett, 2012, p. 20). What they meant by this, was that

Los Angeles was a racially pure space, a city built by whites for whites.70 However, the city counted with an important number of immigrants born in southern and eastern

67 Harry E. Huntington was a U.S. railroad magnate, owner of the Pacific Electric Railway, who settled in Los Angeles and developed a trolley system which stretched over 1,300 miles across Southern California. Together with Harrison Gray Otis, owner of the Los Angeles Times, was one of the main boosters of Los Angeles, proponent and strong defender of the open shop approach.

68 According to Josh Sides, the black population of Los Angeles climbed steadily from 2,131 in 1900 to 15,579 in 1920, to 38,898 in 1930. In 1910 almost 40 percent of African-Americans in Los Angeles County owned their homes, compared to only 2.4 percent in New York and 8 percent in Chicago (2003, p. 16).

69 Sides describes the harsh discrimination suffered by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, who, in addition to harassment from the police, they endured persistent discrimination in employment, in housing, and in schools, where the children were routinely diverted into separated classrooms and labeled “retarded” by educators (2003, p. 15).

70 For example, in the 1910 edition of Charles Lummis popular booster work Land of Sunshine, he repeated his claim that “our foreign element is a few thousand Chinese and perhaps five hundred native Californians who do not speak English” (Laslett, 2012, p. 20).

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Europe, as well as thousands of Mexicans, Asians, and other people of color. This multicultural character of the city, which mitigated the harshest effects of residential segregation, exacerbated, on the other hand, the effects of employment discrimination by increasing competition at the lower end of the labor market (Sides, 2003),71 a feature which still affects Los Angeles today.

A further important development that took place in Los Angeles, which fostered further immigration and urban growth, was the construction of the San Pedro harbor, which began in 1899 and was finished by 1912. The 1890’s depression, indicated that agriculture, land speculation, real-estate, and tourism, was not enough to develop Los

Angeles. Industrial development was needed. Slowly, Los Angeles was building the necessary infrastructure to develop as an industrial power.72 With sunshine and the open shop as their main assets, and allied with the great transcontinental railroads, a syndicate of developers, bankers, and transport magnates led by Los Angeles Times owner, Harrison Gray Otis, and his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, set out to promote the city to industrial entrepreneurs by developing an open shop culture.73 Underneath this

71 One of the first organization which tried to overcome the racial tensions inside the working-class, was the Communist Party. The effort by the Party on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys attracted many African- Americans into the Party. The Los Angeles branch of the party, established in 1919, was based in the multiracial community of Boyle Heights and initially directed its appeals to Jewish garment workers; and later attempted to organize Mexicans and African-Americans (Sides, 2003).

72 The harbor’s business mounted to 10.3 million tons in 1922, climbed to 27.2 million in 1923, and fluctuated from 20 million to 30 million thereafter. Los Angeles handled almost as much freight as all the other Pacific coast ports combined by weight and slightly less than San Francisco though far more than Seattle and Portland by value. Commerce, as a result, increased with the Orient directly, the eastern United States, and Latin America via the Panama Canal, and the Southwestern states and northern California by railroads and highways (Fogelson, 1993).

73 Existing unions were locked out, picketing was virtually outlawed, and dissidents were terrorized (M. Davis, 1990, p. 25).

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booming boosterism there was another story, one of workers’ exploitation, and violent racial conflicts.

During this era of urban development, the Los Angeles Police Department would go through important transformations, taking the first steps to become a professional police force. Under Chief John Glass, a former mayor of Jeffersonville, Indiana, a group of watchmen would turn into professional police officers. The police would adopt a more rigid, military-style, structure, including the purchase of Winchester rifles and military uniforms. Chief Glass set up the first police districts, substations, patrol wagon, entry level officers requirements, and the adoption of the Alphonse Bartillon identification system.74 After Chief Glass tenure, LAPD began enjoying greater autonomy, despite the fact that City Hall had great control over the Chief nomination process and the police

(Bultema, 2013). Under control by the political authorities and the business-elite, the

LAPD would play a fundamental role in enforcing the open shop ideology, as well as keeping Los Angeles racially segregated.

As the early years of the twentieth century advanced, Los Angeles continued its almost unstoppable growth. An important step towards Los Angeles’s industrialization was the discovery and development of oil fields in the region. California suffered from a scarcity of traditional energy resources. During the 1890s, engineers and entrepreneurs attempted to develop hydroelectric power, but it was petroleum that broke California’s energy bottleneck (Williams, 1996).75 With fuel available, there was enough energy to

74 Alphonse Bartillon was a French police officer, who developed an identification system based on physical measures. Bartillon was also the creator of the mug shot.

75 The 1895 opening of the Los Angeles oil field temporarily saturated the market and prices fell. Yet, the exploration and drilling kept going, storage facilities were built, and an enduring and growing demand for the product developed. By 1900, new fields at Coalinga, Sunset, McKittrick, Kern River, Fullerton, Brea- Olinda, and off-shore at Summerland assured steady oil supply. Between 1900 and 1910, state per-

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create the pre-conditions for the state’s manufacturing industry. The discovery of oil also led to the development of a vast suburban network. Industrial and residential suburbs appeared at either the field or a refinery site and helped them to enhance the industrialization of Los Angeles’s greater metropolitan region (Viehe, 1981).76 The oil discoveries created an impressive pipeline system that connected the refineries with the city and the port. The suburban network would later attract different extracting companies and accelerated the process of industrialization during the 1920s.77

This industrial suburbanization helped develop, according to Fred Viehe (1981), the open shop approach and political conservatism in the region. While the working class worked in the industrial suburbs, most neither lived nor voted in them, and this allowed corporations and other business interests to control the politics as well as the police in the industrial suburbs and, consequently, reduce labor’s organizing power.

Immigration continued throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. Los

Angeles was among the most popular destinations for the political refugees after the

1910 Mexican Revolution. They established in the isolated enclaves around downtown, where earlier Mexican immigrants now lived. The economic impoverishment of these

capital oil consumption grew from three to twenty-barrels nationally. By 1920, it reached 114 million barrels per year (Williams, 1996). After World War I, oil fields were established at Huntington Beach, Montobello, Seal Beach, Santa Fe Springs, and Long Beack, which supplied almost a million barrels a day, nine percent of the nation’s oil and five percent of the world’s petroleum (Fogelson, 1993).

76 Fred Viehe (1981) argues that it was actually the discovery and the development of the oil extraction industry that fueled Los Angeles’s suburban dispersal, and not the inter-urban railway system as Robert Fogelson argued. Viehe’s thesis is that the extractive industry was responsible for suburban dispersal and metropolitan fragmentation. Oil allowed Los Angeles County to keep taxes low by collecting oil revenues.

77 According to geologist Joseph Jensen, the vast quantity of oil gushing forth was “the greatest outpouring of mineral wealth the world has ever known” (quoted in Viehe, 1981, p. 13). In 1925, it accounted for one-fifth of the nation’s total production. The oil boom also helped transform Long Beach into one of United States’ greatest oil shipping ports (Lislett, 2012).

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early twentieth century barrios was noticed by the authorities, who saw the horrendous living conditions and decided to demolish these slums. The displaced residents were dispersed and a significant number moved to the East side of the city (Miranda, 1990).

East Los Angeles still has a predominant Latino and Mexican population nowadays. The living conditions in East Los Angeles were not much better than the downtown slums, and illnesses and disease affected the population. Continuing employment discrimination did not help either. As immigration from Mexico continued to flow, more and more suburban communities sought to enhance their desirability for Anglo migrants by excluding Mexicans and African-Americans and then touting their absence. The lack of housing options led to an increase in rent prices in the Mexican barrios. Mexicans were not only discriminated from jobs, but once they were able to get jobs they were paid much less than others (Monroy, 1999).78 The increasing Mexican immigration as well as the large concentration of working-class people in Los Angeles, led to a downward pressure on wages, not only for Mexicans, but for most working people. The oversupply of labor was deliberately promoted by Los Angeles’s Chamber of

Commerce, who had advertised in the East for more workers that Southern California’s market could handle.79 The goal of the Chamber and business-leaders, as Grey Otis,

78 In the years before World War I, rents for a one room house court averaged about $3.50 or $4 per month; for a two room, about $6; and for a three room, about $12. The average income was around $37 per month. A study done in 1916 of 172 Mexican families in Ann Street district, calculated the average rent Mexican paid as $6.36. The California Immigration Commission of 1910 reported that Mexican railroad workers, for instance, earned twenty-five percent less than non-Mexicans. On the Southern Pacific Railway, just north of Los Angeles, a 1908 study noted the following wages “to be in force for ordinary section hands: Greeks, $1.60; Japanese, $1.45; and Mexicans, $1.25 a day” (Monroy, 1999, p. 100).

79 The Chamber of Commerce continued to search for workers in the East, despite knowing that the labor market was saturated. Their pamphlets talked about high wages and good jobs available. Because its reach was much greater than that of LA’s labor press, it was able to so without much fear of contradiction. In April 1916, the chamber declared that eastern manufacturers should open branches in Southern California because workers who migrated to Los Angeles were “pleased with what they found.” They had

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was to keep labor costs low, develop a non-unionized labor force, and turn the city into the mecca of industrial freedom.80 Employers not only avoided hiring union members, but also created blacklists of those workers who were union members, participated in strikes or any other pro-labor activities. The LAPD became an important instrument in enforcing this anti-union policy. At the same time, employers made great efforts to earn the loyalty of their white-collar workers, offering them welfare benefits, bonuses, profit- sharing schemes, and insurance.

Despite these efforts, workers were able to organize themselves and a series of strikes took place during the first decade.81 After the 1903 strike at Pacific Electric, the company developed one of the most advanced employee welfare programs in

“left behind their old labor associations” when they came to the “home of the open shop” (Laslett, 2012, p. 24).

80 In theory General Grey Otis accepted a worker’s right to join a union as long as the employer did not have to hire only union labor; in other words, as long as the employer could avoid a closed shop, and, consequently, a stronger union. In practice, the goal was not to employ any union members at all. He was a strong opponent of boycotts, strikes, and any other weapons unions might use to protect workers. The Merchants and Manufacturers Association began systematically dismissing their union employees and pressuring them to avoid all contact with labor organizers. Other businessmen started an “educational fund” to instruct employers in the evils of trade unionism. The Merchants and Manufacturers Association was able to secure the support of virtually all of LA’s leading shipping, lumber, oil, iron and steel, and haulage firms, as well as citrus growers in the surrounding countryside, becoming one of the largest and most successful open shop associations in the country (Laslett, 2012).

81 One of the most famous strikes took place in 1903 and was organized by Mexican workers, working at Huntington’s Pacific Electric. Several hundred of HPE’s Mexican employees were laying tracks along Main Street, working hard to prepare the city’s spring Fiesta and for a projected visit by President Theodore Roosevelt. On April 23, the secretary of the Central Labor Council announced the creation of a new union for Mexican tracklayers, the Unión Federal Mexicanos. Two days later, the union counted with nine hundred tracklayers. The workers asked for a wage increase. When Huntington rejected it, all the Mexican tracklayers struck, leaving about sixty Irishmen, African-Americans, and a few other workers on the job. The Los Angeles Times denounced the walkout, claiming that it was the work of radical agitator, who deluded the poor, ignorant peons, who had no idea what a union was. Huntington hired Mexican, Japanese, and African-American strikebreakers from out of town. The strikers held for several more days, even disrupting the tracklaying operations. Huntington responded by bringing in a large number of police. By April 27 full crews were again laying track, and a few days later the strike and the Unión Federal Mexicanos collapsed (Laslett, 2012, pp. 32-33).

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California.82 A further event that partially changed Los Angeles’s political landscape and the relations between capital and labor, was the bombing of the Los Angeles Times on

October 1, 1910, by two labor activists. The bombing not only gave employers a further excuse to continue to establish the open shop model,83 but it also damaged Job

Harriman’s, the Socialist Party candidate, chances to win the mayoral elections.84 The bombing of the Times, Job Harriman’s mayoral candidacy, and the strike wave that swept the city in 1910-1911, showed the deep conflicts between labor and capital that would continue throughout Los Angeles’s history. A conflict intensified by the complex racial and ethnic structure that developed in the city. The LAPD’s alliance with the

Merchants and Manufacturers Association played a fundamental role in favor of capital, and in intensifying the racial tensions in the city.

The high tide of Progressivism in the United States, marked by the 1912 election of President Woodrow Wilson, and the passage of many labor reforms, helped improve

82 The Pacific Electric built clubhouses containing libraries, restaurants, tennis courts, and even movie theaters. They organized an interdivisional baseball league to promote team spirit and raise company morale. A further welfare policy was the establishment of the Los Angeles Railway Recreation Association, which put on monthly dances, picnics, and “smokers” to which all employees and their spouses were invited. They also offered a voluntary medical insurance program (Laslett, 2012, p. 30).

83 The open shop lobby had grown so strong that it was able to keep union membership in the city down to no more than eight thousand, even though unions were growing fast across the United States. Between 1904 and 1909, the city’s unions lost three-quarters of the eighty-three strikes they conducted. The use of strikebreakers was a fundamental mechanism used by employers to fight the power of labor. This was supported by the LAPD, which gave protection to strikebreakers and strictly enforced the city’s picketing laws (Laslett, 2012, pp. 43-44).

84 On the night of October 1, 1910, downtown L.A. was shaken by a huge blast. The Los Angeles Times at First and Broadway had exploded. Twenty-one people died, and dozens more were injured. The explosion occurred during the course of the most violent and extensive labor organizing campaign in the city’s history. Two leaders of the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers Union, the brothers James B. McNamara and John J. McNamara, were responsible for the bombing. General Harrison Otis, owner of the Times, blamed organized labor, denouncing them with harsh words, “O, you anarchist scum! You cowardly murderers, you leeches upon honest labor, your hands are dripping with blood” (Laslett, 2012, p. 39).

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workers situation.85 This would not mean the end of the open shop, on the contrary, the

1920’s industrial boom, helped moved forward the open shop ideology in Los Angeles.

Furthermore, the continuing immigration into the city, especially from Mexico and also of

African-Americans from the South and North, made the class and racial structure even more complex.

The 1920s Industrial Boom

Much of Los Angeles’s modern form, Jules Tygiel (2001) argues, was developed during the 1920s. The city population more than doubled, its vast expansion, the dependency on automobile, its predominance as a Western business and financial center, the growth and centrality of Hollywood, and above all its intensive industrial development.86 A combination of rapid in-migration and aggressive expansion added eighty square miles and almost six hundred thousand residents to create a new metropolis. The population remained overwhelmingly white and Protestant, but there were two “great migrations,” one of Mexicans uprooted by the Mexican Revolution and of African-Americans leaving the South; combined with a growing Japanese population, they gave Los Angeles the second highest percentage of nonwhites of any major city in

85 The Clayton Act of 1914 and the creation of the Department of Labor were important acts by the Federal Government. In 1911 the Sacramento legislature adopted nearly all of labor’s preferred measures, including workmen’s compensation act and a law limiting the workday to eight hours for women and minors. In 1913 legislators passed improvements to the state workmen’s compensation law and established the Commission of Immigration and Housing (Laslett, 2012, p. 59).

86 In 1919, Los Angeles was a small city, anchored by a downtown and a central district, with a majority of Anglo-Saxon Protestant population. Most of the surrounding communities were unincorporated and sparsely developed. Los Angeles ranked behind seventeen other cities as a manufacturing center, its labor force was concentrated in service and tourist-based enterprises. The petroleum industry was not fully developed yet, and Goodyear Tire had just become the first significant national company to open in the area. By 1929, however, Los Angeles had annexed forty-five adjacent communities, only a third of its population lived downtown, it ranked first in the nation in movie production, second in the making of automobile tires, and it was rapidly rising in other areas. Los Angeles became the aviation capital of the United States, with a third of the nation’s air traffic centered in the region. Los Angeles became the ninth industrial center in the country (Tygiel, 2001).

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the nation.87 Los Angeles became a large industrial center, more than a quarter of its workers participated in manufacturing, and large corporations replaced smaller enterprises as the dominant economic players.88

The population of Los Angeles grew at an intensive pace during the 1920s, stimulated by the oil boom, a new surge in Southern California land prices that rewarded speculators, and the rapid growth of mass production industry. Four scattered industrial suburbs emerged during this decade: craft workers in Hollywood; semi-skilled autoworkers in South Gate; mixed-skill oil workers in Signal Hill; and unskilled citrus workers in the San Gabriel Valley. Most of the oil workers, as Hollywood’s studio craft workers and South Gate’s factory employees, were white, native-born Americans. Very few Mexicans and no African-Americans were employed in the oil industry, limiting the ability of both populations to acquire high-skilled jobs.

The industrial expansion was a continuation of Los Angeles’s boosters, who in previous decades had promoted the city as a bucolic paradise, in which tourism, agriculture, and real estate were the main economic engines. The civic elites noted that it would take more than tourism, land speculation, and services to provide employment for all new residents streaming into the city (Hise, 2001). These businessmen began luring big companies and manufacturers to move to Los Angeles, promoting the natural

87 Apart from Mexicans, African-Americans, and Japanese, there were important communities of Jews, Slavs, Italians, Russians, and Armenians (Tygiel, 2001).

88 By 1930, Los Angeles manufacturing output ranked first among the Pacific coast industrial areas, exceeding San Francisco by $153.7 million, Seattle’s by $929.6 million, Portland by $1.1 billion, and Denver’s by $1.2 billion (Fogelson, 1993). There was an increase in output of almost 500 percent, from $103 millions in 1914 to just over $610 million in 1927. Los Angeles led “all cities west of Chicago” in the production of bakery products, canned fish, machine-shop products, canned fish, machine-shop products, furniture, pumps, and iron work. Some of the companies that came to the region were Bethlehem Steal Corp., National Lead Co., Procter & Gamble, US Steel Corp, and Willard Storage Battery Co. (Hise, 2001, p. 19-20).

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and infrastructure benefits existing in the city. Interested companies received valuable business and engineering assistance in establishing branch operations in Los Angeles

(M. Davis, 2001).89 Part of the promotion strategy was to sell Los Angeles’s open shop model. Goodyear was one of the first industries to open a plant west of Vernon. The tire maker constructed eight-hundred homes nearby as a “company neighborhood,” called

Goodyear Park. While workers enjoyed the possibility of having a house near the factory, which included some type of welfare services, it also served as a way of controlling the workers and reduce the organizing ability of the unions.90 In short, militant anti-unionism, careful planning, low taxes, abundant electric power, warm weather, mass-produced bungalows, and a racially selected labor force made Los

Angeles a paradise of the open shop. The region’s real and imagined charms kept labor markets overstocked with new immigrants ready to work under open shop conditions.

The existence of subdivision covenants restricting occupancy to whites helped to shape a complex working-class divided by race. The anti-union approach meant that working conditions were far from what the boosters promised, and also maintained the racial division both in housing and the workplace.91

89 In 1919, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, accepted LA’s Chamber of Commerce invitation to discuss the city’s industrial prospects. They told the Chamber representatives, including Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, that the booming automobile market was making the region increasingly attractive. That same year, Goodyear became the first Eastern company to open a major factory in the city (M. Davis, 2001, p. 103). Goodyear, for instance, invested $6 million dollars in their plant on Central Avenue (Hise, 2001, p. 30).

90 Until World War II, Los Angeles was known as the open shop capital of the United States. Contrary to what the booster pamphlets promised, workers realized they had to struggle just as hard to make a living in Los Angeles as they did in the East or Midwest (Laslett, 2012). Los Angeles’s industrial employers, especially in the metal trades and the lumber industry, relied on extensive blacklists, regularly updated private detective agencies, to exclude workers with union backgrounds.

91 In his study on the history of labor in Los Angeles, John Laslett (2012) shows how certain unions, in particular the AFL, worked hard to maintain racial divisions, by not allowing African-Americans or Mexicans as members, and supporting nativist claims and anti-immigration policies. On the other hand,

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One of the most important industries in Los Angeles was the motion picture industry. During the 1920s, Los Angeles became the main producer of motion pictures in the world.92 Producers who were tired of battling powerful eastern unions were drawn to Los Angeles because of its reputation as an open shop city. The movie industry helped ignite the growth of the city’s population and economy.93

Despite the difficulties, unions continue to organize workers and fight for better working conditions. This intense labor activity gave workers a sense of pride and led them to greater political activism. The open shop activists continued to use any method available to fight unions; they use the police to repress labor organizers, and they took advantage of the presence of the Ku Klux Klan to attack both union leaders and keep

Los Angeles as segregated as possible.94

Mexicans and African-Americans continued to suffer employment discrimination and occupied the lower echelons of the working structure. This led, between other things, to a fierce competition between these two populations for low-skill jobs. Low pay, underemployment, seasonality, and bad working conditions characterized employment in such competitive-sector businesses as construction, clothing and accessories,

more radical unions, such as the IWW, or those supported by anarchists and communists, made great efforts to organize nonwhite labor, and incorporate nonwhites in the unions and in the labor struggle.

92 The United States produced ninety percent of the world’s films and Hollywood accounted for at least eighty percent of U.S. production (Ross, 2001, p. 255).

93 The value of the annual product coming out of Hollywood’s studios went from approximately $79 million in 1921 to $850 million in 1930 (Ross, 2001, p. 269). By the end of the decade, its fifty-two studios employed 15,000 workers, paid $72.1 million in salaries and wages, and stimulated additional investment in related sectors such as photographic equipment (Fogelson, 1993).

94 In the winter of 1923-1924, for instance, the LAPD expelled the remaining members of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World). In this effort, they were aided by the KKK. The KKK was fundamental in fighting Italians, Mexicans, and other foreign-born workers, who worked as longshoremen. Thereafter members of the KKK frequently went to San Pedro to back up police raids against radical sites (Laslett, 2012, p. 81).

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restaurants, service stations, and the laundry trade (Monroy, 1999).95 It would be take the World War II, when many white workers were drafted to the army, for nonwhites to become an important workforce in those areas where they had previously been excluded.

As Josh Sides (2003) states, pre-World War II Los Angeles was a city of paradoxes. It was a city where white supremacy was as central to white self-perception as it was in southern Mississippi but where anti-black violence was quite limited. It had one of the highest proportions of black homeowners of any United States’ city together with restrictive housing covenants designed to minimize black residential mobility. While housing and education opportunities were somehow available, the opportunities for industrial employment were limited. With a labor surplus and no federal laws prohibiting discrimination, employers were free to segregate as much as they wish to.96 However, the interesting racial structure of Los Angeles meant that on one side there was a white population, while on the other there was a large and vibrant patchwork of races and ethnicities. It was a city in which both Mexicans and African-Americans struggled to balance the desires for activism and accommodation, and struggled between forging interracial alliances and the harsh competition for low-skill jobs, a situation that still

95 When Mexicans were employed in industries generally reserved for whites, they would be employed in the worse jobs in the sector. For example, they would be employed in steel mills and foundries in tasks which were hot and gritty, but the skilled positions of core maker and molder, which paid much better, were reserved for whites only (Monroy, 1999).

96 Before World War II, there were only a few fields of employment for which race was not a significant handicap for blacks. The first and most significant was domestic service. According to the 1930 census, 87 percent of employed black women and 40 percent of employed black men in the city worked as household servants. Approximately 17 percent worked in the transportation industry, almost exclusively as porters and waiters. Another 22 percent of male workers were employed in the manufacturing industries, usually as janitors and laborers. The City Engineers Office hired large numbers of African- Americans as garbage collectors, street-sweepers, and asphalt truck drivers (Sides, 2003).

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continues nowadays.97 As the city population grew, this interracial mingling was reduced due to spatial segregation. The black population became increasingly concentrated in

South Central, but even then, they shared the neighborhood with other groups.

The neighborhood of Watts, which already was becoming the main place for

African-Americans in the city, was not able to secure an industrial base of its own during this period. The town had originated before World War I as a labor camp for Mexican tracklayers and this gave the area a shady reputation that discouraged white factory owners from establishing plants there. Furthermore, most white employers at that time refused to hire blacks, consequently, they had no reason to establish themselves there.

The manufacturing suburbs worked hard to maintain themselves exclusively white, insisting on excluding Mexicans and African-Americans.98 By World War I, restrictive covenants were helping define the insulated, middle-class world of Los Angeles’s

Westside. At the same time, these covenants were building a “white wall” around the

Black community on Central Avenue, in what Mike Davis describes as a “private Jim

Crow” (1990, p. 16).99

It is important to recall that Los Angeles’s manufacturing suburbs did not contain only blue-collar workers. As these areas grew, commercial and white-collar jobs also

97 The one area in which African-Americans were shielded from competition with Mexican immigrants, whose citizenship status made them ineligible to work, was in public employment (Sides, 2003).

98 Huntington Park, for instance, was described approvingly by one source as having a population that was “100% American of the white race.” And South Gate itself was praised for having an “abundant supply of skilled and unskilled white labor…[and] no foreign population.” At this time, Alameda Street was developing a reputation as one of the most complex racial barriers in Los Angeles (Laslett, 2012, p. 91).

99 According to Mike Davis, the restriction enacted by homewoners’ associations meant that 95 percent of the city’s housing stock in the 1920s was effectively put off limits to Blacks and Asians (1990, p. 161).

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became available.100 This marks an important different from what took place during the late 1980s and 1990s, when a series of socio-economic transformations affected these neighborhoods, and those with better jobs and better socio-economic positions left the region leaving behind a mass of unemployed or underemployed, who had no chance but to stay.

It is in this period of industrial growth and increased racial segregation and racial tension, that Los Angeles’s Police Department took its first serious steps towards modernizing and professionalizing its police force. In 1923, August Vollmer, was chosen to lead the LAPD.101 During his tenure, a police school was established, and the top graduated officers formed what he called the “Crime Crushers,” the precursors of what today is the Metropolitan Unit. This highly mobile force was in charge of “cleaning up

‘nests’ of crime” (Bultema, 2013, p. 97), which included vagrants, gambling houses, and union activities. Vollmer was the first chief to use statistics to make decision on where to concentrate LAPD’s resources, which were generally deployed in nonwhite, working- class areas.102 Later on, during Chief James Davis tenure, the use of scientific knowledge to direct policing was further enhanced by the use of fingerprints. Chief

Davis went as far as to ask all Los Angeles’s residents to be fingerprinted and their records kept on file. Chief Davis also introduced the infamous “red squad” commanded by Captain William Hynes. The LAPD’s red squad engaged in sophisticated espionage

100 By 1930, for example, one-fifth of South Gate’s earners held white-collar positions as professionals and managers, shopkeepers, or owners of small businesses.

101 Chief Vollmer had served as chief of police in Berkeley, and founded the School of Criminology at the University of California, where he lectured (Bultema, 2013, p. 93).

102 Khalid Muhammed (2010) has made an extensive analysis on how the use of crime statistics was central in the construction of black criminality.

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and outright physical violence against labor unions, leftist political clubs, and civil rights organizations.103

Challenging the Open Shop and Racial Segregation

The Great Depression was as severe in Southern California as it was in other parts of the country. Neither the agricultural, oil, nor the motion pictures industry could mitigate the effects of the 1929 economic crash. Factories closed and the number of unemployed increased.104 Homeless families established squatter camps in various parts of the city. There was also a serious contraction in city services, which prompted rising demands for relief, Los Angeles’s response was to rely on private charity. For nonwhites, the Great Depression hit them really hard. Faced with the double burden of racism and poverty, they struggled to survive.105

One of the ways city authorities attempted to cope with the increasing unemployment rates was to expel Mexican residents. Interestingly, several unions supported the idea of “repatriating” Mexicans, and in August 1931, the state legislature passed a law making it illegal for any company doing business with the state to employ

“aliens” on public works. The law was used illegally by private employers to favor whites over job applicants of color (Laslett, 2012, p. 111). The threat of deportation drove many

103 The “red squad” operated until 1938, when Fletcher Bowron won the mayoral election and force the LAPD to abolish the squad. Chief Davis believed that one of the primary goals of communist ideology was to encourage sexual liaisons between white women and black men, and encouraged his red squad to brutally dispersed any gatherings of suspected radicals (Sides, 2003).

104 By 1932, about seven hundred thousand people were out of work in California, almost half of them in Los Angeles. In 1934 the unemployment rate stood at 16.4 percent in Southern California, three points higher than the state average (Laslett, 2012, p. 108-110).

105 In the first years of the Depression, an estimated 30 percent of black men and 40 percent of black women were unemployed (Sides, 2003, p. 27).

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Mexicans away from the once-thriving, ethnically mixed neighborhoods near the Plaza into the safer and more isolated barrios of the East Side.

As a consequence of the precarious working conditions and the loss of power by employers over unions, union membership rose from 20,000 at the beginning of the

Depression to more than 150,000 by 1938 (Sides, 2003, p. 27). The New Deal would significantly change the open shop situation, strengthening unions and helping workers, whites and nonwhites, to come out from the dire conditions brought by the depression.

Yet, when Communists began to organize demonstrations, and strikes began affecting local industry, California’s vigilante right became increasingly aggressive, perpetuating the labor and racial fights of the previous decade.106

The post-Depression economic expansion combined with the increase power of unions challenge the open shop model, which was dominant until then. The growing political influence of the Democratic Party together with the New Deal and the unions, put down the power of the open shop lobby.107 Los Angeles was transformed from a place where unions where regarded as a threat to industrial freedom to one where they were reluctantly accepted as a legitimate part of civil society.

What turned the situation for the best was the coming of the military industries to the region. If Los Angeles was becoming one of the most important industrial centers in the country, the military industries consolidate the city’s position as a top manufacturer.

106 California’s vigilante right included groups such as the Silver Shirts in San Diego, resembling Hitler’s Brown Shirts, a revived Ku Klux Klan in the Central Valley, and the Associated Farmers, a powerful group of right-wing growers who were affiliated with the Merchants and Manufacturers Association (Laslett, 2012, p. 110).

107 The hearings of the Senate Subcommittee on Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, exposed the nefarious practices of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, helped bringing partially down the open shop (Laslett, 2012, p. 172).

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Overnight, Los Angeles became the nation’s second largest industrial manufacturing center.108 As World War II approached, Los Angeles aircraft industry expanded much faster than the auto industry. The federal government had given an important number of large defense contracts to companies in Los Angeles, which brought many new migrants to the city in search for employment.109 Much of this migration wave were

African-Americans and whites from Oklahoma and Arkansas. These population shifts contributed to a major increase in racial tensions.110 One expression of this tensions came in June 1943 with the “Zoot Suit” riots.111

With the increase in population came an increased demand for housing, and city authorities began building new apartment buildings throughout the city. Liberal members and unions favored using federal funds for public housing projects. Their opponents, which included the real-estate elite, pushed authorities to use federal funds to subsidize private houses. The debate was complicated by the racial friction that emerged between the recently arrived workers, which included African-Americans,

Okies, and white southerners. At the end, the housing authorities build most of their public housing projects in Watts and the Alameda corridor. For the first time,

108 Los Angeles was outranked only by the Detroit area. The city received more than $11 billion in war contracts, built twice as many warplanes as any other production area, and rivaled all other areas in shipbuilding. By 1943, more than half a million people were employed in ship, plane, and steel production. Between 1946 and 1955, more than $2 billion were invested in the construction and equipping of manufacturing plants in Los Angeles (Sides, 2003).

109 By September 1942, Los Angeles had secured 64 percent of all California’s contracts for fighters and bombers as well as 28 percent of its shipbuilding awards (Laslett, 2012, p. 175).

110 At the peak of migration in 1943, more than six thousand African-Americans came to Los Angeles each month, and more than two hundred thousand arrived in the 1940s (Sides, 2003, p. 43).

111 In June 1943, white US Navy officers stormed through Mexican neighborhoods in Los Angeles, beating young Mexicans (Sides, 2003, p. 48-49).

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representatives of the city openly acknowledged the terrible effects of racial segregation and took concrete steps to mitigate the harshness of those effects. Most of these projects contained a mixture of black and white residents, together with Latinos. Having long ignored the effects of residential segregation, the government was suddenly confronted with overcrowded neighborhoods in Central Avenue and the slums of Little

Tokyo. Despite this, the expanding employment and sharply rising incomes for many

African-Americans meant that while residents of the ghetto often lived in slums they not necessarily lived in poverty.

In regard to work, the labor shortage during World War II forced employers to reconsider their exclusive preference for white male labor. Furthermore, the Fair

Employment Practice Committee, which threatened to revoke federal defense contracts from discriminatory employers, assisted African-Americans in their entrance to the military industries. In the two decades following World War II. African-Americans in Los

Angeles made the greatest economic advances they had ever experienced, becoming a steadily increasing proportion of the workforce, joining unions in rising numbers, purchasing homes, and approaching middle-class standards. African-Americans became more active politically and in the labor movement, developing important challenges to their second-class citizenship status. Yet, African-Americans continued to suffer discrimination, segregation, and intermittent racial violence. The greatest barriers to full equality were now subtler, but as damaging as before. As opportunities for

African-Americans increased, they were stymied by managerial racism, restrictive

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seniority rules, white workers’ preferences, and deepening competition with Mexican workers.112

While it seemed that Mexican-American workers, seen by many whites as proximate Caucasians, enjoyed greater benefits than African-Americans, the reality was less bright. Latino workers suffered just as much from overcrowded housing, police harassment, and employment discrimination as any other minority group. They were forced, together with African-Americans, to compete in a segregated labor market where most of them were confined to unskilled, low-paying jobs.

The establishment of defense industries in Southern California during World War

II laid the foundation for extensive industrial growth in the postwar era.113 Between 1946 and 1955, more than $2 billion were invested in the construction and equipping of manufacturing plants in Los Angeles (Sides, 2003, p. 58). Workers benefitted from the postwar boom, and union membership reached its peak.

The economic boom gave power back to those who previously favored the open shop model. While they were not able to bring it back, they did reduce the power of labor. The shift to the right in California, and Los Angeles in particular, included a counterattack against labor, the retreat of New Deal liberalism, and the emergence of a new form of cultural conservatism. This shift intensified racial prejudice and ended the movement for public housing. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 meant a big blow to the

112 This discrimination came not only from employers but also from some of the unions, which attempted to protect white workers threatened by the massive entrance of African-Americans and Mexicans into the labor force (Lasslett, 2012; Sides, 2003).

113 After reconversion, the aircraft, motion picture, automobile, rubber, petroleum, furniture, and food processing industries continued to flourish, and the electronics industry rose quickly (Sides, 2003).

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unions and the political organization of nonwhites.114 Communist and Socialist leaders, who fought for the formation of an interracial labor movement, were persecuted in the

Cold War climate of the postwar era. While conservative organizations such as the

Chamber of Commerce, right-wing nativists, and most AFL members, were happy with the expulsion of Mexicans and Communists, an alliance of left liberals, Jewish activists, and people of color from downtown and East L.A. began to join forces and elected in

1949 the first Latino, Edward Roybal, to Los Angeles’s City Council.

By the 1960s, it had become clear that the industrial jobs for which blacks had long fought were now slowly disappearing. Preference of industrial employers for

Mexican over black workers had become thoroughly entrenched. Residential segregation increased in many ways. Aircraft industries, which offered better working conditions, began opening plants in the predominantly white suburbs, leaving African-

Americans highly concentrated in the Central industrial corridor, where working conditions were much worse. The inadequate transportation system made matter worse, as nonwhites living in the segregated neighborhoods of South Central and East

Los Angeles had difficulties accessing the biggest defense plants, which were located on the West Side or the harbor area. The lack of minority and liberal representation insulated City Hall from the social changes taking place in the country, and kept

114 The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act canceled many of the legal rights unions had acquired in the 1930s. The law expanded the list of unfair labor practices to include mass picketing, sympathy strikes, and secondary boycotts. It also banned the closed shop, empowered states to adopt “right-to-work” laws, and required union officers to file affidavits affirming they were not members of the Communist Party. Interestingly the AFL and CIO partially accepted some of the measures of the Taft-Hartley Act, including the anti- Communist declaration, generating a serious political rift in the Los Angeles labor movement (Laslett, 2012, p. 217-218).

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pursuing a conservative agenda of fiscal austerity, strong support for the forces of order, and reluctance to participate in federal social programs (Sonenshein, 1993).

The postwar economic boom meant that those able to get good jobs quickly began moving out from the low-income neighborhoods. The multiethnic neighborhoods in which blacks had lived before World War II often became solidly black neighborhood.

Those African-Americans who benefitted more from well-paid, union jobs, and achieved certain upscale mobility were ready to move out of South Central leaving behind the most impoverished members of the community. The expansion of housing opportunities was cause for optimism, but it also exacerbated the material and psychological effects of economic division among blacks.

During the immediate postwar years, the LAPD also went through important changes under the leadership of William Parker, who held his position as chief of police from 1950 until his death in 1966. The LAPD evolved from an inefficient, highly corrupt department into one of the most sophisticated police departments in the country. Chief

Parker developed the idea of police officers becoming more knowledgeable with the communities they patrolled. Officers were expected to be familiar enough to make on- spot decisions about who belonged there and who did not. Intentionally or not, LAPD officers believed that at least part of their duty was to enforce the color line.115 For black

Los Angeles, the threat of police violence was a daily, and sometimes deadly, reality.

Chief Parker regularly accused civil rights groups for attempting to bring anarchy and

115 When asked about accusations of racial profiling, Chief Parker responded: “Any time that a person is in a place other than his place of residence or where he is conducting businesses,… it might be a cause for inquiry” (Sides, 2003, p. 136).

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communism into the city, and exhorted white citizens to support the police in its mission to contain minorities territorially.116

Chief Parker work hard to impose a rigid, hierarchical, militaristic bureaucracy.

Parker hated community policing, which was attempted by his predecessor. He preferred to have a wall between the community and the police. Chief Parker trained officers to have a tough, unemotional, yet objective demeanor to the public. Officers were taught to see themselves as professional crime-fighting soldiers whose mission was to wage war against crime and criminals who were now viewed as “the enemy”

(Lasley, 2012, p. 1). He transformed the department’s existing management style into that of a paramilitary organization where the chief of police had power and authority over his police like a general commanding his troops. One of Parker’s protégé was future Chief of Police Daryl Gates, who played a fundamental role in the militarization of

LAPD. Inspector Daryl Gates would be the one leading LAPD in the ground during the

Watts uprising.

It would be the actions of this police department that sparked one of the most violent uprisings in the city, the 1965 Watts revolt.117 Watts rioters were prompted as

116 In 1965, Chief Parker told a television interviewer, “It’s estimated that by 1970, 45 percent of the metropolitan area of Los Angeles will be Negro. If you want any protection for your home and family, you’re going to have to get in and support a strong police department. If you don’t do that, come 1970, God help you!” (cited in Herbert, 1997, p. 81).

117 On August 11, 1965, a white police officer pulled over a young African American man named Marquette Frye for reckless driving. Frye failed a sobriety test and was arrested. The officer, who was on a motorcycle, radioed for a patrol car to take Frye to jail. A crowd gathered, including Frye’s mother and brother, who fought with the police. As the police car left, several angry youths threw bottles at the patrol cars. The crowd did not disperse, and as the evening went on, the crowd grew larger and began throwing rocks and bottles at passersby. Then someone firebombed a white-owned business, while others shot at the police. Shops were looted, buildings were set on fire, and barricades were erected in the streets. The LAPD appealed for help, and National Guard troops were sent. Four days later, more than fourteen hundred armed Guardsmen patrolled the streets, hundreds of buildings had burned down, and dozens of rioters lay wounded. When the six-day uprising finally ended, thirty-four persons were dead, nearly all of

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much by unemployment, bad housing, and lack of access to a decent education as they were by hatred of white-dominated LAPD.118 For both black and white Los Angeles, few moments were more terrifying than the Watts uprising.

For Daryl Gates, the commanding officer at Watts during the riots, the uprising left the feeling that police training and tactics at the time were inadequate to address the threat posed by the rioters. Gates sought the military, who were fighting guerrillas in

Vietnam, for guidance. Gates would create the police unit which would change the culture of United States’ policing from the late 1960s onwards; he developed the first

SWAT team in the country.119

The most urgent task facing Los Angeles’s authorities in the aftermath of the

Watts uprising was how to respond to the widespread property destruction and job losses. White flight accelerated after the riots, taking with it many of Watts’s better-off workers, shopkeepers, and skilled entrepreneurs. By the end of 1965, the unemployment rate in the area had risen to 10.7 percent, compared to only 4.2 percent for the city as a whole (Laslett, 2012, p. 241). Relief programs were enacted, but it is unclear how many African-Americans actually got new jobs. The situation was not much better for poor, unskilled Latinos searching for jobs in the East L.A. barrios. The problem was exacerbated by the persistence of racial covenants in the sale and rental of private housing. The Watts riots brought to the forefront the class differences in the black

them African-Americans, and 1,032 residents were wounded. Property damaged amounted to $40 million, and over six hundred buildings were damaged or destroyed (Laslett, 2012).

118 The McCone Commission identified three most important causes of the uprising as unfair housing, segregated schools, and high rates of minority unemployment.

119 For a thorough analysis on the creation and development of SWAT in Los Angeles and in the rest of the country, see Radley Balko’s (2013) The Rise of the Warrior Cop.

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community too. Black middle-class people not only did not join the uprising, but when rioters attempted to move towards Compton and Willowbrook, they were stopped by fierce resistance of both white and black homeowners (Sides, 2003, p. 175).

The uprising did what more than a year of politics failed to do; it finally brought the War on Poverty to Los Angeles. The uprising also accelerated the formation of a biracial alliance, which would bring Tom Bradley, a former LAPD officer, to become the first African-American mayor of Los Angeles in 1973.120 During his first tenure, Bradley’s administration would use federally mandated affirmative action rules to provide employment for minority men and women in city government. He created a multiethnic and multiracial coalition in City Hall, which would be more receptive to the needs and requirements of the nonwhite and working-class residents of the city. Moreover, Bradley attempted to have greater control over LAPD by appointing aggressive civil rights advocates to the police commission.121 However, the main beneficiaries were public employees, small entrepreneurs, and middle-class African-Americans. They were not the uneducated, unskilled, or the inner-city poor. By his second tenure, Bradley moved away from his base and began to collaborate with the downtown business elite in redeveloping the central city. He allowed large-scale property developers to raze old

120 In his book Politics in Black and White, Raphael Sonenshein thoroughly explains the formation of this biracial alliance, the rise of Tom Bradley, his time as mayor and his later fall after the 1992 riots. The first stage in Bradley’s rise to power was the alliance forged by Jews and African-Americans in the Tenth District, which elected him as city council in 1963. Bradley expanded this coalition after the Watts uprising, uniting African-American voters in the Ninth District, middle-class African-Americans and Jewish activists in the Tenth District, and white liberals from the West Side.

121 One of Bradley’s administration achievements in the area of law enforcement was to force LAPD to eliminate the use of the chokehold and limit the police department’s intelligence-gathering program. Yet, the police reforms were quite moderate in comparison to other cities, there was no civilian review board, and the number of police shootings was not significantly reduced (Sides, 2003, p. 194).

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working-class neighborhoods near Downtown and replace them with expensive high- rise office buildings, diverting resources from low-income neighborhoods.

In the mid-1960s Latino and African-American youth became more politicized and led a series of attempts to take political control over their communities. Tired of the integrationist, nonviolent, and moderate policies of the civil rights movement, they search for more radical activism. The Southern California branch of the Black Panthers

Party was one example. During 1968 and 1969, the Panthers develop a series of social programs in South Central which were designed to “uplift the black masses” (Laslett,

2012, p. 257).122 Persecuted by the government and the police, rejected by the white- run trade unions and the mainstream civil organizations, the Black Panthers had a short life in Los Angeles. Yet, this short period of time led many residents of the area to feel politically empowered. This would radically change with the entrance of drugs (crack in particular) and the gangs that partially took control of the area.

The LAPD attempted too to make some changes in the aftermath of the Watts riots. Under Chief Davis, who assumed in 1969, LAPD attempted to reach out to the community, especially in Watts. The plan involved defining a specific patrol area for

LAPD officers so they could get to know the citizens and place they worked. It included a series of community-oriented measures to build bonds between the public and the police. However, the tough attitude developed during the Parker era continued unabated through Chief Davis’s tenure.

122 The services developed by the Black Panthers included a health clinic, a community center, and a free breakfast program for schoolchildren (Laslett, 2012, p. 258). The Brown Berets were the Black Panther’s of the Latino community.

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The Watts uprising also marked the end of the long postwar economic boom in the United States and signaled the beginning of a period of socio-economic changes, which would lead to the long process of deindustrialization and reindustrialization of the city.

Towards Post-Fordist Los Angeles

The mid-1960s marked the beginning of the end of one phase of economic growth in the region and the simultaneous emergence of another. After two decades of rapid economic growth, the postwar industrial manufacturing boom had begun to slow.

Many large factories employing unionized workers either closed or relocated to areas with lower taxes. However, it was not a process of deindustrialization as it was a process of reindustrialization.

We need to remember that the explosive economic growth during the postwar era, which led to increase number of immigrants, also implied the segmentation of local labor markets, leading to an increasing polarization of the urban society in Southern

California (Scott, 2000). This has led to a widening divide between a highly paid cadre of professional, managerial, creative, and technical workers, and a large segment of low-paid, low-skilled manual workers, a very large proportion of whom were immigrants.

Since the 1960s, this divide has grown together with the number of people in the lower- end.123 The transformations of the last years of the 1960s and the 1970s, meant a decrease of unionization and the decline of real wage rates.124

123 A good example of this dual labor market has been the high-tech industry, which employs a small segment of very well-paid workers. On the other hand, many of these high-tech industries include a series of sweatshops employing low-wage immigrant and female workers (Scott, 2002, p. 172).

124 According to an NPR report union membership in California has suffered a steady decline since the mid-1960s, going from 33% members in 1964 to 21.6% in 1984, to 18.3% in 1994.

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By the end of the 1970s, and even more during the 1980s, labor unions’ hope for improving membership and bargaining power were destroyed by an unprecedented social and economic crisis. The recessions of the mid-1970s and 1980s, involved the loss of United States’ hegemony as the world’s leading producer of manufactured goods. The export of manufacturing jobs had a devastating effect on blue-collar workers and threatened their middle-class lifestyle. Combined with this, an increase in immigration from Mexico, Asia and Central America added around half a million workers into the labor force.125 Furthermore, the process of reindustrialization meant the movement of capital from the declining auto and steel factories into hundreds of small electronics and high-tech plants.126 This forced thousands of unionized workers, desperate for employment, into low paying service jobs on the bottom of the economic ladder. Most of the new businesses that came to southeast Los Angeles in the 1980s were retail outlets, furniture makers, storage companies, and food processing firms, which demanded long hours and paid minimum wage.127 These economic changes were led by a New Right coalition which took former California governor, Ronald

Reagan, to power, and meant the collapse of the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition.

125 The flow of immigrants combined with the power of Reagan’s New Right, led many white blue-collar workers to support the nativist backlash that erupted against these immigrants (Laslett, 2012, p. 268).

126 In the mid-1970s, when car imports from Japan and South Korea deluged the market, the Big Three automobile companies (Ford, GM, and Chrysler) decided to move production back to their factories in the Midwest and close their West Coast facilities. In the early 1980s, Goodrich Rubber and a number of other rubber and glass factories follow suit (Laslett, 2012, p. 268).

127 The old Firestone Rubber plant in South Gate, for instance, was converted into a nonunion furniture factory, the buildings that formerly housed Bethlehem Steel on Slauson Avenue were rented out to a hot- dog distributor, a Chinese food products company, and a maker of rattan patio furniture. U.S. Steel was turned into a warehouse complex. None of the employees in these new businesses were paid more than $7 or $8 an hour (Laslett, 2012, p. 276).

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Losing one’s income, John Laslett (2012) argues, was not the only consequence of plant shutdowns. For those who had worked many years in the same factory, job loss had profound psychological consequences. For Latino, African-American, and Asians, these jobs had meant, after years fighting discrimination, their acceptance to United

States’ society, it gave them a sense of pride in working alongside workers of other races as equals; pride in becoming full-fledged U.S. citizens. The deregulation of industry and the dismantling of New Deal social welfare policies added downward pressure on wages and led many factories to reduce their workforce. Reagan’s cuts on housing subsidies, the reversal on the government’s policy of raising the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation, made the situation worse.128 Thousands of immigrant families were forced to live in “a dense, continuous ring of slum housing around downtown” (Laslett, 2012, p. 275).129 UCLA researcher Paul Bullock found that by 1973, the total unemployment rates for men between sixteen and twenty-four years old stood at forty-six percent in Watts and thirty percent in East L.A. (Laslett, 2012, p. 245). This was more than six times the rate for whites in surrounding communities.

During the 1950s an important number of African-Americans were able to achieve white-collar status. The rising proportion of white-collar African-Americans during the 1960s and 1970s transformed the racial geography of Los Angeles. African-

Americans began moving out of South Central and Watts into the more affluent areas of

128 The reversal of the government’s policy of raising the minimum wage to cope with inflation, meant a loss of 25 percent in real wage. Moreover, the elimination of subsidies and the lack of public housing available meant that rents increased more than 150 percent, while wages had risen only 14 percent (Laslett, 2012).

129 Between 1969 and 1990, the percentage of L.A. workers earning less than $15,000 a year went from 7 percent to 19 percent, while the proportion of workers who earned between $30,000 and $44,999 a year fell from 38 percent to 26 percent (Laslett, 2012, p. 276).

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Leimert Park and the exclusive area of Baldwin Hills, which quickly became the heart of upper-class black Los Angeles, a position it still holds today.

A further development influenced by the economic transformation was the surge in drug consumption and drug commerce, together with the reappearance of gangs in the most impoverished areas of the city.

Black gangs had almost disappeared after 1961 and the political swirl of the

Watts uprising. But some had persisted around the public housing projects, which had now become slums.130 New gangs appeared mostly along schools or park lines. The new gangs consisted of young teenagers, with a few twelve and under. And they quickly tuned to violence, armed street robberies, and shootings at parties became common.

Watts became particularly sensitive to gang activity as three housing projects were located in that area.131 The projects became breeding grounds for gangs, and the areas around them intensely crime ridden. It is in this environment that the Crips were created.132 Violence increased across South Central, Watts and Compton. As the Crips gained notoriety, cells formed over a large area. By 1973, the police were estimating as many as eight or nine hundred youths were claiming to be Crips members. As a

130 There were the Sin Town in Jordan Downs, the Pueblos in Pueblo del Rio, Dartanians in Hacienda Village, Orientals in Avalon Gardens, and both Avenues and Huns in the William Nickerson Gardens. Imperial Courts also had the Avenues and Huns, and what was left of Corregidor Park was claimed by the Gladiators (Dunn, 2007, p. 185),

131 Imperial Courts, Jordan Downs and Nickerson Gardens are located in Watts.

132 William Dunn argues that there are a number of stories regarding the creation of the Crips. Most gang members agree that the formation of the Crips was influenced by Raymond Washington, who was involved in street politics and grew up in a territory dominated by the Black Panthers. While in high-school during the spring of 1971, Williams met Stanley Tookie Williams and decided to create the Cribs, who would later become the Crips. Some versions argue that the Crips already existed before this meeting. Regardless of its origins, the first reported action came in 1972 when youth Crips members attacked and killed a white truck driver on February 6, 1972 (Dunn, 2007).

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reaction to the growth of the Crips, a series of rival gangs decided to form a coalition and began using the name Blood.133 The residents of these areas were not only caught in the crossfire of the gangs’ turf wars, but were forced to live in an increasing environment of fear.

By late 1970s gang violence and gang membership was decreasing. It seemed as most of the kids grew tired of the killing, and there was hope that the gangs would disappear. But by the beginning of the 1980s, cocaine from Florida began to make its way in large quantities into Los Angeles, and with cocaine came crack too.134 The international drug cartels needed local agents to distribute the drugs throughout the city, and the Crips and Bloods were ready to make the delivery. With the drug money flowing, gangs began to grow again at incredible rates. The lack of job prospects, the low quality of jobs available, the deterioration of the housing projects, all contributed to the growth of this large informal economy. Turf wars and violence became part of the daily life in South Central and the East barrios under control of Latino gangs, including the infamous gangs which would be exported from Los Angeles to El Salvador and other Central American countries.135

133 The name is in reference to black soldiers returning from Vietnam, who called each other Blood (Dunn, 2007, p. 191).

134 Demand for cocaine in Los Angeles rose by 1000% between 1978 and 1983 alone. Tens of thousands of people were consuming crack regularly. While powder cocaine had an upscale image, crack belong to the lower classes. Users were street people, the homeless, and laborers (Dunn, 2007, p. 230).

135 Aside from the 230 Black and Latino gangs which the LAPD have identified in the Los Angeles area, there are 81 Asian gangs, and their numbers are also rapidly growing (M. Davis, 1990, p. 316).

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The state authorities’ reaction to the gang problem became a classic response in the era of the penal state, when crime became the rationale behind social policies,136 and law and order the framework to deal with social ills. Without doubt, gang activity is a crime problem, but the creation and growth of gangs responded to the series of socio- economic problems and racial struggles that developed in Los Angeles. Gone the manufacturers with their unionized jobs, gone the housing and welfare programs, the informal and illegal economy became one important resource for many residents. At the same time, left without any social policy alternative, authorities responded through an exclusive tough-on-crime, law enforcement approach.137 LAPD began acting fiercely against gangs, transforming every young African-American or Latino into a potential gang member, which justified being stopped, frisked and harassed. Between gangs and

LAPD, many young black and brown residents of the city felt under siege.138

Revisiting Watts nearly a generation after his study on the socio-economic situation of the area, UCLA economist Paul Bullock stated that the worsening conditions he saw in 1975 were now deteriorating even more, and that endemic unemployment was at the core of the community’s despair. Bullock indicated that, from an economic

136 Jonathan Simon, in his book Governing Through Crime, shows how crime has become the rationale behind the organization of social policy across the country, and an example of the expansion of the penal state to areas beyond criminal justice (Simon, 2007).

137 For instance, the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act of 1988 (STEP), which was passed with bipartisan support from Southern California, allowed authorities to prosecute parents of alleged gang members for not exercising reasonable care to prevent their children’s criminal activities (M. Davis, 1990, p. 283).

138 In 1988, for instance, a busload of well-dressed Black members of Youth for Christ were humiliatingly surrounded by security guards and frisked for drugs and weapons at the popular Magic Mountain amusement park. Park managers defended their right to search “suspicious” (aka Black) youth as a matter of policy (M. Davis, 1990, p. 284).

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perspective, the only rational option for Watts youth was to sell drugs (cited in M. Davis,

1990, p. 308).

The increase in gang activity allowed the now Chief of Police, Daryl Gates, to continue to develop the militarization process LAPD had undergone, and increase the use of SWAT teams in their war on drugs. On April 8, 1986, Reagan signed National

Security Decision Directive 221, which instructed the military to assist local law enforcement in their fight against drugs (Balko, 2013). Chief Gates created CRASH

(Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) as a response to the increase in gang activities. As a show of force, LAPD implemented several highly controversial field tactics. People in suspected gang neighborhoods were automatically stopped and made to lie face down on the ground with hand and feet spread for even minor traffic violation

(Lasley, 2012).139

While the police increased their presence and power in the streets of Los

Angeles, the myriad of responses to the socio-economic changes and the social problems it created became more and more limited as the control of the state and federal government became more and more conservative. Even the Democratic Party was adopting a more conservative stand, as the popularity of the welfare state declined and a push against taxes became stronger. Already in 1978, California voters had approved Proposition 13, which placed severe limits on future increases in property taxes. Over the long run, the tax revolt had an increasingly negative effect on the

139 The greatest show of force was the gang sweep carried out under the name “Operation Hammer.” It was carried out typically on weekend nights, involved some 100 or more LAPD officers descending in unison on inner-city areas and making mass arrests of hundreds of residents (M. Davis, 1990; Lasley, 2012).

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provision of public services. In this context, a new uprising took place in South Central

Los Angeles, and once more it was a violent police action that triggered the riots.

Rodney King and the Post-Fordist City

The spark setting off the 1992 uprising was widespread indignation among

African-Americans over the verdict in the Rodney King trial.140 What began as spontaneous African-American street protests escalated rapidly into a rampage of the dispossessed and socially-marginalized, with total property destruction exceeding one billion dollars (Scott, 2002, pp. 176-177).141

The context in which the riots took place where those which have been described above. The process of reindustrialization, the elimination of manufacturing jobs, which allowed workers, in particular nonwhite workers, to achieve a sense of citizenship and hope, was now lost with the nonunion, low-wage jobs and the rise of the informal economy. This process led to a polarized geography of social class and racial segregation, in which the predominantly blue-color urban core became almost entirely

African-American and Latino, while the Anglo managers and executives lived on the slopes of the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains (Scott, 2014). At the same time, those African-Americans and Latinos who were able to achieve some upper- middle- class status abandoned this urban core for the upper-class neighborhoods of Baldwin

140 Rodney King was an African-American taxi driver who on March 3, 1991, was stopped for speeding by LAPD officers. The officers jumped on King and began brutally beating him. George Holliday, a witness to the stop, videotaped much of the beating. The officers were charged and tried. A change of venue was granted and the trial took place in the white suburb of Simi Valley, where a jury acquitted the officers.

141 Los Angeles’s authorities had to ask the state and federal government to assist them in controlling the violence. In all, 13,500 troops from the California National Guard, the Third Battalion First Marine, and the Fortieth Infantry Division and Seventh Infantry Division of the US Army were sent in to stop the violence. There fifty-three fatalities, and over 2,000 injured (Balko, 2013).

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Hills or the West Side, leaving behind a mass of dispossessed, which took the streets in

1992.

Homelessness, which is still mostly concentrated around Skid Row near

Downtown LA, has also spread throughout the city. Homelessness, Edward Soja describes, is just the cruelest tip of an even larger iceberg of housing poverty (2014, p.

151). The working poor in Los Angeles, while often having several menial jobs, cannot easily afford formal housing. This has led to the creation of an “informal” city of slums.

Soja reports that nearly every housing survey shows Los Angeles to have the most overcrowded formal housing in the United States (Soja, 2014, p. 151). While there may not be extensive favelas, many residents of the city live in similar precarious conditions.

The economic restructuring underwent by Los Angeles, together with the elimination of most of the housing and welfare programs, combined with the rise in crime and gang activity, created an explosive situation, which, with the expansion of the penal state, it would be managed by a law and order approach, leaving the police as the almost exclusive institution to deal with the city’s social ills.

The trauma of the 1992 riots, and the harsh criticism received by Chief Gates from the Christopher Commission, which investigated the riots, led to important changes in LAPD. Willie Williams became the first African American Chief of Police in the city.

Chief Williams brought community policing into the force as a way of repairing the damaged public image of the department. It was a deliberate step away from the militarized model brought by Parker and fully developed by Daryl Gates. Yet, the rank and file was not very receptive to community policing. Rejected by many police officers, community policing was quickly transformed in a way of using the community as

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intelligence gathering against those seen as “others,” and a mechanism to enforce control over these neighborhoods. Chief Williams left after five years and another

African-American officer, Bernard Parks, assumed as Chief of Police. His attempts to bring the rank and file to accept the management requirements of community engagement were not well received.

In 2002, William Bratton, a Vietnam Army veteran, and former chief of the Boston

Police Department and chief of the New York City Transit Police, was brought as the new LAPD Chief. Chief Bratton continued to develop community policing, but now under the ideological guidance of the Broken Windows theory, which still guides LAPD’s approach to communities of color around the city. Despite the new community policing approach, much of the militarized culture and tactics has not been abandoned by LAPD officers. Furthermore, the adoption of Broken Windows theory has helped consolidate the model that sees the social problems affecting the community as problems for the police to solve.

Deprived from unionized, well-paid jobs, welfare services, housing programs, and good schools, the communities and residents who suffered the most from the socio- economic and political changes of the last decades of the twentieth century, see the police as the only state agency dealing with their ills. In spite of a relative union revival, marked by the Justice for Janitors movement, residents of South L.A., almost all of them

African-Americans and Latinos, have not been able to recover the sense of pride and hope the unionized manufacturing jobs from the postwar era gave them.142

142 Union membership in Los Angeles has fallen from 20 percent in 1986 to 13 percent in 2013. The fall has not been bigger due to the existence of strong unions in the public sector, which have kept their

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As we shall see through this work, the police have become central in the lives of

South L.A.’s residents. And it is the regular negative encounters with the police which affect the way residents define their racial identity, their idea of space, and their sense of second-class citizenship, similarly to what happens with São Paulo’s periphery residents.

membership around the 50 percent. In the private sector, unionization has dropped from 16.2 percent in 1986 to 7.4% in 2013.

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CHAPTER 4 SHARED EXPERIENCES I: CONSTRUCTING RACE AND THE MAINTENANCE OF RACIAL HIERARCHY

Constructing Race: “You want to know who is black? Ask the police, they know”

Marcelo, a resident of São Paulo’s southern periphery, born and raised in one of the favelas in the region, shared the following story.

Os homens1 came in the middle of the night. They were looking for a suspect in the area and they thought he may be at my house. It was around midnight and we were all sleeping. My wife was pregnant at that time with our second child, and my four-year old son was sleeping in the next room. They broke in with full force, kicking and pushing everything in their way. They pointed their machine guns at me and shoved me out of my bed, slapping and kicking me. My son came running to our room. My wife hugged him tight, both of them crying. At the beginning the officers thought I was the suspect they were looking for. When they realized I wasn’t him, they kept slapping me and asking where that person was. At gun point, they ordered me out of the house. When the neighbors heard all the confusion, they came out too. They shouted at the officers that I was a “worker” and not a “bandit” and asked them to let me go. The commotion was such that the officers decided to let me go. (Marcelo, in conversation with the author, São Paulo, September 2015).

If you were not the suspect and the officers knew you didn’t know anything about the suspect, why did they keep beating you? I asked Marcelo. “Because for them I was just another black bastard,” Marcelo answered.

This story, which exemplifies part of the daily life of residents of São Paulo’s periphery, may not present anything novel, except for the fact that from a phenotypical perspective Marcelo is not black. From an outsider’s perspective, such as mine,

Marcelo could easily be categorized as white. However, his experiences with the police as a favela-born man living in São Paulo’s periphery leads him to identify himself as

1 “Os homens”, “the men” in English, is the way in which periphery residents of São Paulo generally refer to the police, especially the Military Police.

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black. In Brazil’s ambivalent definition of race, defining and constructing racial identities is as much an internal process as it is shaped by external forces. In this context policing becomes a central element in the construction of race; as the popular expression in São

Paulo goes, “if you want to know who is black, just ask the police.”

A similar situation can be observed in Los Angeles too. Adelle is a middle-class,

African-American woman in her early fifties. She has two sons, one in his late teens, and the other in his early twenties. Their father is white. And while the older son, according to Adelle, has assumed a white identity, the younger has recently begun adopting an African-American identity. I asked Adelle why she thought her younger son has adopted what she saw as a black identity:

I do not exactly, but I believe it has to do with my family and also his experiences with the police. My brother, his uncle, has had too many bad experiences with the police. When we were young, living in South Central [Los Angeles], my father all the time used to send me to see why my brother was taking so long in running an errand. I would go to see and I would find him spread-eagle on the ground or against the wall being searched by the police. My sister was harshly beaten at Leimert Park by police officers. My nephews are constantly being harassed and pulled over. My youngest son recently bought a car, a Volvo that had tinted windows. He has long curly hair that makes him look black if you see him behind the car windows. He already got pulled over by the police several times. The funny thing is that when they ask him out of the car, they don’t really know how to ‘classify’ him. He has friends who have been beaten, even shot by the police. I think all of this has had a strong effect on his racial identity. Of course, it is not only this. He is proud of all his heritage, and I think defining himself as black gives him a sense of empowerment, as if he is saying “now I know what to expect and how to cope with it.” (Adelle in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, May 2015).

As we can observe, both in Los Angeles and in São Paulo, encounters with the police lead some residents to identify themselves as black, even when, phenotypically speaking, their racial identification is not clear. Both stories further show how, as

Michael Omi and Howard Winant (2015) state, that a person’s racial identification may

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be different from how other people may see them. It is their life experiences, marked by history, socio-economic and spatial context, which influence the way in which both

Marcelo and Adele’s son identify. As Sandra Bass (2001) and Kidiste Bonner (2014) show, race and space are mutually constructed by the way policing is carried out. In the context of the penal state, with the expansion of police powers across communities of color, the police play a prominent role in defining individuals’ racial identities, and the content of this identity. Didier Fassin (2011) argues that encounters with the police, as the ones described here, represent an instance that may not be important in itself, but become so because of what it means to the person living through it. These experiences are inscribed in the bodies of those going through it. It shows what they represent in the eyes of society, and the routinization of these experiences leads to the internalization of this representation. Similarly to what Ben Penglase defined as “moments of crisis”

(2014, p, 139), where interactions between the police and favela residents allowed him to observe the interaction between social and racial prejudices, the experiences of

Marcelo and Adele’s son show us how the interplay of socio-historical contexts, space, and violence lead them to define themselves as black, and distinguish themselves racially from those who do not experience similar abusive encounters.

Marcelo’s older son is twelve years old now, and as most of the children and teenagers in Capão Redondo, they spend most of the time outside. “I have no problem with him playing outside,” Marcelo told me, “the problem is his mother. She doesn’t like it.” Why? I asked

There’s a boca opposite my house.2 My wife is afraid something will happen. She doesn’t want him to get involved with that crowd. And she’s

2 Boca or mouth in English, is the places were drugs are sold in the favelas.

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terrified the police will come and my son will be playing there and they will think he’s part of the drug business. There’s not much we can do. These kids are his neighborhood friends, the play football, fly kites, play around, and yes, they sell drugs too. But that’s the reality we live in. I told my son to be careful and I have to trust him. I’m afraid of the police too, but that’s the world we live in. The problem with my wife is that she’s white, and she hasn’t experienced what we did (Marcelo, in conversation with the author, São Paulo, September 2015).

Yet, once again, from a phenotypical perspective, Marcelo’s wife was not very different from Marcelo. However, in Marcelo’s eyes, the fact that she did not grow up in a favela, and had not gone through many of the violent experiences Marcelo did, led him to classify her as white. Adelle too shared with me her frustration with her ex-husband and his actual partner, both white, who have difficulties “understanding what it is to be black in South L.A.”

Both, my son’s dad and [my partner] got angry because I let [my son] buy the tainted-window Volvo, and I wasn’t very happy with the idea either. But it doesn’t matter, and this is what they need to understand, it doesn’t matter where you live, how much money you have, or even how light-skin you are, the police will remind you you’re black. When they stop, frisk, and beat you, they don’t care that your father is white, that you’re an A student, that you work hard, or even that you live in Black Beverly Hills [Baldwin Hills], they just see another black thug. (Adelle in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, September 2015).

The days when race was defined biologically have long gone, and most, if not all, serious scholars agree that race is a social construction. The fact that racial categories are socially constructed, does not mean that they are not real, once created and once an individual is ascribed as belonging to a specific racial category, it produces real social effects on the individual and the communities associated with that category

(Bonilla Silva, 2006). These personal experiences are turned into collective narratives, which are later transmitted from generation to generation and begin to form part of what means to be preto, pobre, periférico, or a black or brown resident of South L.A. As

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Clarissa Rile Hayward (2013) shows, narratives play a central role in the social construction of race. When parents, both in São Paulo and South L.A., tell their children how they ought to behave when encountering the police, they use the narratives of police violence and abuse not only as a warning but as part of the communal heritage.

The way an individual is situated under a specific racial category is a complex process, which depends on different factors, ranging from socio-economic, to spatial, and experiential ones. Furthermore, as we saw in the aforementioned stories, individual experiences play an important role in the process of racial definition. As Bonilla-Silva

(2006, p. 9) indicates, in order to understand the social effects produced by the construction of race, we need to consider the notion of racial structure, which, in our cases, reflects a system in which people from European descent (whites) are awarded systemic privileges in contrast with people from non-European descent (nonwhites), in other words, a system of white supremacy. When agents of the state, in this case the police, categorizes someone as “black” and reflects this categorization through inappropriate, oftentimes violent, behavior, they are reproducing white supremacy. And it is not only policing that influences the social construction of race, but, as we shall see, race influences the way policing is exercised. As Laura Gomez (2010) contends, law, or policing in this case, and race construct each other in an ongoing dialectical process.

The racialization of certain spaces, means defining space and its residents as “others” as a potential threat to the social order and as such they need to be policed in specific ways; at the same time the way certain people and spaces are policed lead to the racialization of those individuals and regions. The police produce and reproduce the existing racial and social hierarchies. Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel (2014)

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argue that race is interpreted by the police in their actions. “Appearances matter, and not only the skin-color but the looks… The way police officers act in stops, shapes the definition of race” (2014, p. 24). The police, Penglase indicates, tie together socioeconomic, racial, and spatial markers of difference (2014, p. 141-142); and in doing so they give meaning to race.

Contrary to what happened in Brazil, law played a fundamental role in defining race in the United States since its foundation until the 1960s. However, as the Brazilian case shows, as well as the post-Jim Crow United States, the lack of a legal definition of racial categories, did not eliminate the informal categorization of race, which keeps situating nonwhites in general, and Blacks in particular, in the lower echelons of the social structure (Bastide & Fernandes, 2008 [1959]; Haney Lopez, 2006). Police violence and abuse over black bodies is not accidental, but central to the maintenance of white supremacy (Alves, 2014).3 Disguised in a rhetoric of threat, crime, and war, where blackness is criminalized and black bodies are seen as disposable, police action reproduces societal racial hierarchies and demarcates the blurred lines that define racial categories. Nonwhite residents of South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery find themselves in a vicious cycle in which discriminatory patterns of arrest and incarceration fuel crime statistics, which reinforce the images of nonwhite spaces and black bodies as dangerous (Alexander, 2012; Cano, Ribeiro, & Meireles, 2010; Glover, 2008;

Muhammad, 2010; Peffley and Hurwitz, 2010; Russell-Brown, 2009). Nonwhites carry

3 The racialized social structure, which is organized to produce and reproduce the privilege positions of whites over nonwhites, is maintained, according to Ruth Peterson (2011), through residential segregation, which leads to unequal patterns of education, employment, public resources, and policing. In other words, policing is one way, albeit a very important one, in which the racialized social structure is maintained.

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within their bodies a halo of suspicion, which leads to hyper-surveillance and over- policing (Barlow & Barlow, 2000), leading police officers to see not only driving-while- black a suspicious activity, but also riding-while-black.

The “Halo of Blackness”: Carrying the Sign of Suspicion

On the eastern side of Southwest L.A. lies the University of Southern California

(USC) main campus. USC is an expensive, high-ranked, private research and higher- education institution that attracts students from all over the United States and the world.

The elegant campus with its red-brick and yellow-wall buildings, and its pristine green gardens, is surrounded by a low-income, nonwhite community. The old houses with their cracked wooden walls, their dry lawns, and small fences, contrast with the impressive red and gold of USC’s main campus buildings. The presence of a private, elite institution in the heart of South L.A. has created many tensions and instances of violence in the region. As a result of a series of bike thefts on USC’s campus, police officers increased the repressive measures against residents of the area. Residents of the area have expressed their frustration and anger with the way in which police officers and USC policemen act towards the community. In one of the CPAB (Community Police

Advisory Board) meetings in the area,4 the problem of bike theft was raised by one of the lead officers.

“We have had an increase in bike thefts recently,” the Lead Officer in charge of

USC’s surrounding area said. A community member replied by asking what could be done. The officer informed the participants that they were asking USC students to

4 These meetings, which take place weekly, are part of the community-policing program implemented across Los Angeles. The Board is presided by the Captain of the police station of that area and a community member chosen by the community. Most of the participants in these meetings are generally older, and wealthier members of the community.

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register their bikes. “In this way,” the officer explained, “when we see someone riding a bike that doesn’t look like its owner, we can stop that person and check if the bike is his.” After the meeting, I approached the lead officer in charge of the USC area and asked her about the bike registry and how they apply this in the field, in particular I asked her what she meant by “not looking like the owner.”

L.O (Lead Officer): Well, you know what I mean. Someone who’s riding a bike that it’s probably not his.

Me: Actually, I don’t know what you mean. Could you explain it to me?

L.O: I know the community and the people in the community. I know when the rider looks like the owner or not. And again, we just check that the bike is not registered to another person.

Me: So you stop anyone who’s riding a nice bike and check?

L.O. Not everyone, only those who don’t look like the owner.

Me: Do you stop USC students too?

L.O: Not generally. It’ll be rare to have a student stealing a bike. I’m not saying that it can’t happen, but it’s rare.

Her evasive response led me to believe that the officer was probably racially profiling when deciding who “looks like the owner” and who does not. Being a young black or brown living in the area meant you were not expected to ride a nice bike, and officers were now using a bike registry to stop young residents. This situation is not new in the area, reporter Sahra Suleiman, had covered the issue of RWB (riding while black) for the Streetsblog LA. In my conversation with Sahra, she explained how police officers have been targeting young residents in the area.

They see a young black or brown resident riding a bike and they find any excuse to stop them, as they used to do and still do with drivers. They even use personal safety as an excuse. You’re not using a helmet or you’re riding to close to the drivers’ lane, they stop you. They would first tell you that it is for your own safety, but then they’ll run the registry or

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they’ll find any excuse for a citation. So before they’re eighteen, the police is already building a rap sheet. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about this, and almost all the young residents I talked to, told me they had been harassed, insulted, stopped, and even frisked by the police. If you’re brown or black, riding a bike is a suspicious activity around here [in South L.A.]. (Sahra Suleiman, Streetsblog LA reporter, in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, May 2015).

Nonwhite residents feel they are constantly carrying a halo of constant suspicion, a suspicion that is reinforced by regular pullovers of nonwhite drivers, bike riders, or even when walking through the city’s streets. In certain spaces, regular activities conducted by nonwhites become suspicious activities in the eyes of the police. However, it is not the activity qua activity, but the agent carrying the deed that makes that action a suspicious one. In some instances, it is the combination of the agent and the space that renders an action suspicious. Adailton, a young Afro-Brazilian psychologist and resident of Capão Redondo, recalled the time when he was doing his residency in an important hospital in São Paulo’s center.

It happened in 2006, during the large PCC uprising. I was doing my residency and was working in a clinic in Moema.5 Because of all the violence that was taking place in the city, it was not safe for a Black man, from the periphery, to be walking around the noble areas. As I was working in the clinic I wore a gown. The police would stop me, but they would identify me as a medical student, so they wouldn’t bother me that much. Once I left my gown in the clinic, and a Military Police patrol car drove through. The moment they saw me, they stopped, the officers jumped out of the car, and without giving any warning, they shoved me to the ground, and one of them put a gun to my head, while another police officer pushed my head to the pavement with his boot. I couldn’t move or talk. A third police officer was handcuffing me, when my boss saw the situation and began asking why had they stopped me. He explained them that I was a student at his clinic and that they should let me go. They frisked me, checked my bag, and found some of my medical equipment and the tag from the clinic. Finally they let me go. The officer who held the gun to my head, helped me up, and asked me from where was I. I told him I was from Capão. He was from Capão too, and told me that it was not a

5 Moema is an upper-middle class neighborhood in São Paulo’s noble areas.

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good time for a black guy like me to walk around the city. I was lucky my boss saw us and came to rescue me. Since that day onwards, I wore my gown everywhere, it was the only way to avoid being stopped, abused, beaten, or even worse. (Adailton in conversation with the author, São Paulo, October 2015).

A similar situation took place in South L.A. with Juan and José, two Latino, gang- interventionists who have been working in Olympic Park and Newton area for many years already. Both of them were in their early forties, strongly built, bald, with tattoos in their forearms and neck. Despite working for the city and in coordination with the local police station in trying to reduce gang violence they have been pulled over and mistreated several times, even by police officers who knew who they were and what their job was. Juan and José argue that the police automatically saw them as a threat for being Latinos, bald and with tattoos. For the police they are gang members, or work for the gangs. They do not seem to care that the regular stops put Juan and José’s lives in danger, if a gang member sees them being held by the police and then released, they may think they are informants. “They don’t care,” José said, “what does it matter one

Latino less around here.” “For them, we are not people,” Juan added, “we are gang members, thugs, drug dealers, we are nothing for them.”

As with the aforementioned story of Adailton, Juan and José express the same anger and frustration towards the police. They both convey the feeling that their bodies carry an aura of suspicion they cannot change. Police actions reinforce this image of being a constant threat, they reinforce racial stereotypes and imprint in Adailton, Juan and José’s bodies, a sense of being a threat to society, a threat that they carry for the simple fact of being Black or Brown, for being in the wrong side of town, or walking at the wrong time of the day.

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Not all interactions are violent, but this does not mean they do not produce a similar effect. Adailton, for instance, shared with me the fact that he prefers to use public transport instead of his car, because every time the police decides to do a blitz,6 he gets stopped for driving-while-black. Most of these stops are done in a polite manner, but reinforce Adailton’s feeling of being a suspect. A similar negative, albeit not violent, experience happened to Marcus, an African-American man in his fifties, who works as a chief constructor in South L.A. and contrary to the white construction workers, who work under his supervision, Marcus has been constantly stopped by the police, who asked for his documents and the reason for him being there, even when he is wearing his construction uniform and a helmet. “No matter what I do, how do I dress, the way I walk, or talk, I’ll always be a suspect.” Marcus told me.

Oftentimes these interactions with the police, which reinforce the idea that nonwhites carry within their bodies a halo of suspicious, takes place in sites we would consider as safe spaces, such as schools. This happened to Marc and Ana, a Latino teacher and a Latino student and student counselor at a charter school in the Newton area.7 Ana recalled how the police would come to her previous school and do random searches in the cafeteria or in the classrooms.

They [the police] would come to the school, enter the classrooms and randomly choose students. They would always pick up the blacks of course, the Samoans and some of the Mexicans too. The white kids would rarely be picked up. I would get really nervous. I know I had nothing on me, I don't do drugs or drink or carry knives, but I would get really nervous. And then when they picked me even more and I would double

6 A “blitz” is the way periphery residents refer to a police roadblock.

7 Both, Marc and Ana, work and participate in a charter school which works with kids of all ages, including young adults, who dropped or were expelled from the formal school system and want to get a high-school diploma. Ana is a student but also works as a student counselor helping new students adapt to the charter school’s system.

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and triple check that I had nothing, although I knew I had nothing. They would take us to a little office, take our backpacks and passed them through a metal detector. I would ask myself all the time if I was dress correctly, I would always be afraid and nervous, even knowing that I had nothing on me. (Ana in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, June 2015).

Young residents in São Paulo’s periphery and in South L.A. would repeat similar stories of being stopped, frisked, and harassed by the police. Young residents in Capão

Redondo, recalled being stopped after school on their way back home, searched and sometimes even slapped by police officers, who know they are students from the nearby school. “The darker you are, the greater your chance to be stopped and slapped by the police,” a young resident of Capão Redondo shared with me. These kids have organized themselves to walk back in groups and never leave their fellow darker-skin friends alone. Yet, this tactic not always worked.

We were walking back one day from school and a Military Police patrol stopped us. They immediately came after Marquinhos, he was the only black boy in the group. They pushed him against the wall, searched him and slapped him a couple of times. They insulted him, asked him if he was ‘banging white girls’, if he was selling us drugs, all that stuff. The worst of all was that one of the officers who was abusing him was black. We began shouting to leave him alone, they were all over him. They had pushed him towards the patrol car. We shouted at them that he was our classmate, that he was doing nothing wrong. At the end, they let us go. Marquinhos was crying, I felt really bad for him. The police officers were laughing while we walked away. I don’t want to imagine if they have caught him alone (Rose, young resident of Capão Redondo in conversation with the author, São Paulo, October 2015).

The generalized feeling shared by most of the interviewees is that there is something they have, the color of their skin, the way they dress, talk, walk, the place they live, or a combination of all these elements that makes them look suspicious in the eyes of others, especially the police. The criminalization of race has deep historical roots both in the United States and in Brazil. The “halo of blackness”, as Charles Mills (1997)

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described it, which makes nonwhite bodies suspicious, is carried by nonwhite residents and is reinforced by police action.

One way of understanding these historical roots is to take a brief overview of the development of criminology as a discipline and how they influenced criminological thought in the United States and Brazil. In the late nineteenth century, for instance, the

Italian Ceasre Lombroso linked biology with criminality, arguing that criminal behavior was biological determined, and that people from African descent were prone to criminal activities, indicating that white criminality was due to nonwhite genetic influence.

Lombroso’s ideas influenced the eugenics movement in several countries, particularly in the United States (Kalua-Crumpton 2010). Lombroso’s ideas together with other pseudo-scientific arguments that posited people from African descent as inferior and crime prone, such as Gobineau or Sir Francis Galton, made their way into the United

States through Herbert Spencer and MIT sociologist William Z. Ripley, who reproduced these ideas and adapted them to the United States’ political reality (Newby, 1965).

Khalil Gibran Muhammad (2010), studied the history of the idea of black criminality in the United States, showing how the link between race and crime “is as enduring and influential in the twenty-first century as it has been in the past” (2010, p. 1). Muhammad indicates that between 1890 and 1940, racial crime statistics became the central argument in the debate about “blacks’ fitness for modern life” (2010, p. 2). Muhammad

(2010) demonstrates how, with the publication of the 1890 census, prison statistics became the basis for the discussion of black criminality, ignoring the fact that racist laws and discriminatory punishments were driving the numbers. Furthermore, he points out how W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida Wells were already in those days attempting to deracialize

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black criminality, efforts ignored by mainstream social science. Blackness and criminality became tied together, even when the pseudo-scientific arguments of

Lombroso and others were refuted. As we saw, according to Naomi Murakawa (2008),

United States political leaders since the 1940s onwards addressed black civil rights issues in criminological terms; furthermore, Murakawa argues that in the 1960s the

United States did not “face a crime problem that was racialized, but had a race problem that was criminalized” (2008, p. 236).

In Brazil too, the positivist school of criminology, represented by Lombroso, Ferri and Garofalo, had its followers. The works of Nina Rodrigues in the late nineteenth century, as well as Euclides da Cunha and Oliveira Viana posited that people from

African descent were biologically inclined towards criminal activity. These authors, together with Artur Ramos and Nelson Hungria, for instance, attempted to explain

Brazil’s social and cultural backwardness and slow economic development due to the influence of people of African descent (Adorno, 1996). Alongside these ideas, through the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, cortiços and favelas, spaces occupied by poor, mostly Afro-Brazilian residents, were seen as health threat to the urban development of Brazil’s main cities, especially the capital Rio de Janeiro and the developing city of São Paulo (Goldstein, 2003; Holloway, 1993; Meade, 1997; Needell,

1988). These theories, Sérgio Adorno (1996) suggests, continue to weigh heavily in those in charge of formulating and implementing security policies (1996, p. 287). With the expansion of the carceral state, this becomes very important, as the problem of race

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is primarily addressed though a law and order approach rather than a socio-economic one.8

In 1954, Oracy Nogueira, examined the differences in racial prejudice between

Brazil and the United States. He characterized Brazil as having a prejudice based on mark or color, while the United States had a prejudice based on origin. A prejudice of mark, according to Nogueira (2006 [1954]) is based on the physical traits of the individual or phenotype, is more flexible, allowing Afro-Brazilians who may look white, or have special abilities to move up in the social ladder, although these are exceptional cases. In the case of prejudice of origin, exemplified by the one-drop-of-blood rule, the stratification system is more rigid. These ideal types defined by Nogueira have become less appropriate in examining the ways racial prejudice works, although certain elements remain in place. Ben Penglase (2014) adds a third category, the prejudice of crime or criminal spaces, by which the police misrecognize the way racial dynamics function in periphery spaces and treat black residents of those spaces as criminals, blackness and criminalization overlaps, sometimes blackness is seen as a sign of criminality, but in other instances it is police treatment of an individual or a space as criminal that makes that individual or space black (2014, p. 159). Penglase, similarly to what Laura Gomez (2010), Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve and Lauren Mayes (2015) describe how blackness and criminality follow a dialectal process constructing and challenging one and the other. Both the United States and Brazil are converging into

8 While programs of quotas and affirmative action attempt to create better opportunities for people of African descent both in Brazil and the United States, the main institution dealing with race in these two countries has been the criminal justice system and the police.

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this type of racial prejudice,9 still influenced by the legacies of their own past and the different expressions the racialized structure took.

In the process of criminalizing race, the tropes of war regularly used by the police reinforced the process of criminalization and constructed black bodies as a threat to the social body an internal enemy that needs to be fought against. The premise is one of a constant threat, and residents are well aware of it. In different community meetings in

South L.A. and in São Paulo, residents emphasize the need to teach the youth how to avoid confrontations with the police, and civic associations in both places have created flyers instructing residents how to act when pulled over by the police. Learning how to avoid being abused by the police have also become part of the repertoire of what means to be nonwhite from South L.A. or São Paulo’s periphery (Sclofsky, 2016).

These tropes of war have been used not only to increase police presence and surveillance in these areas, but also to justify police killings. In conversations with police officers regarding the Osasco massacre that took place in August 2015, they all used the language of war to explain what had taken place.10 “You need to understand that there is a war going on here,” one of the officers said. “The PCC has no problem in killing police officers and we need to defend ourselves. I’m not justifying the killing of innocent people, and I don’t think that the method use was correct; but most of the victims were bandidos,”11 he stated. “Not all of them,” I argued, “a fifteen years old girl

9 Oracy Nogueira explicitly indicates that these categories are ideal types and as such they do not perfectly reflect reality. In a similar vein, I consider Penglase’s category also as an ideal type.

10 On the night of August 8, 2015, nineteen residents of Osasco were allegdedly killed by Military Police officers in retaliation for the assassination of a Civil Guard officer a couple of days before.

11 Bandidos or bandits in English, refers to people who are seen as criminals and not as honest workers. Most of the people killed in the massacre have had criminal records. The modus operandi, at certain stages of the massacre, was that the assassins would enter a bar guns out, would separate those people

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and a sixteen years old boy having an ice-cream were killed.” “That’s sad, but there is always collateral damage in a war,” the officer replied.

The construction of blackness as criminal, as a threat to society, has, as we have seen, deep historical roots both in Brazil and the United States. Nonwhite residents of

South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery feel they carry a halo of suspicion wherever they go. They express this when they talk about the way the police see and treat them, by sharing a sense of living under siege, and by portraying the police as the enemy. On the other hand, the police reinforce these images through the discourses of fear and the tropes of war, which portrays nonwhite residents as a potential threat and leads officers to justify mistreatment, abuse and even killings.

Black Bodies as Disposable: Violent and Deathly Encounters

I met Marisa, a white resident from Capão Redondo in her late thirties, at the school she worked. Angelica and Renata, two residents of Capão with whom I became friends, had asked me to meet some of the older students at the school and I agreed. A few minutes later I entered a classroom with more than forty students and a group of teachers. At certain point in the evening I asked the students and teachers to raise their hands if they had a relative or acquaintance who had been killed by the police or the gangs, all the participants raised their hands. Marisa was one of them.

One of my brothers was killed by the police. I had two brothers, they are both black. I’ve seen the police stop, frisk, and beat them many times, but with criminal records, and then they executed them. Regarding the concept of bandit, the common conceptualization argues that if you are one, you have renounced to your rights as a member of the community and, henceforth, you can be killed or abused. In certain ways it replicates the idea hold by some social contract theorists, such as Locke, which argues that if you violate the law of nature by attacking the property (life, liberty, and estate) of someone else you can be killed (Locke, 1980 [1764]). There are two basic problems with this, one is that it denies the legal rights any person has to stand trial. Secondly, the common understanding of the concept is that if you are victim of police violence then it means that you are a bandit.

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I never imagined, or I didn’t want to believe that they will kill one of them. We were driving back, the three of us, from São Paulo’s center into Capão, when we got caught in a blitz at the neighborhood entrance. The officers ordered me to stop on the side of the road. Immediately, three officers draw their guns and ordered us to step out of the car. Probably the police saw a white woman driving a nice car with a black man on her side and a black man on the back, they assume they had kidnapped me. They shoved my brothers out of the car at gunpoint. I yelled at the police officers telling them that they were my brothers. It took them a while to understand this, and at the end they let us go. A couple of weeks later, I received a call from a friend telling me to go immediately to the police station that something had happened with my older brother. I rushed to the station, there was a lot of confusion, they didn’t want to tell me where my brother was or what had happened, they just told me that something had happened and that my brother may have been hurt. My friend drove me to the municipal hospital, where the doctors informed me that my brother had been shot and killed. He was stopped at a blitz and was shot. The official report stated he resisted arrest, which I know it’s not true. Another black man dead, one more for the statistics, who cares? It was bound to happen; a black person is always a suspect and his life is worthless in the eyes of the police (Marisa in conversation with the author, São Paulo, October, 2015).

The story of Marisa’s brother, together with other hundreds of stories of extreme police violence in São Paulo, share a similar pattern. Most of them are black, poor and from the periphery (Fórum Brasilerio de Segurança Pública, 2016; Hasenbalg & do Valle

Silva, 1999; Trindade Maranhão, 2011). The violence police inflict upon black bodies, generates a sense that these black bodies are disposable. It has led to the dehumanization and devaluation of black bodies, which, as Jaime Amparo Alves states, are economically exploited, spatially segregated and physically eliminated by state action (2014, p. 324). This sense of worthlessness is shared by many nonwhite residents of both cities.

On August 11, 2014, for instance, Ezell Ford, a twenty-five years old mentally-ill

African-American man, was shot and killed by LAPD officers. Police alleged that Ford tackled one of the officers and attempted to grab his gun, prompting the officer to fire his

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backup weapon. One of the officers involved in the shooting was found to have violated

LAPD’s policy on the use of lethal force; yet LAPD’s Chief, Charlie Beck, send an internal video in support of LAPD’s officers (Mather, 2015). Africa Keunang, for example, was shot on March 1st, 2015 by three LAPD officers, when he allegedly attempted to grab one of the officers’ weapon. Convicted of armed robbery in 2000, committed to a psychiatric prison hospital, Kuenang was living as a homeless in LA’s

Skid Row. Police said Kuenang had attacked another skid row man, and began fighting officers when they arrived (Holland, 2015). As we have seen, the changes that took place in Los Angeles in the last decades of the twentieth century included the closure of mental health clinics across the city, and it is the police, in the framework of the penal state, that deal with individuals with mental health problems.

Not all violent encounters end in death, but they leave indelible marks, as happened to Kanina, Adele’s sister. The incident took place at KAOS in Leimert Park

Plaza, an art workshop run by Ben Caldwell, an African-American artist and filmmaker, in his late sixties. KAOS has been offering for the last decade, art workshops for young members of the community. Kanina was participating in one of these workshops when the police stormed the place. According to Ben Caldwell’s testimony, the police had been surveilling the place for a long time.

The police were not happy to see young people from different races and ethnicities getting along and working together. We would talk about violence, including police violence, and the kids were becoming more politically conscious. Neither the police nor some community members liked this. They began spreading the rumor that young kids would come to KAOS to smoke weed, and that it was a sanctuary for gang members. Nothing of it was true, of course. Yes, some of the kids who came here were gang members, but this was a way of getting them out of the gangs. We were rehearsing for a show, it was late at night, around 10pm, when the police stormed into the place. They brought the door down and began

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pushing us to the ground, barking orders, kicking and beating the students. They began dragging the kids out of the locale into the street. Once in the street, they beat the hell out of them. Kanina was there that night. They hit her in the head, grabbed her by her hair and dragged her out of the building. They almost pulled her hair out. Once outside they beated her and left her unconscious. Her boyfriend and other friends were beaten too. She was taken to the hospital. Due to the beating, she lost her sense of smell (Ben Caldwell, KAOS director, in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, June 2015).

Kanina was working at youth center cooking for kids there. With the loss of her sense of smell, she had to quit her job. “We took the case to court and settled,” Adele told me.

Since then, Kanina has been targeted by the police. She is constantly pulled over, and, according to Adele, she has been threatened by some police officers. “Last time, I was with her when she got pulled over. When the officer came back with her driving license, he asked her how was her smelling,” Adele said. This feeling of vulnerability leads residents to comply with police abuse as a way of surviving. For instance, the case of

Bruno, whom I met at a community center in Jardim Ângela, run by the Santos Mártires parish. When I saw him the first time, Bruno was wearing a dressing on his right arm and on his right leg, covering what seemed as recent injuries. When I asked him what happened, he told me about his last encounter with the police.

I was hanging out with some friends near my house in the morro.12 We were not doing anything that time, we generally do some shit,13 but not that day. It was around ten o’clock at night when the men came. A Military Police patrol car came from nowhere and the men jumped out with their guns out and started shouting at us. They slapped me, frisked me, and searched my backpack. They asked me for my ID and when I refused, they asked by if I had been in juvenile detention. If I told them yes, I would be in trouble, so I shut up. Refusing to give them my ID, is enough trouble, but letting them know I had been arrested before is even worse. The

12 Morro translates as hill. Most of the favelas are located in the hills surrounding the more urbanized areas of the periphery.

13 “Doing shit” or fazendo merda, means doing something illegal, this could range from smoking or selling weed, to some type of petty crime.

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officers started looking around to see if there was anyone else in the streets. Once they realized we were alone, they told me to roll down the hill. At first, I said no. But then he put his gun on my head and hammered the weapon. When he did that, I dropped to the floor and began rolling down the cobblestone street. I scratched all my body, I was wearing a short and a t-shirt. I hurt my hands and legs, I ended with blood all over me. The policemen were laughing at me rolling down the street. After that, they just got into their car and left (Bruno in conversation with the author, São Paulo, October 2015).

Living with violence, especially police violence, is a constant in the lives of many Black residents. Political theorist, Charles Mills (1997, 1998) distinguishes between persons and subpersons, between those who are entitled to full rights and those who, because they are considered racially inferior, the rights and liberties enjoyed by persons do not apply to them. Police action reproduces this distinction. In their encounters with the police, nonwhite residents of South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery not only identify as black, but they develop what means to be black. They experience what means to be a considered a constant threat, to be treated as a menace, seen as a subperson. This does not mean that residents are simple passive objects in which these identities are imposed upon. The acts of resistance, from small individual actions that allow residents to survive, to collective action that tries to affirm their personhood through artistic expressions and mobilizations, residents of São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A. are constantly attempting to show that Black lives do matter (Sclofsky, 2016). Nonetheless, these dynamics make these efforts feel as an uphill battle.

Furthermore, interactions with the police not only affect the way individuals define their own racial identity, it also impacts the way the community defines itself, how they demarcate their physical and ideational boundaries and determine who is part of the community and who is not.

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Constructing and Defining Community

Community oriented policing, has been one of the main new strategies implemented by police departments across the United States and in some Brazilian cities. The police have become one of the main institutions administrating social life in low-income communities, and community-policing has spread police work into areas beyond law enforcement. In this context, certain interactions between the community and the police have been formalized both in São Paulo and in Los Angeles and include regular formal meetings between police officers and community members through the

Community Policing Advisory Boards (CPAB) in Los Angeles or the Conselhos

Comunitários de Segurança (CONSEG) in São Paulo. It is important to recall here some of the basic tenants of community policing in theory and in practice.

Robert Trojanowicz and Bonnie Bocqueraux (1990) define community policing as a philosophy based on the idea that only through coordinating efforts between police officers and private citizens can community problem related to crime, violence, and disorder can be solved. This requires police departments to “develop a new relationship with the law-abiding people in the community, allowing them a greater voice in setting local priorities” (1990, p. 5 italics added). Community policing expanded the police mission to include the search for solutions to a series of community problems, including crime, fear of crime, perceptions of disorder, and quality of life issues. This means that the police not only needs to enforce the law, but they must serve as “advisors, facilitators, supporters and leaders of new community-based initiatives” (Kappeler &

Gaines, 2009, p. 1). Neil Websdale (2001) argued that most studies on community policing neglect the experiences of those most affected by this new type of policing and insisted that community policing is a new strategy to control the poor and impose a

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narrow idea of community and what the community needs. As Sklansky (2008) indicates, the way community policing has been implemented ignores the heterogeneity of the community in which they work. Furthermore, it reinforces the belief that social problems can be solved through law and order and law enforcement intervention.

The institutionalized frameworks of community policing include a circumscribed sector of the community, mainly older and wealthier residents, especially business owners. Focusing on law and order, and quality of life issues, the CPABs and

CONSEGs construct an idea of community based on a restricted definition of what the community interests are. Community members generally provide critical information to the police, which later define the appropriate means of action to be taken, in what seems a one-way avenue relationship. For instance, São Paulo’s Ministry of Public

Security web page defines the CONSEGs as a support entity for State Police Forces and the directives established by the Ministry of Public Security (Secretaria de

Segurança Pública (Secretaria de Segurança Pública-SP). In rare occasions, community members, who are neither part of the institutionalized leadership nor regular attendees, come to these meetings and question the notions of community and quality of life developed in these frameworks. Most of the time, these voices are silenced by the police or other community leaders. These formalized meetings end establishing the principles by which the community should abide, and defining those who participate as the true representatives of the community.

However, constructing the “community” also takes place in the daily, street encounters between residents and the police. In many ways, the daily interactions inform and complement the notions developed in the less regular and more formalized

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meetings institutionalized through community-policing. This is particularly the case in

São Paulo, in which most residents I interviewed, including many activists, not only do not participate in the CONSEG’s meetings, they do not have knowledge of the existence of these meetings. The meetings take place once a month, and most of the time not more than four or five community residents participate. In other words, in São Paulo, community-policing seems to exist only in paper, or as the popular expression goes “é só pra inglês ver.”14 The construction of community and who is a respected member of the community and who is not, takes place in the streets. In contrast, in Los Angeles,

CPAB meetings take place once a week, and they play a much more prominent role in the constructing the sense of community.

Interactions, specifically violent and abusive interactions, between community residents and police officers oftentimes influence the way residents are labeled as respectable members of the community or not. They define who is considered a

“bandit,” and, henceforth, a threat to the community; and who is a “worker”, a respectable member in the community. While similar labels are not used in Los

Angeles, community-police formal encounters and the more regular and informal interactions in the streets also define which residents are part of the community and which members are a threat or part of the “anti-community.”

Finally, in South L.A., there has been an ongoing interracial/inter-ethnic conflict between African-Americans and Latinos. As we have seen, this conflict has its historical roots in the way the labor market was structured in Los Angeles. The conflict spread

14 “Só pra inglês ver” translates to “only for the Englishmen to see,” which means it is only for appareances.

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into gang conflicts for territorial control, a conflict that still goes on today in a lower intensity. Nowadays, much of the tension is related to who speaks for the community and who has a say in the way the meager resources are allocated in the community.

The police, through community-police meetings, play an important role in this tension.

São Paulo: Bandido versus Trabalhador

In Marcelo’s story, with which we open this chapter, his neighbors “saved” him from further police violence by screaming he was a worker and not a bandit. The use of the adjective “bandido” has been racialized and reflects a series of stereotypes regarding black, poor, residents of the periphery, which end justifying or tolerating police abuse. While the distinction between “bandido” and “trabalhador” was never clear, in the past, there were some formal criteria, which would make the division a clearer one. If a person had a formal job, if, as we saw in the previous chapter, he had his Workers’

Card, if he was not involved with jogo do bicho,15 or drug dealing, these were all signs of a worker, and as such he should be considered as a respectful individual and should be protected against police violence. In contrast, the bandido does not enjoy these rights.

By engaging in the illegal and informal world he should be aware that the police can use violence against him; this violence is not legal but it is legitimate in the eyes of many paulistas. Nowadays, with the deep changes in the urban economy, the borders between the formal and the informal have been blurred (Feltran, 2011; Soja, 2000;

Telles, 2001, 2010), and police actions contribute to the blurring of these borders.

15 Jogo do bicho, or “animal game”, is an illegal gambling game played across Brazil, in many street corners, especially in low-income neighborhoods. The control over the game led to the formation of criminal syndicates, similar to nowadays’ drug gangs. As we the drug dealing, the police would allow the game to take place, by charging a fee, and sometimes would even provide security for those involved in the illegal business.

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In the previous chapter, we saw how during the Vargas regime, a series of labor laws and labor rights were enacted, including the formation of state-controlled unions, which led to the distinction between workers and bandits. The array of documents created by the Vargas regime served as a symbol of citizenship and respect. Formal labor served as a way of accessing civil status, seen as a civic duty and an obligation towards the nation. Through work, Vera Telles (2001, p. 48) argues, the individual would become a citizen and earn the moral status of an honest person neutralizing the stigma of poverty. Those who were unable to acquire the formal status of “trabalhador,” were seen as incapable of belonging to the civitas, they were the “others”, those who were outside, who did not deserve the protection of the state. This took place, despite the fact that these non-workers, engage regularly in productive activities, as informal workers, or domestic workers who were not given the protection of labor laws. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Chalhoub (1996) argues, the association between being poor, black, and being a criminal became the basis for police action in Brazil’s main urban centers. Areas in which there was a large concentration of poor, black folks, was automatically considered a dangerous region that had to be under constant surveillance.

In this post-Fordist era, where much of the periphery economy moved from industrial to service provision, many residents are unable to make ends meet and engage in both the formal and informal world. Residents would work during the week in formal jobs and participate in the informal or illegal economy during the weekends.

Many of my informants admitted selling burned DVDs, stolen cellphones, different types of stolen merchandise and sometimes doing small jobs for the drug dealers, such as

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keeping an eye on a boca, or carrying packages. The latter is especially popular among the youths. Street vending, which is very common both in São Paulo and across South

L.A., is more tolerated in São Paulo than in Los Angeles, yet, in some cases the police takes a “fee” from vendors in São Paulo in exchange for allowing them to work undisturbed.

Describing and proving that an individual is a worker and not a bandit, can save that person, as we saw with Marcelo. On the other hand, defining someone as bandido, opens the door to violent actions. Furthermore, it creates internal divisions in the community, determining who legitimately belongs to the community and who does not.

As with race, the definition of bandit and policing engage in a dialectical process in which they define each other in almost a circular way. If you are a bandit you could suffer police violence and abuse, at the same time, if you suffer police violence and abuse, it is probably because you are a bandit. Things become more complicated when, as we saw, a process of criminalization of blackness and favelado16 takes place.

Periphery residents, especially those who live in favelas, are first and foremost, suspected of being bandidos. This process has deep historical roots as the works of

Andrelino Campos (2005), Teresa Meade (1997), and Janice Perlman (2010) show, where favela residents were seen as a health menace, a criminal element blocking the attempt to transform Brazilian cities into “civilized” urban centers, lowlife individuals who could only be dealt with by force, as it is forcefully depicted in Aluísio de Azevedo’s novel “O Cortiço.”

16 Favelado literally means someone who resides in a favela. However, it is generally used as a derogatory term, defining the individual as a subperson.

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The category of bandido continues to be commonly used in São Paulo today as a way of justifying violent actions against periphery residents. In the weeks after the

Osasco massacre, for example, I talked with police officers about the actions allegedly done by off-duty police officers, which lead to the assassination of nineteen residents of

Osasco and Barueri, including a fifteen years-old girl, and a sixteen years-old boy who was having an ice-cream with his pregnant girlfriend. “It is difficult to know what really happened that night,” a Military Police officer told me.

You need to understand there is a war going on out there, and some us are tired of watching our brothers being killed by the PCC. And some officers get carried out. You kill one of us, and they will kill ten bandidos. You saw the video, they were all bandidos.17 If you chose the life of crime, then this is part of the rules. If you are a bandit, then don’t complain when you get hurt. You chose that life. (Anonymous Military Police Officer in conversation with the author, São Paulo, September 2015).

When I asked the officer what about the two teenagers who were killed, his answer was that it was sad that innocent people die, but “unfortunately, there’s always collateral damage in a war.” While the officer did not explicitly condone the massacre, he attempted to justify the killers’ actions by showing that some of the victims were former felons, in other words “bandidos”. It is interesting to note how the killers used the distinction between worker and bandido when choosing the victims. They intentionally asked who had been in prison, they separated these individuals from the rest, and executed them, as if they were aware that killing bandidos would be tolerated.

Not only police officers justified the killing of former felons in Osasco, some periphery residents accept this as well. Talking to some residents from Capão Redondo,

17 The press released a series of videos from security cameras at some of the bars where the killings took place. In the video, you could see two or three of the perpetrators asking customers who had been in jail, separating those who had from the rest, and executing them (https://youtu.be/oqB5u9_abr0).

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while eating at one of the street vendors across the metro station, they justified the massacre in the same terms as the police officers did. “You don’t kill a policeman and get out with it. You don’t play games with the police around here.” “If you’re a bandit, screw you! You have no rights,” where some of the residents’ comments. Being labeled a bandit excludes you from the community of rights, and police violence becomes accepted when it is directed towards those labeled in this way. According to a 2016 survey conducted by Datafolha and published by the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança

Pública, fifty-seven percent of Brazilians agrees with the sentence “bandido bom é bandido morto.”18 In her ethnographic work in one of São Paulo’s favelas, Teresa

Caldeira (2000) showed how this “crime talk” feeds a circle of fear that justifies violence.

Caldeira reproduces how certain residents construct the image of the bandido. Older residents associate the newcomers from the Northeast as a criminal element, who have brought decay to the area. They are characterized as ignorant, lazy, dirty, promiscuous, immoral, and criminals (2000, p. 30). As such, they not only do not belong to the community, there are a threat to it.

Certain residents, especially older residents and business owners, those who generally participate in the CONSEG, distance themselves from residents who live in the nearby favelas, and adhere to a discourse that divides the community between the poor and the poorer, a discourse that separates those who belong to the community and those who threatened the community. As Elijah Anderson (1999) described in the

United States context, the knowledge that there are poor people down the street, or up the hill in the case of São Paulo, led people “here” to be on guard from people “there”

18 “Bandido bom é bandido morto” means “a good bandit is a dead bandit”.

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(1999, p. 18). Similar to Elijah Anderson’s description, in São Paulo too the expansion of drug traffic and the control of the region by the PCC, as well as the spread of the informal working world across the periphery, led to a situation in which it is difficult to separate the drug culture from the experience of poverty. However, as Elijah Anderson

(1999) points out, there are degrees of alienation, which are distinguished in his case by the labels “decent” and “street” or “ghetto”, and in our cases by the labels “trabalhador” and “bandido”. The latter are threat to the community, and as such they are seen as outside of it.

When community residents and workers reject this distinction, the police act in ways that threatens or punishes those who do not abide by the distinction. For instance a group of nurses working at the Mboi Mirim Municipal Hspital, in Jardim Ângela, shared with me their experiences with victims of violence in the area. The regularly see victims of gun violence, many of them victims of police shootings, especially in the weekends.

“The police do not like when we treat victims of police shooting,” one nurse told me. The police will threaten nurses not to treat the victims and allow them to take the victims from the hospital. “They are all the time saying we protect bandits, and that we should be careful when we get out from work, bad things happen, they tell us,” another nurse said. More than once, the nurses have treated victims of police abuse, who come back dead after they are released from hospital, according them, killed by police officers in the nearby morro.

Sometimes, it is police officers who feel they are pressured by society to act in violent ways.

We are under a lot of pressure. Society wants us to clean the favelas and they don’t care about the people who live there. I grew up in a favela and I

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live in the periphery. It’s tough. But nobody cares, they protest against the police because someone gets killed, but then when the PCC does something, they want us to go up the morro and kill everybody. When the police stand down, everybody complains. Let me tell you, I’ve had neighbors coming and asking me when the police will “clean” the area from bandidos. And I know that they have no problem if the police come and kill some of the boys who are dealing in the corners. And yes, there are some officers who get carried away, and do some extra work.19 Then the commanders praise and reward them, so you shut up.20 I transferred battalions several times, hoping to find one in which these things don’t happen. Most of us, are against the killings, but working in the favelas is tough, and you feel there’s not much you can do. I work with young kids in the community, trying to help them avoid the drug business. I have to confess that I get scared many times, I know fellow officers who have been killed because someone discovered he was a police officer. Many times, it is kill or get killed (Anonymous Military Police officer in conversation with the author, São Paulo, September 2015).

Police officers operate in a very complex environment. As this testimony shows, the rhetoric of war is constantly deployed when officers interpret their daily work. The enemies are defined as PCC members or drug dealers, but slowly they expand to include almost everyone, especially young, black, male, residents of the favelas.

Executions have become part of their job description, although not all officers are involved, but it seems that not much is done to stop these killings. As this officer said, sometimes it is his own neighbors who ask him when the police will get rid of the bandits.

If you are harassed by the police, then it is probably you are bandit; if you engage in informal economic activities, then it is probably you will be seen as bandit; if you smoke weed, if you hang out with members of a gang, even if you are not part of it;

19 By “extra work”, the officer refers to police officers who kill favela residents.

20 Caco Barcelos (2003), in his book Rota 66, examines how a group of Military Police officers belonging to ROTA, who committed several extrajudicial killings, were later praised and promoted by their commanders.

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if you are young, black, male, and poor, there is a probability you will be considered a bandit. Police actions, which construct and reinforce the separation between worker and bandit, divides the community along very thin lines, establishing who may have right and who does not.

South L.A.: Defining Community and “Anti-Community”

Aaron Roussell (2015) argues that policing in South L.A. has developed a specific concept of “community” in opposition to the idea of “anticommunity” along racial preferences and labor utility. According to Roussell, the idea of anticommunity provides the means to punish and exclude South L.A.’s black community while controlling the influx of Latinos as low-wage and informal labor. The CPABs are the institutional framework in which the idea of community is developed. They are formed by those who abide by the norms established by police needs of controlling territory and establishing order. CPABs have become a place for police to gather critical information about the community, and develop strategies that lead community leaders to accept and comply with policing tactics, even when these tactics, as we saw, reproduce racial hierarchies and reinforce racial tensions. Through participation in training activities to the development of youth programs, the police reorient community members into supporting police efforts. As Roussell states, “the community police relationship can be summarized as follow: residents present police with complaints and information; the

LAPD explains to residents how it polices and self-regulates; residents represent these views locally” (Roussel, 2015, p. 823).

We saw an example of this, when the Senior Lead Officer in the University of

Southern California area, argued that the implementation of a new bike registry would allow them to stop those who “do not look like bike owners,” a measure welcomed by

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the community members at the CPAB meeting. In that same meeting, a further example of who belongs to the community and who is the “anti-community” took place. William, a middle-aged, African-American real estate owner, complained about new municipal measures that would affect his property rent business. William was concerned about the effects of the recently approved Proposition 47,21 and a recent municipal ordinance to help former felons, released under Proposition 47, with rental vouchers. The ordinance would provide Section 8 housing vouchers to those released under the aforementioned proposition, which would facilitate the access to housing for these people.

Politicians and interest groups, who do not live in the community and do not suffer what we suffer, are implementing these terrible programs. They don’t care about the rights of property owners or residents here, and they are flooding the community with felons. Now when I rent a place I cannot ask in the form for the person to tell me if he was convicted or not. And with the vouchers I cannot refuse to rent to them because they’ll have enough money to vouch for the rent. We cannot discriminate against felons anymore. We need to oppose this before it reaches our neighborhood, we can’t wait until someone gets attacked to stop this from happening. (Williams, Southwest Los Angeles resident at community meeting, Los Angeles, June 2015).

I was taken aback by Williams comments and waited for some of the participants to react to Williams’s comments. However, with the exception of the CPAB president, all other residents in the meeting supported Williams’s concerns.

In both cases, the bike theft problem and now the rental issue, community members in this institutionalized setting of community policing, defined who belongs to the community and who are not welcomed. For instance, while attending one of the

21 Proposition 47 was a ballot initiative passed by California voters on November 4, 2014, which reduced certain drug possession felonies and petty crimes to misdemeanors. The law allowed people who are already serving a felony conviction for these crimes to petition the court for resentencing. In addition, it allowed a person who has completed her sentence to file an application before the trial court to have the felony conviction reduced to misdemeanor.

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meetings of the Watts Gang Task Force, an African-American reverend, who leaded the meeting, asked participants to concentrate on “black on black crime” rather than criticizing the police. “If Black lives matter,” an African-American middle-aged man said,

“then we need to start demonstrating each time a brother kills a brother and stop moaning against the police.”

All lives matter! We rally only when the police screw up, but not when we kill each other, that’s hypocrisy. And the community leadership needs to stand up and denounce this, it can’t be that they only come out when the media comes and then they disappear. (Watts resident at Watts Gang Task Force meeting, Los Angeles, April 2015).

There was no consensus in the room regarding the man’s expressions, and while some seemed to agree, others bitterly disagreed with him. As it happened in other meetings, many complaints were raised against the young members of the community: members complained that they do not respect authorities, that they are responsible for an increase in property crimes, drug dealing, graffiti, and gang acts. The youth is generally represented as unruly, as a threat, as the “anti-community.”

For instance, Steve Houchin, Neighborhood Prosecutor for Olympic Division, expressed concern at the United Neighborhood Neighbor Council (UNNC) meeting about the presence of “problem people” inside the community, and the need to “take out the problem people from the community.” Without clearly defining who the “problem people” were, both Houchin and other members at the meeting made reference to homeless, prostitutes, and young people hanging in the streets.

In conversations with young members of the community, they recognize certain efforts Mr. Houchin does to help those in trouble, giving them a second or even a third chance, before sending them into the formal criminal justice system. Yet, most of them indicate that they feel voiceless and the police together with older residents impose their

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rules. “If you don’t like it, you’re in trouble,” one young resident of University Park said.

“We are constantly under surveillance around here.” The sense of exclusion is a common feeling among young members of the community.

As mentioned in Chapter 2, the police have expanded its role beyond law enforcement, and they have become social workers, mental health workers, and even educators. They do so through a law and order framework, without any knowledge in those areas. For instance, as part of the community-policing approach, LAPD has developed a Cadet program across the city. Their mission is to “instill discipline, leadership, academic excellence and life-skills,” to all participants. “It is a great program,” a middle-aged African-American woman in Southwest L.A. told me, “it gives these kids some discipline.” Rosario, a middle-aged woman and leader in one of South

L.A. CPABs expressed these positive feelings towards the Cadet program:

The Cadet program has been wonderful. Around four-hundred young kids participate yearly. They receive police training; they learn about what the police do and how important they are for the community. [The police] keep the youth out of the gangs and drugs, they teach them discipline and respect for the police. There are a lot of social justice groups that indoctrinate kids against the police. These social justice groups and social media demonizes the police and this generates mistrust. But programs such as the Cadet program, helps socialize the young members of the community. The kids learn how they can assist the police, they have a community van doing drug control, and they positively contribute to the community. (Rosario in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, April 2015).

The few young community members who participate in these programs, share Rosario’s feelings, but this is not what many of their peers feel. Most of them confessed lying to their peers about participating in police sponsored programs. Part of the problem, according to one participant, is that the police encourages them to report activities which do not abide with the established order.

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Rosario provided a further example of the dichotomy between community and anticommunity when referring to street vendors, an issue discussed in other CPAB meetings across South L.A. “They [street vendors] are undocumented people, illegal immigrants, who are doing something illegal, and they are a health threat to the community,” Rosario said. She expressed her frustration and anger towards community organizations that help street vendors. “It is unfair, that illegal workers, who do not pay taxes, who have no control from the health department, can freely sell their tacos and tamales wherever they want.” Her suggestion was for the police to enforce the law and expel these vendors from the community, an action many of the police officers with whom I spoke, did not like or agree doing. Rosario’s testimony indicates two interesting elements. First, following our discussion of community versus anticommunity, she defined who the community members were and who were not. Moreover, she clearly established that the role of the police is to protect the “community” excluding the street vendors from that definition.22

In a context were a very narrow section of the community participates in the meetings, and those meetings generally included investors, police officers, and city councilmen, the discourse of “order” and blaming those who do not adhere to this discourse as debilitating the community gains relevance. Talking with a group of young and middle-aged African-American residents near the iconic corner of Manchester and

22 Interestingly, not all police officers are happy to fulfill these requirements. Capt. Rodriguez, Newton Police Station Captain, expressed his frustration with some of the community requests. “Part of the problem we face is that the community believes the police is the panacea for all their problems. They have a problem with their neighbor, they call us; they have a problem with street vendors, they call us; there is an issue with someone who has mental health problems and the paramedics don’t know how to control him, they call us. We are not the panacea for all the community problems and we shouldn’t be” (Capt. Rodriguez, Newton Police Station Captain, in conversation with the author Los Angeles, June 2015).

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Vermont, they shared their concerns about community investments being decided without community participation, benefitting only a narrow sector of the community, and, according to one of my informants, excluding those who need the investment most.

The discourses of law and order, which the police promote through the formal meetings in the context of community-policing, fuel the division between the community and the anti-community. However, there are occasions in which the “law and order” discourse gets out of control and the community takes it to extremes, which are detrimental to the police. Participating on a neighborhood block meeting with LAPD

Senior Lead Officer Sunny Sasajima, neighbors complained about the presence of young kids hanging out in the street corners, and homeless people sleeping in the surrounding areas, and have made plans to hire private security guards to take care of the area. An idea strongly opposed by the police, and Officer Sasajima in particular.

“They’ll bring private security guards here, and in less than a week they’ll shoot the first black or Latino kid that ‘disrespects’ them,” Officer Sasajima said with clear frustration.

As we have been able to observe, the formal encounters between the community and the police, through CPAB meetings, Neighborhood Councils, or Neighborhood

Blocks meetings, define, as Roussell (2015) argues, who are part of the community and who are the “anticommunity,” those who are not only excluded, but whose presence in the area presents a threat to the social order that is being constructed through these interactions. Barlow and Barlow (2000) indicate that there is a disparity between a white, middle-class perspective, which define the police’s main role as crime control; and the perspective of non-whites, shared by these authors, which see the police role as preserving the power and race structure. As Adela Barajas, a Latino woman,

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member of the Newton CPAB, and founder of LAURA (Life After Uncivil Ruthless

Acts)23 contended,

Those who participate in these meetings do not actually represent the community; they are a very narrow sector of the community, with their own narrow interests. For example, in the 77th [precinct CPAB] most of the participants are business owners, who want the police to protect their business. (Adela Barajas, LAURA president, in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, June-July 2015).

In many ways, the dichotomy community/anticommunity is the Los Angeles version of the trabalhador/bandido dichotomy we saw in São Paulo. Those who participate in the meetings are the respected small-business owner class of South L.A., those who contribute to the social order and form, in Roussell’s terms, the “community”. On the other hand, those who are surveilled and repressed by the police are the

“anticommunity,” the troublemakers or in the words of Neighborhood Prosecutor Steve

Houchin the “problem people” the “others” who need to be surveilled and controlled.

Managing Interracial Conflicts: Latinos versus African-Americans in South L.A.

A final example in which the police reproduce the racialized structure and racial divisions, is the role the police play in the ongoing conflict between Latinos and African-

Americans across South L.A. There has been an ongoing tension between these two populations due to labor market competition, fueled by the labor market structure. This situation, as we saw, continues to take place, and it is influenced by the way police act.

In South L.A., with the exception of the Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw/Lemeiert Park area,

23 LAURA was founded by Adela Barajas after her sister-in-law, Laura Sanchez, was killed in drive-by- shooting in 2007. She created the organization to fight violence in South L.A. For more information on LAURA, its history and work see http://www.laurala.org.

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Latinos have become the majority in all areas of South L.A., including Watts and its public housing projects.

During my time in South L.A., I witnessed the conflict between Latinos and

African-Americans in multiple occasions. More than once, I was warned by residents to leave an area because, having been identified as Latino, my presence could posit a risk to my safety. I was asked to “go back to Mexico” by an African-American young man in

Leimert Park. I witnessed group of Latinos and African-Americans youths celebrating when the police stopped and frisked members of the other group. I saw, Latino kids and

African-American kids entering school from different gates in order to avoid conflicts. As

I was able to appreciate through my stay in South L.A., the conflict becomes visible in many different places. It is visible in the interracial violence that took and still takes place across the area, especially through gang fights. It is visible in the different expressions of hate and disdain expressed by members of both groups. And it is visible in police actions in the streets but also in the formal institutionalized encounters that take place across South L.A. For instance, the Watts Gang Task Force.

The Task Force was created in 2006 by councilwoman Janice Hahn after an increase in gang-related homicides. The meeting is supposed to gather community leaders, gang-interventionists, social workers, and police officers to address the problems affecting the community. In recent times, it has included possible future investors, especially real-estate investors, which has increased the suspicions of many community members and residents regarding the real motives behind the task force.

The first time I attended the meeting, it caught my attention that there were no Latinos present at the meeting. I asked, Alberto Ybarra, director of Watts Century Latino, a

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Latino organization working to help and improve living conditions of the Latino population in Watts, about the lack of Latinos at the Gang Task Force. Alberto was one of the original members of the Task Force but was excluded from the leadership by the authorities and African-American community leaders who, according to Alberto, see the task force as a way to gain political power. “Not only they ignore Latinos, they have made us invisible,” Alberto said. African-Americans “took control of the task force, and they don’t want to share power. There are very few resources in Watts, and many of them are allocated through the police and through that meeting, so they want to be near the cake,” Alberto argued.

Many of the Latino residents in the projects live under constant fear from the actions of African-American gangs, and also due to the threats of their African-American neighbors. Many of them are afraid to go outside in the evenings, they cross the street when they see a group of African-Americans hanging around, and avoid any contact with the police. It is important to recall that many of them are undocumented or have undocumented relatives living with them, and some of the threats they received from their neighbors is the threat of being reported to immigration authorities. The police, with the exception of a couple of officers working in Watts, seem to ignore the problem. The fact that the most important community-police meeting lacks any presence of Latino residents or community leaders reinforces the feeling of being abandoned. Furthermore, this tension does not allow for interracial community coalition to flourish.

The Watts Gang Task Force is a clear example of the way in which community- police meetings exacerbate the conflict. The meetings are open to the public, and Latino leaders, in theory at least, can come and express their concerns. Yet, many Latino

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residents and community leaders express the same feeling Alberto Ybarra had, that they are not welcomed in the meeting. African-American community leaders control the agenda and the tone of the meeting, and despite having a majority of Latino residents in

Watts in general, and in the public housing projects in particular, there are no Latino voices. In conversations with Latino residents in Watts and in the projects, not only they expressed the feeling of not being welcomed, but some of them are even afraid of showing up. A Latino woman, resident of Jordan Downs, told me she felt the police and the African-American community leaders did not want her at the meeting.

There was another Latino woman there. We were the only Latinos in the meeting. And she stood up to complain that they don’t do anything to help us, that the black gangs keep harassing us, and the police don’t do anything. First, one of the officers there said that if we don’t report it is very difficult. And then, a Black woman, who works in one of the projects, started saying that we shouldn’t complain, that the police always protect us, and because of us, they keep harassing black people. One of the officers came after and told us not to worry, but I was afraid, and I never went back (Anonymous Latino woman, Watts resident, in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, June 2015).

As this Latino resident states, the one time she did go to a meeting she witnessed a fellow Latino resident being shut down by the African-American representatives there.

Similar experiences take place across other areas of South L.A. Adela Barajas, for instance, expressed this concern regarding the CPAB in the 77th precinct.

In the 77th, most of the CPAB members are business owners, they don’t live in the community, they come and go, so they are less invested in what happens in the community in general, they just want the police to protect their business. Part of the problem is that most of them, if not all the CPAB, is African-American, and to change that is very difficult. In order to get more Latinos involved, you need to have bilingual meetings, you need to translate to Spanish and that’s not easy. The other members get fuzzy because the meeting takes longer, and they don’t like it. It is really hard to get Latinos involved, and the police doesn’t help. So when you get Latinos to come, they either don’t understand or they sit down and say nothing, we don’t know how to speak up. LAPD knows this, and they don’t care, so our voice is going to be easily suppressed. LAPD should work to change this

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and make the meetings more accessible, but it is comfortable for them this way, because they don’t have to deal with the Latino issue, which is a great problem. They don’t want to deal with immigration, street vending, and so. They prefer to send Metro to deal with this, so they can keep presenting themselves as the good guys in the station. And when you complain, they say “come to the CPAB.” Then you tell them that the meeting has to be translated to Spanish and so on, and they [the police] say “talk to the CPAB leaders,” and here we are again fighting with African-Americans. (Adela Barajas, LAURA president, in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, June 2015).

When talking to police authorities across South L.A., many of them portray Latinos as law-abiding citizens and hard-working people. In some instances, this discourse is used to justify the lack of Latino voices in the meetings. They are not the ones creating trouble, so we do not need to address their concerns. On the other hand, there are certain areas in which Latinos lead the meetings, such was the case in Newton, Pico, and in the eastern areas of South L.A., near Boyle Heights. In these places, we observe the division between older and wealthier members against young residents or undocumented residents.

In conversations with Alberto Retana, the newly elected and first Latino president of Community Coalition, he addressed the tension and conflict existing between African-

Americans and Latinos in South L.A.

Racial and ethnic divisions in this country should not be a surprise to anyone. Why should they [African-Americans and Latinos] get along? This is a country based on division and getting on top of one another. The main reason for the division has to do with the socio-economic system and the way labor is structured in this country. And policing contributes to this. The job market, the immigration system, policing, all play their role in putting blacks and browns against each other. Latinos have a larger workforce participation, but are the most severely underpaid. So one narrative says that we [Latinos] are one of the most hard-working community and most humble, and if blacks will do the same they’ll be fine; and politicians, the media, and the police use this narrative. On the other hand, the African- American community is the most overlooked, excluded community in the job market. So you have a community being exploited and the other being excluded. And then you have African-Americans saying “they are taking

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our jobs.” Which, in a certain way, it is true. All what I have just said is an example of how the socioeconomic system creates the tension. And then the police manage the tension, using one narrative against the other. I’m not saying the police do it intentionally, they are part of a system of white supremacy intertwined with capitalism, which the police are in charge of protecting. (Alberto Retana, Community Coalition President, in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, June 2015).

As Aaron Roussell points out, African-Americans in South L.A. are seen as unsuitable for the new service economy based on sub-poverty wages and informal employment and need to make room for a vulnerable Latino proletariat (2015, p. 842). The feeling of having to fight for meager resources, and portraying Latinos as taking the jobs of

African-Americans was expressed by Marcus:

Many Mexicans come here illegally and business owners take advantage of this. They pay them very little, and Mexicans are hardworking people, who would work for little pay, they have no chance. We [African- Americans] are not willing to work for that money, so they end taking our jobs and that generates tension. Also Mexicans are not targeted by the police as we are. I work with many Mexicans, and they are afraid of the migra and of the police, but the police always stop me and not them. (Marcus in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, July 2015).

Marcus testimony reinforces what Alberto Retana expressed regarding the job market.

Moreover, it adds a new narrative, which has to do with the history of police violence.

African-Americans feel they are targeted more than Latinos, but also that they have suffered police brutality for a longer time. As Rhonda, an African-American young woman from Southwest L.A. said, “Latinos must go through a lot of violence before they can talk about police brutality as we do.”

A final example on how police interactions fuel the tension between Latinos and

African-Americans is related to the way in which the police oftentimes deal with interracial violence. This was the case of Adela Barajas and the assassination of her sister Laura.

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My sister-in-law was murdered by an African-America young man. The moment they [the police] classified the murder as gang-related, first they began accusing us as being part of a gang, they address the murder as one more of a continuing gang war, it felt as if they didn’t care, as if it was one gang member less. I had police officers telling me, go and talk to the Black leaders, they know who and why they killed your sister-in-law. Once I created LAURA, I began going to the meetings, including the [Southern California] Ceasefire Coalition. I’ve heard police officers telling Black people there, that I was in touch with the Latino gangs and was looking for trouble. And many times, they [African-American leaders] tried to shut me down, but I have a strong character. Now they know me, and we have been working together, but many police officers constantly try to divide us. There are some African-American organizers that they don’t want me there, but I don’t care, I keep going and I have earned my place. (Adela Barajas, LAURA President, in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, June 2015).

In rare occasions, police actions bridges between both communities. Instances of police violence and abuse have brought Latinos and African-Americans together in the fight against police brutality. Furthermore, there are police officers across South L.A. who have developed programs and initiatives to bridge between these two groups, especially young Latinos and African-Americans.

An example of this was the creation of the Youth Justice Coalition, created in

2003 after community members, who had been incarcerated or had a relative in prison, came together to discuss the damage mass incarceration was generating in the community. In 2007, they created Free L.A. High School for youth ages sixteen to twenty-four to build the future leadership of the community. Its director, Kim McGill, highlighted the fact that in rare occasions, the community is able to overcome its differences and come together to fight police violence. However, this is not the norm, the struggle for resources and underpaid jobs in a service economy, combined with community-policing tactics, which, as part of their territorial and spatial management, reinforces racial and ethnic differences, fuels the interracial tensions across South L.A.

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As an African-American resident living near Manchester and Vermont stated, “we are fighting each other to see who doesn’t end last in the racial hierarchy.”

Conclusions

I began this chapter by showing how the negative, violent, encounters between residents and the police affect the way individuals define their racial identity. Both in Los

Angeles and São Paulo, residents who went through these violent interactions identify themselves as black or brown, and see others who do not share these experiences as white.

In a place such as Brazil, in which there always was a fluid and non-legal definition of racial categories, in which, as Oracy Nogueira (2006 [1954]) claims, discrimination was based on mark or color, how others see you and treat you becomes central in the way an individual is racially categorized (Bailey, 2002). In the United

States, with the history of the one-drop-of-blood rule, or as Nogueira states, discrimination based on origin or ancestry, racial categories seem to be more rigid. Yet, in Los Angeles, we also saw, how the way others, particularly the police, define you have important consequences. The negative and mostly violent encounters with the police do not only affect the way individuals define themselves racially, but also give content to the meaning of being black or brown. As we have seen, the criminalization of blackness, the halo of suspicion that surround black bodies, has deep historical roots in

Western science, political thought, and the development of disciplines such as criminology both in the United States and in Brazil. Police actions reinforce this idea that posits blacks as a constant threat. This has led Ben Penglase (2014, p. 159) to add a third category to Nogueira’s classification, the prejudice of crime or criminal space.

While, the influence of the prejudice of mark and origin still play an important role, Los

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Angeles and São Paulo seem to be converging into a prejudice of crime. Afro- descendant individuals or Latinos are criminalized because of the spaces they inhabit, because of the way they look, dress, talk or walk. In this sense, blackness and criminality are engaged in a dialectical process in which they define and challenge each other. A black or brown individual, especially if he is young and male, has a great chance of being seen as a threat, particularly if he is moving in spaces that have been already defined as dangerous. The police act on him reinforces this prejudice and strengthens the link between blackness and criminality. The constant harassment, abuse, and killing of young black residents of these communities, lead these individuals to develop a sense of worthlessness.

Nonetheless, we should not simply posit nonwhite residents as passive subjects in which their racial identity is imposed upon then. Resistance to state violence, specifically police violence, takes place in both cities, individually and collectively. When

Marcelo proudly defined himself as pobre, preto, e periférico, he is not simply establishing his belonging to an economic, racial, and spatial category. He sees himself as being part of a larger, imagined community, who see the belonging to these categories as a symbol of pride and resistance. Both in Los Angeles and São Paulo, residents resist through organized collective action, through street art and music, through protests and demonstrations, and also through the development of small survival tactics in an attempt to avoid the law and its enforcers (Sclofsky, 2016).24

24 In their work on how regular people interpret, situate, and interact with the law, Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey (1998) argue that people who see the law as oppressive, situate themselves against the law and develop a series of resistance and survival tactics, which include avoiding the law. These individuals will develop strategies to avoid being stopped by the police or participate in any formal legal situation if possible. When there is no escape, they will attempt to minimize any risk, sometimes by

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The negative and violence encounters with the police end reproducing the racial hierarchy that historically developed in both places, which situates blacks and browns in the lower rungs of the social ladder. Moreover, community-police interactions influence the way the community is defined. It determines who is in and who is out of the community, who abides by its norms, and deserves respect and who does not. And finally, the police have an important impact in the existing interracial struggles between

African-Americans and Latinos across South L.A. The police, and policing tactics, end deepening the cleavage between these two groups, and in the very rare occasion in which police officers attempt to bridge between them, the efforts are oftentimes thwarted by the police or community stakeholders.

The development of the penal state, which has expanded police power and presence in low-income, nonwhite communities, has, as Löic Wacquant argues, promoted an economic, ethno-racial, and moral order “via the punitive regulation of behaviors of the categories deemed threatening” (2009a, p. 59). Racial caste did not end in the United States with the fall of Jim Crow, it was redesigned through a myriad of policies and institutions that developed in the context of the war on crime and the war on durgs (Alexander, 2012). Racial caste did not end in Brazil either, and the harsh repression against Afro-Brazilians continues.

All this has lead to what Eddie S. Glaude Jr (2016) calls a “value gap”, or in Joe

R. Feagin (2010) words, a white racial frame; by which whites are seen as superior and nonwhite lives do not matter. As Wacquant (2009b) shows, penal institutions, including

challenging the prejudices hold by law agents, as was the case of Adailton when he wore the gown to show police officers he was a medical student.

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the police, act to enforce the socio-economic and racial hierarchies and control contentious categories, while at the same time they transmit norms and “shape collective representations and subjectivities” (2009b, p. xvi). As we saw, the negative encounters with the police reinforce the racial hierarchy, they promote symbolic cues by affecting the way racial identities are constructed, strengthening the historical links between blackness and criminality, deeming blacks as threats, carrying a constant halo of suspicion that needs to be control. Under a hegemonic framework, which sees social problems through the lenses of law and order, it is the work of the police to administer the racial tension generated by a hierarchical racial structure. The formal and informal interactions between community residents and the police, determine who is part of the community and who is left out, who is trabalhador and who is a bandido, the community and the “anti-community”, those who abide by the established social order, and those who need to be constantly surveilled and repressed.

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CHAPTER 5 SHARED EXPERIENCES II: CONSTRUCTING SPACE AND BEING “OUT OF PLACE”

There is a war going on out here! You may think the kids around here are innocent kids, who are just fooling around, but criminals have no age in this place. These kids are the first line of the PCC army and we need to be prepared (São Paulo Military Police Officer in Jardim Ângela, in conversation with the author, São Paulo, August 2015).

There are gangs operating in the area, there are a lot of weapons in the streets, and there is a lot of tension and violence. When we go out there to patrol, you sometimes feel you are entering a war zone (LAPD Officer in South L.A., in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, May 2015).

These tropes of war, regularly used by police officers when describing South L.A. or

São Paulo’s periphery, are not simply a way of describing their experiences and feelings regarding these spaces. They inform and are informed by a policing approach that portrays those inhabiting these areas as enemies and the place they inhabit as war zones. The urban ghetto and favelas have historically been described as sites of deviance and immorality, where an undeserving underclass is concentrated (Feagin,

2010; Perlman, 2010). The police reproduce this rhetoric through their regular work in these areas and the discourses used to justify their actions.

While the development and expansion of the penal state crosses several boundaries, both geographical and institutional (Beckett & Murakawa, 2012; Garland,

2001; Wacquant, 2008, 2009b), this chapter will show how the penal state takes a particular repressive form in specific spaces defined as “peripheries.” In other words, in areas constructed as spaces of war, inhabited by “dangerous others”, the penal state assumes a repressive form characterized by violent encounters between residents and the police. In other words, periphery is constructed not as a geographical location, but one in which specific state practices take place. Furthermore, as it was the case with racial identities, these violent experiences, shared by residents of South L.A. and São

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Paulo’s periphery, construct a spatial identity that describe these neighborhoods as a threat to the social order, which, in consequence, needs to be under constant surveillance. Moreover, I argue that the particularly punitive expressions the penal state takes in these areas, combined with the already existing socio-economic deprivation, define these neighborhoods as “peripheries.”

Defining periphery exclusively in geographic terms, in relation to an urban core

(Park, Burgess, & McKenzie, 1967), or denying the existence of a periphery due to the lack of a proper urban core (Dear & Danhmann, 2011), misses the point. Periphery is a relational concept, defined by the socio-economic structure (Castells, 1977; Harvey,

2001, 2005b), the racial structure (Du Bois, 1994; Massey & Denton, 1993; Sutton &

Kemp, 2011b; Wacquant, 2001), and also regarding the democratic state and its legal system. Periphery is defined by material conditions: the lack of proper housing, jobs, health and social services; the prevalence of illegality and informality: drug markets, illegal street vending; by racial features: as a space where the lower echelons of the racial structure live; and by policing practices: killings, police abuse, and constant surveillance. As Löic Wacquant states, once a space is defined as a lawless zone outside the common norm, the implementation of penal practices which deviate from the law becomes easy to justify, and has the effect of further marginalizing their residents

(2008, p. 240).

In this chapter I will first describe the highly repressive features the penal state takes in South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery. The penal state develops different modes depending on the space in which it acts. It is in “peripheries” in which the penal state develops its most punitive features. Peripheries represent the spatial

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concentration of a potentially explosive population who, being predominantly nonwhite, has suffered years of ethno-racial discrimination; while at the same time it has been the population which has experience the worst consequences of neoliberal policies, the shift from manufacturing to education-intensive jobs, low-skill service positions, and the need to rely more and more in the informal economy (Feltran, 2011; Telles, 2001, 2010;

Wacquant, 2008). Seen as war zones, as regions of crime and deviance, inhabited by

“dangerous others”, the occurrences of abuse, constant surveillance, in which the rule of law makes little sense, where the formal and informal become indistinguishable, are all features of the “periphery.” These peripheries, as we will further see in the next chapter, can be described as authoritarian enclaves, vestiges of an authoritarian past despite democratization in Brazil and the existence of an overall democratic framework in the United States.

In the second section of this chapter, I will demonstrate how the police attempt to establish clear urban boundaries between peripheries and the rest of the city. While some authors contend that in the neoliberal capitalist phase boundaries have become blurred and the classic modernist city has given place to post-metropolises, in which dwellers are in a constant flow (Sassen 2001; Soja, 2000, 2014; Telles, 2010); the police, organized in a territorial fashion, continuously attempt to demarcate borders, limiting the supposedly openness of this urban flow. The police act differently in different spaces, and act differently towards people who belong or are identified as belonging to a specific place. In doing so, the police, as it did with race, affects the way periphery residents construct their spatial identity and their sense of place.

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The Penal State, Policing and the Construction of “Periphery”

As we have seen in chapter 3, several authors have pointed to a significant change in penal policies in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United States, which led among other things to a massive increase in prison population (Alexander, 2012;

Garland, 2001; Gottschalk, 2006, 2014; Wacquant, 2009b). A similar process has been identified in Brazil in recent decades (Adorno, 2002; Nunes Dias, 2009; Wacquant,

2003). Yet, incarceration is generally the end result of a long process of penal expansion, which begins with police action. Furthermore, while the penal state has expanded into areas which were outside the purview of criminal justice, such as schools and welfare programs (Beckett & Murakawa, 2012; Lerman & Weaver, 2014; Simon,

2007), and has affected all citizens, albeit in different ways (Gottschalk, 2014), it is in urban spaces such as South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery, where poverty and racial segregation concentrates, that the penal state has developed its most repressive features.

In the mid-twentieth century ghetto, upper, middle and low-class African-

Americans shared the small geographic space and the majority of adults were employed in different occupations. Nowadays, much of the African-American upper- class has left the inner-city ghetto and established black neighborhoods outside of the ghetto. At the same time, those who could not leave the ghetto, have suffered from the reduction of manufacturing jobs and the decline of the welfare state. As Wacquant

(2001) points out, the penal state has become the predominant institution in charge of controlling this surplus population, and nowadays, the ghetto looks more and more like

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a prison, and prisons look, racially and class wise, more and more like ghettos.1 In São

Paulo, a similar process has taken place, manufacturing Fordist industries, located in

São Paulo’s periphery provided employment to the ever-growing population of the favelas. The economic transformation brought by neoliberalism during the last decades of the twentieth century has eliminated most of these factories replacing them with low- wage jobs in the service industry. Faced with few job prospects, many residents found their way into the informal market, including drug dealing (Telles, 2001, 2010).

Moreover, the appearance of the PCC has increased the popular perception of these areas as areas of crime and immorality, justifying greater and more repressive police intervention.

These series of socio-economic, political and cultural transformations led to the abandonment of penal welfarism for a more punitive approach to crime and urban disorder in the United States (Garland, 2001; Gottschalk, 2006; Wacquant, 2009b). In

Brazil in general, and São Paulo in particular, the end of the military regime and the democratization process did not bring an end to police brutality against residents of low- income communities. Police violence and abuse, as well as police killings are concentrated in these areas. The tropes of “war-zones” or “no-go-zones”, areas in which the police do not dare to venture but need to reestablish control, is oftentimes a discourse to justify specific actions or deployment of special units, rather than a faithful depiction of reality; it resembles military tropes of “no-fly-zones” and areas of great

1 Löic Wacquant (2001) describes four characteristics of today’s ghetto that makes them look more and more like a prison. Similar to the prison, the ghetto now is formed by the most precarious elements of the unemployed, casually employed, and uneducated urban proletariat. Much of the ghetto residents have lost their positive economic function. State institutions of social control have replaced many of the communal institutions. And finally, according to Wacquant, the ghetto has lost its capacity to buffer its residents from external forces.

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danger.2 This depiction of space justifies police actions and keeps police budgets high, reinforcing existing images that describe these places as violent ones.3

Moreover, an intensive policy of surveillance and control has taken place, addressing the potential criminogenic characteristics of these spaces (Garland, 2001, p.

16) and leading to an increase in surveillance strategies. These negative stereotypes of low-income neighborhoods as disorganized, dangerous, toxic, and pathological tends to flow down and attach to residents (Sutton & Kemp, 2011a, p. 2).

In this context, police abuse has become a common experience for most of the residents of these areas. Such was the case of Geraldo, a middle-aged teacher in

Capão Redondo.

I was walking to the bus-stop one night after class, and two police officers were holding Serginho [an Afro-Brazilian student], and were slapping him. I asked the officers what was going on, but they told me to mind my own business. I told them I knew him and that he was a student of mine. “Vai defender bandido, agora?!”4 they asked. I told them he was no bandit, that he was a student, but they didn’t care. They slapped him, searched his backpack, and of course they did not find anything. One of the officers looked back at me and asked me if I knew that Serginho worked for the drug dealers, I kept repeating he was a student and that he was not involved in anything. At the end they let him go, but only after slapping him fiercely. Serginho was crying, he had blood running from his nose and lips. I felt terrible. As a teacher you feel it is your responsibility to keep your students safe, but what could I do? (Geraldo in conversation with the author, São Paulo, October 2017).

2 Keith (1991) shows how the rhetoric of “no-go-areas” in the UK was first used in the fight in Northern Ireland and was imported to England during the 1980s to describe the communities in which young, black residents were rioting against what they perceived as state discrimination and police harassment.

3 M. Davis (1990), Vargas (2006), and Wacquant (2008) illustrate these discourses in the United States in general and Los Angeles in particular. Caldeira (2000), Telles (2010), and Feltran (2011) show similar tropes in São Paulo.

4 “Are you going to defend a bandit?!”

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Similar situations of abuse can be seen in South L.A. too. Marc, a high-school teacher in South L.A., remembered his days working in a public school in Newton5 before coming to work in the charter school and how the students were constantly harassed by the police.

The security guard had been a police officer his whole life and he retired and worked there. Every time the restroom smelled like weed, they would shut down the whole school and they would bring in some cops with sniffing dogs. The kids would have to come to the cafeteria and show their hands and the police would look at their fingers, and the dogs would sniff everyone, search classrooms and all the backpacks. I would feel really bad as a teacher for being a part in enforcing that and I remember students being so angry for being treated as a criminal. (Marc, high-school teacher in South L.A., in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, June 2015).

These types of experiences form part of the daily life of periphery residents and, as they did with the construction of race, give content to what it means to belong to these spaces. Both residents and the police, are well aware that these interactions are defined by space. Dwellers of South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery indicate how the police act differently according to the place in which the interaction takes place. This does not mean that there is no police abuse outside of these areas; however, oftentimes the abuse that takes place outside the periphery is directed to those who are, or are identified as, periphery residents and, as we will see later in this chapter, they are “out of place.”

The police explain their intensive and aggressive actions through a series of spatial cues. In conversations with police officers, both in South L.A. and São Paulo,

5 Newton area is located in the heart of South L.A., between Alameda Street and Harbor Freeway, and Florence Ave and the Santa Monica Freeway, approximately. Approximately 84 percent of its residents are Latinos, and 13 percent African-Americans. Newton ranks in the bottom ten areas regarding income, with low education levels.

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they refer to the fact that drug dealing, for instance, is circumscribed to these areas.

Police officers do not deny that drugs are dealt and consumed in other parts of the city, but they argue that drugs are more prevalent in these peripheries and highlight the fact that drug dealing and consuming is generally done in open spaces contrary to private and closed spaces in the richer parts of town. I asked a police captain in South L.A. about the disparities in drug arrests considering that drug consumption is similar across racial lines.6 “The thing is that around here [in South L.A.] folks deal and consume in the open, so it is much easier to make arrests,” the captain explained. “You can snort cocaine without any problem in the noble areas,” Marcos, a resident of Osasco told me,

“but don’t dare to smoke a baseado in Osasco, because the police will get you.”7

As we saw in chapter 3, both São Paulo and Los Angeles went, in the last decades of the twentieth century, through a process of economic restructure, which transformed the nature of manufacturing, eliminating many of the well-paid, unionized and stable industrial jobs, for unstable, low-paid work, and the state withdrawal from welfare programs and commitments increasing its penal features. At the same time, a rapid and sustained increase in recorded crime took place in the United States in the two decades after 1960 (Garland, 2001, p. 89); while in Brazil a similar rise took place in the 1990s (Waiselfisz, 2011).8 Furthermore, while the majority of victims of violent crime

6 According to the 2015 National Survey on Drug and Health Abuse, there is no significant disparity in reported drug consumption patterns between whites and African-Americans in the United States. Seventy percent of respondents were white, while fourteen percent were African-Americans. 73.5% of white respondents reported having consumed drugs in the last year, while 13% of African-American respondents said they consumed drugs in the past year.

7 Baseado means a marihuana joint.

8 In Los Angeles, homicide rates went from 12.5 per 100,000 inhabitants to 23 per 100,000 inhabitants during the 1970s. In São Paulo, homicide rates went from 18.1 per 100,000 in 1980 to 63.5 per 100,000 in 1999.

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were low-income and nonwhite, violent crime expanded to different and more affluent sectors of the city. Slowly, crime became part of the norm, something city dwellers would need to learn to live with. However, the new paradigm of crime control developed in the United States and later exported to other parts of the world, including Brazil

(Wacquant, 2003), saw crime as individual choices and individual responsibility, rather than a consequence of structural conditions (Garland, 2001). Rather than attempting to address the social ills that generate crime, the new penal mode saw no possibility of rehabilitating criminals; consequently, what needed to be done was to increase control over those who were crime prone, and eliminate or reduce the situational and ecological elements that favor crime. This meant an increase in surveillance and security measures, the creation of partnerships between the police and the community to reduce criminological hot spots and identify areas and people who are crime prone, as well as the development of spatial policing strategies to eliminate criminal opportunities.

In 1982, criminologist George L. Kelling and political scientist James Q. Wilson, developed the theory of broken windows. What this theory argues, is that neighborhood decay is one of the main sources for the development of criminal behavior in that area.

In other words, the authors argue that when a broken window goes unrepaired this is a sign that no one cares, henceforth, criminals could go on breaking more windows. From a crime perspective, if disorderly behavior and petty crime goes unpunished it invites further and more violent criminal activity. One of the conclusions these authors make, is that there is a need for a constant police presence and the formation of police and community partnerships to identify those individuals who are “strangers” and generate disorder in order to control them or expel them from the area. Without such control, the

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area, in Kelling and Wilson words, will become vulnerable to criminal invasion, “drugs will change hands, prostitutes will solicit, and cars will be stripped” (Kelling & Wilson,

1982). Furthermore, the authors contend that it is neighborhood standards rather than legal restrictions that should shape police behavior. Criminals are not those who do harm to others, “arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust… but failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community” (Kelling & Wilson, 1982).

If we expand this logic to the city as a whole, allowing these dangerous neighborhoods to expand and transfer their unruly behavior to the rest of the urban space would amount to allowing for a broken window to remain unfixed. Henceforth, there is a need to tighten surveillance and control in these areas. Steve Herbert and

Elizabeth Brown (2006) illustrate how broken windows and situational crime prevention reinforce social and spatial distinctions that help legitimate the repression imposed by neoliberal governance. These approaches posit that landscapes have the ability to communicate messages of neighborhood vulnerability to crime, that there is a relationship between community health and territorial behavior; neighborhoods that work and are healthy fix their broken windows. Furthermore, broken windows theory contends that there is a division between insiders and outsiders, and outsiders need to be surveilled and expelled when they violate neighborhood codes. Beyond the fact that the approach does not address the structural conditions which lead to decay and crime, reinforcing the neoliberal stand that crime is an individual choice, the theory disregards the power dynamics by which “proper behavior” receives meaning. We saw in the

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previous chapter how community policing constructs the community excluding community members who do not fit the profile of “respected” members.

Different iterations of the “broken windows” approach have been deployed both in Los Angeles and São Paulo, now under the new rubric of “quality of life” policing.

Steve Houchin, the Neighborhood Prosecutor for Olympic Division, explained to me how the neighborhood prosecutor program operates under the logic of broken windows:

The goal of the program is to have a prosecutor embedded and integrated to the community to address the quality of life issues. Things that bother community members but that they feel they are too small for City Hall to address, they now have someone like me that addresses those issues. For example, drug consumption in a corner, graffiti here and there, dumping trash, homeless people sleeping in the area, small things that we need to prevent so they don’t become a bigger problem. I don’t necessary prosecute all of these problems, but I do collect evidence and I may ask for a restrain order or talk to LAPD to act upon these issues (Steve Houchin, Olympic Division Neighborhood Prosecutor, in conversation with the author Los Angeles, May 2015).

I asked Houchin how and who defines what a quality of life issue is. “They are the small things that affect the daily life of the community. That is why I have direct contact with

Senior Lead Officers and CPAB members, so I learn what these issues are.” Yet, as we saw, those who define what is the community and what their norms are, is limited to a very narrow sector of the community. Furthermore, Houchin’s emphasis in a

Neighborhood Council meeting that his goal is to expel the “problem people” out of the community, reinforces Herbert and Brown’s argument that broken windows or quality of life policing is not about solving the problems but about defining those inside and outside the community and expelling those considered outsiders. However, outsider is not used in a spatial way, but rather in a relational way, similar to “periphery”. Outsider refers to those who do not adhere to the social and economic order. The “outsiders” are

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community residents who rely primarily in the informal economy, homeless people, or young residents who hang out in the streets.

In the case of São Paulo, police officers also refer to “quality of life” policing when explaining the strategies which have been deployed in the periphery. The deployment of community policing stations and the formation of community security councils

(CONSEGs) as well as the establishment of full military police battalions have been justified by police officers as promoting the community’s quality of life. As a Military

Police officer in Jardim Ângela explained:

The CONSEGs allow us to learn where the hot spots are, where drugs are sold, prostitutes work, and crime is concentrated. When you start seeing graffiti supporting the PCC, or abandoned places, you already know that crime will take place there. That’s why there is so much crime in the favelas, because the place is a mess, there is no control, it is all in the hands of the gangs and bandits. We need to take care of the areas near the favelas, so they don’t extend the crime into all the periphery. That’s why [state security authorities] decided to deploy the two battalions here in Jardim Ângela, so we can control the area and give the honest workers a better quality of life” (São Paulo Military Police Officer in Jardim Ângela, in conversation with the author, São Paulo, September 2015).

The deployment of these policing tactics together with the discourses that justify them, reinforces the image of these regions as spaces of crime. “The moment you say Jordan

Downs people think gangs, violence, danger,” Reggie, a community worker in Jordan

Downs public housing projects told me. Yet, rather than addressing the problem of social and environmental injustice, residents of these areas are seen as criminals, drug dealers, school dropouts, or, as stated by neighborhood prosecutor Steve Houchin

“problem people.” As Charles Mills (1997) contends regarding the emergence of white supremacy, space is conceptualized in a circular way, the people who live in these places, the vast majority of them nonwhite, are considered as criminals and undesirables, and this imprints to these regions an image of danger. At the same time,

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because these spaces are spaces of deviance, then the people who live in these places must be deviants. Policing tactics such as broken windows, situational policing, or quality of life policing, assume that the most we can achieve is to eliminate criminal opportunity, and not allow for the disorderly elements to extend their criminality to other parts of the city.

As a consequence, a series of measures of control and repression are extended to these areas. We already saw how police abuse is part of the daily routine for most residents of South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery. Being under constant surveillance and developing a sense of being under siege is also part of the experience of being

“from the periphery.”

On one of my visits to Jordan Downs, I noticed the presence of video cameras on top of some of the buildings. Reggie, the community worker, told me that there are thirty-one cameras in Jordan Downs, some of them visible some of them not. They work twenty-four hours, filming everything that takes place in the area. Many of the residents with whom I talked were already used to the presence of surveillance cameras and did not mind being constantly filmed. Younger residents felt exposed and uncomfortable with the cameras. “If you don’t have anything to hide, you shouldn’t feel uncomfortable with the cameras,” said a police officer in Watts. When I asked him if he would mind having cameras installed inside his residence his answer reflected the approach towards criminal spaces: “crime and disorder does not take place where I live, there are no gangs there, so we do not need cameras. We do have them outside the building for security, thought,” the officer answered.

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This sense of being under constant surveillance produced by the cameras installed through the region is reinforced by the constant presence of police helicopters flying around the area. The ghetto bird, as police helicopters are called in South L.A., have become so common that many residents do not even notice them. “I don’t even notice the ghetto bird anymore,” John, an African-American living in South L.A, said.

“My grandma would get terrified every time she heard the chopper flying around. I remember as a kid listening to the ‘chop’ ‘chop’ of the propellers and running behind my grandma. Now I don’t even notice it anymore,” he said.

While there are no surveillance cameras in the favelas in São Paulo, there are cameras in the business areas as well as in the train stations in the periphery.

Furthermore, in the surroundings of the commercial areas, police presence is constant.

For instance, in the thirty blocks that separate Capão Redondo’s metro station and the cultural center where I conducted some of my interviews, I counted four different police stations belonging to different Military Police units and one belonging to the Civil Police.

In Osasco, a business area has been constructed; surrounded by high fences and private security, the area is constantly patrolled by police officers and private security. In conversations with a private security guard in charge of the security of one of the business offices, he told me that they are constantly filming the nearby favela to prevent any criminal activity near their offices. One of the workers in the office, who lives in the noble areas of the city, was astonished to see in one of the films young people smoking weed in the streets, despite the fact that smoking marihuana and consuming other illegal drugs is common among her friends, “but they don’t do it in the middle of the street,” was her justification for her astonishment.

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Confronted by the cameras, private security, constant police presence, from regular police patrols to Military Police battalions, special operations units, or ghetto birds, residents of South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery share a sense of being under siege, especially young residents of these areas.

“Everywhere we go there is a police officer bothering us, we are under siege here,” according to a young resident of Jefferson Area in South L.A. “Hang out with us here and you’ll see that [the police] will come to ask us what are we doing here,” the young man said; and effectively it did not take more than an hour for a police patrol car to go through, stop near where we were and ask if everything was ok. As Juan, the

Latino gang interventionist who works in South L.A., and reporter Sahra Suleiman, told me, the police use any excuse to stop and gather information on you, information they will later use to justify further stops and greater surveillance. “For example,” Sahra shared, “if you are riding your bike in the streets, they will stop you for ‘reckless riding,’ or any other excuse.” “They will give you a ticket or a warning, and slowly they begin creating a file on you, which they will later use as an excuse to stop and frisk, or take you in,” Sahra explained. Juan provided a similar account, showing how once you enter the police database as “gang-related” it is almost impossible to be removed from the database.

Once in a while, Metro or regular cops will do one of their sweeps in one of the parks here. They will take everybody in, write their names down, and will say “arrested for gang-related activity” and then they will let them go because they have nothing on them. But the moment you entered the “gang-related list” you become an eternal suspect for the police, and now they can stop you whenever they want. I have complained to the captain and to the Senior Lead Officer, and they keep arguing that so and so is gang-related, when it’s obvious he’s not involved. They will take you in for smoking weed, which is illegal, but it’s not a gang activity, yet they will

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argue that you’re involved with gangs (Juan, gang interventionist, in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, June 2015).

While the police officers I spoke with denied this type of indiscriminate surveillance practice, they did acknowledge this data gathering practice, arguing that it is a way of fighting criminal activity, and, using Steve Houchin’s expression, taking the problem people out of the community. Senior Lead Officer Sasajima, did acknowledged the fact that some officers tend to act in ways similar to those described by Juan and Sahra. “I think we should be more careful in the way we collect data,” Officer Sajasima told me.

Once you enter a kid’s name that maybe used against him, so we should be more cautious. Because I know the community and the kids, I know if it was a one-time mistake, or if it something bigger. However, other police officers don’t, so they see the name and description on the database and they assume the kid is a trouble maker. When everything is data driven, it is difficult to convince others by just saying, I know the kid and I know the community (LAPD Officer Sunny Sajasima, Southwest Los Angeles, in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, June 2015).

These surveillance practices have a long history in South L.A. In his description of

Operation Hammer, an anti-gang and anti-drug military-style operation done by LAPD in the late 1980s in South L.A., Mike Davis (1990) showed how hundreds of African-

American kids were arrested and their names entered into an electronic gang roster for further surveillance, even when their only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or minor offenses like delinquent parking tickets or curfew violations.

The constant surveillance is not produced only by the installment of cameras, the presence of police helicopters, or the expansion of private security. As Lyon (2003) has argued, surveillance has been used as a mechanism of social sorting, defined as a mechanism to classify people and determine who should be targeted for “special treatment, suspicion, eligibility, inclusion, access and so on” (2003, p. 20). In recent decades, surveillance tactics have expanded in quantity and quality, and have been

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helped by the development of “big-data” analysis, which informs policing (Brayne,

2017). Khalid Muhammad (2010) showed how crime statistics was used to perpetuate the connection between blackness and criminality; and Sarah Brayne (2017), in her study on surveillance and big-data by the LAPD, demonstrates how preconceived images of criminal hot spots and people lead to an increase of surveillance and policing in South L.A.

In 2011, Brayne shows how a new program funded by the Smart Policing

Initiative, was implemented in the Southern Bureau, and encouraged police officers to use evidence-based, data-driven tactics. The offender-based tactic implemented in

South L.A. sought to identify people who are repeat offenders and, therefore, need to be under constant control. Data was gathered daily from patrols, the Parole Compliance

Unit, field interview cards, traffic citations, release from custody forms, crime and arrest reports, and criminal histories. All this information generated a point value indicating the level of risk posited by the individual. It is important to notice that much of the information comes from the field interview cards, which are generated through regular police-civilian encounters and do not require any warrant to collect this data. As Brayne argues, “the point system is path dependent; it generates a feedback loop by which

[field interview cards] are both causes and consequences of high point values” (2017, p.

11). Later, police officers can argue their focus on certain individuals or areas as based on the analysis of neutral and objective data, denying any racial, social, or spatial bias.

This confirms Juan and Sahra’s testimonies and helps us understand why many residents, especially young residents, have a sense of living under siege.

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While there is no evidence of such a program being implemented in São Paulo’s periphery, the sense of being under constant surveillance is shared by young residents in the area. Young residents in Osasco, for instance, shared the same feeling that no matter where they go, the police will come to harass them. “Unless we enter the favela where the PCC has control, there is no place we can hang out without the police coming to harass us,” a young Afro-Brazilian male said. While stops and frisk, abuse and harassment are the most common experiences for many of these young residents, all of them highlight police killings as being a basic characteristic of living in the periphery.

As we will see in greater detail in the next chapter, police killing is widespread across São Paulo’s periphery and gives meaning of what living in the periphery represents. And while killings may take place in different locations across the periphery and under varied circumstances, residents have developed a spatial knowledge which identifies the killing spots used by the police. Thicket areas on top of the hills surrounding the periphery, dark alleys at favela entrances, and even spots inside the favelas are some of the areas in which police killings take place.

During my visit to a favela in Jandira, Marcelinho, the resident who was acting as a guide for Evair and I, led us to a narrow alley in the middle of the favela. The alley was quite strange, it had a hard right-turn, making it almost impossible to see the street entrance until you where there, in other words, once you were inside the alley nobody could see you from the other streets. On one wall, someone had painted, in black and white, a face of an Afro-Brazilian, indigenous man, he was smiling, but his eyes transmitted a sense of despair, he had a butterfly with open wings above his head. The

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sentence “Paz na Viela”9 was written on the wall. I asked Marcelinho where we were.

As if he was showing me any other common place in the favela, he said “this is the place where the police execute people.” Suddenly, a middle-aged, Afro-Brazilian woman welcomed us to what she called “a viela da morte.”10 “My son was killed here, in front of our house,” she informed us with tear in her eyes. “He was coming back from work and they [the Military Police] got him when he was entering the favela. They just brought him here and shot him in the back of his head. They just shot him for nothing and left him there,” she said, pointing to the floor on the opposite wall. “My son was no bandit, he was an honest worker. He was making money to go back to school, he wanted to study, you know,” Eleusa told us while tears ran through her face.

A 2014 analysis produced by the Ponte group, formed by journalists, scholars, and human rights activists, showed how most of the killings committed by the police in

São Paulo take place in the city’s periphery. In 2014, the western periphery (where

Osasco and Jandira are located) had 1.4 killings per 100,000 residents, and the southern periphery (where Capão Redondo and Jardim Ângela are situated) had 1 killing per 100,000 residents, being the number two and three in the ranking of areas where most police killings take place. Furthermore, the analysis indicated that the poorer the population of the area the greater the chance of police killings taking place in that region.

Killing spots such as these are common across the periphery, not all of them are used by the police, some are used by the PCC as execution spots. While they are not

9 Paz na viela means peace in the alley.

10 The alley of death.

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open spaces accessible to anyone who wants to see them, periphery residents know them, know their meaning, and form part of what the periphery stands for. Not only are killing spots a common feature of the periphery, but, as we saw in the previous chapter, most police roadblocks or blitz are performed in the periphery, generally in the entrance to these areas. The police implement roadblocks at the main arteries that connect the periphery with the rest of the city and this happens both in São Paulo and in South L.A.

For residents of both places, these roadblocks, with the traffic stops and searches that follow, are physical signs that they are entering the periphery. “You want to know you’ve arrived to Capão, look for the blitz,” Marcelo, a resident of Capão Redondo would tell me. Similarly, residents of the more affluent neighborhood of Baldwin Hills in Southwest

L.A. would refer to the roadblocks downhill on Crenshaw Blvd, Exposition Blvd, or MLK

Blvd, as border control, “Do you have your passport?” Kimberly, who lives in Baldwin

Hills asked me when we passed through a police roadblock at Crenshaw Blvd, coming down from Baldwin Hills. “Why?” I asked, “because we’re entering Southcentral, a whole new world!” she answered.

This does not mean that there are no police traffic operations in other parts of town, but residents feel that there is an important symbolism to the constant roadblocks at their neighborhoods’ entrances. Furthermore, they sustain that the way the police act in other parts of town is quite different from the way they conduct themselves in the periphery. Charles Epp and his colleagues documented the difference between regular traffic stops and the more invasive investigatory stops, arguing that, in the United

States, nonwhites are regularly exposed to investigatory stops while white drivers go through regular traffic stops (Epp et al., 2014). In São Paulo, the new commander of the

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ROTA unit recently argued that the Military Police needs to act differently in the periphery than it does in the so-called “noble areas,” where they should be more polite and attentive, and not as authoritative and blunt as they need to behave in the periphery

(Carvalho, 2017).

A final element in the construction of periphery, which is generally associated with the economic arrangement of the periphery, but one in which the police play a critical role is the tension between the formal and informal or legal and illegal. The expansion of neoliberalism has intensified the process of informality, which has become part of the urban landscape (AlSayyad 2004). Legality and illegality, formal and informal, cohabitate in such a way that it becomes difficult to distinguish between one and the other (AlSayyad, 2004; Feltran, 2011; Gaffikin, Perry, & Kundu, 2011; Telles,

2010). From the honest worker who in her spare time works for the drug dealer in order to improve her monthly income, or the merchant who alters the prices according to her convenience, or who sells without receipt, or even the police officer who looks to the side when residents of his community are dealing in illegal business, to the many unauthorized street vendors both in São Paulo and Los Angeles, the formal and informal merge in the daily experiences of many residents.

The police contribute through their action to this informal and illegal world. Police killings and police abuse are examples of illegal actions that take place in the periphery, constructing this space as a space in which these types of actions are “legal” or

“authorized” in these places. The collection of “taxes” by police officers from drug dealers or illegal street vendors is another way of “formalizing the informal.” “When you run a boca,” an experienced resident of a favela in Jandira shared, “you need to

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consider not only the salaries you pay to your workers, but also the taxes you need to pay to the police. And the police have increased their share lately, so the drug business is not as good as it was.” A street vendor selling meat sticks outside Capão Redondo’s metro station, complained about the fact that Military Police officers were demanding money.

I already pay the Municipal Guard so they allow us to work here and don’t push us out from the train station. But now the PM [Military Police] want to charge us. I don’t know who they think they are? If they are going to start charging me, I’ll start selling drugs. I’m trying to run a legit business here, and they want to charge me as if I was selling drugs (Street vendor in Capão Redondo, in conversation with the author, São Paulo, September 2015).

While her business is not officially authorized, the fact that she is not selling drugs makes it in her eyes a legitimate business, and the “taxes” paid to the police reinforce this image in which the informal becomes formal. As we already saw, street vending is a common practice in South L.A. too, especially among undocumented immigrants. Some business owners across South L.A. have attempted to eliminate and expel street vendors, accusing them of unfair business and generating a health threat. Contrary to

São Paulo, none of the interviewees told me they pay the police to work in the informal market, but they know which police officers will allow them to work and which officers will ask them to leave.

As Nezar AlSayyad and Ananya Roy (2004) show, urban informality is not just a way of acting or surviving in this new economic reality, informality “is an organized urban logic… [which] operates through the constant negotiability of value and the unmapping of space,” (2004, p. 5). The police contribute in the construction of this spatial logic, by interacting with the informal world, and, through their action, determining the spaces in which informality occurs and is allowed. The location of

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specific killing spots is a sign of periphery and the illegality or informality that characterize the place. When police officers in São Paulo or in Los Angeles expel street vendors from certain areas but allow them to work in others and charge them “taxes” they are mapping the informal spaces and are constructing the periphery. Despite the fact that street vendors move through the city following the market demands, they know or learn the hard way which areas of the city they can operate and which areas they may be running risks. A street vendor in São Paulo explained:

We need to move around so we can sell our stuff and make a living. There are areas which are forbidden zones, you cannot be too near the shopping malls or in certain noble areas. Downtown is open, but there is so many vendors that competition is tough, and the Municipal Guard protects some group of vendors and punish others. In the periphery things are easier, although the police may ask you for money or products if you want to work in good areas, near the metro station for instance. You are in constant negotiation with the police and competing with other vendors for the best spots (Street vendor in São Paulo in conversation with the author, São Paulo, September 2015.)

Things are not much different in Los Angeles. Contrary to São Paulo, the police play a more reactive rather than proactive role, they will allow street vendors to operate almost freely in specific areas but they will expel you from other spaces or when business owners, who generally participate in the formal community-police boards, pressure the police to act against them. Informality is not a residual or marginal category, which indicates the lack of formal legal arrangements. “It is an organization logic, a system of norms that governs the process of urban transformation” (Gaffikin et al., 2011, p. 309). It is an essential component in the construction of periphery.

As argued above, periphery should not be understood in geographic terms, in relation to an urban core or as a marginal and marginalized area of the city. While periphery refers to a specific space, it is a conceptual space marked by socio-economic

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precariousness, social exclusion along ethnic, racial and class lines, and by a series of policing practices, which construct the periphery as lawless zones, outside the juridical order, where informality is the norm, where intensive surveillance, abuse, violence and even killings take place. The geographical location of the periphery may vary, as urban policy evolves, people move, and processes of gentrification take place, henceforth, the importance of considering “periphery” in conceptual and relational rather than specifically geographical terms. Furthermore, the construction of periphery has become an important identity mark for residents of these areas. As we saw, spaces are subject to a series of regulatory mechanisms that work to separate the desired from the undesired, and spatial divisions reflect these social divisions (Herbert & Brown, 2006).

The sentence “preto, pobre, periférico” has become a common way for residents of São Paulo’s periphery to introduce themselves. It brings together the experiences of race, class and place together. While in South L.A. the term “periphery” is rarely used, terms such as inner-city, ghetto, or “Southcentral”, can be seen as synonyms of the way

“periphery” is used in São Paulo. As we saw in the case of race, the routinized negative experiences with the police form part of the community’s rituals, which lead residents to identify themselves with a larger imagined community of “peripheral” subjects. The territorial stigma imposed upon periphery residents, Löic Wacquant reminds us, should not be underestimated. “The sense of personal indignity it carries is a highly salient dimension of everyday life” (Wacquant 2008, p. 29). “I can’t remember the many times I lied when they asked me where I lived,” Angelica told me. “If I had said I live in Grajau, they would have never hired me. Being black and from a favela, impossible to get a job downtown.”

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There exists a strong correlation between the symbolic degradation and the ecological disrepair of urban neighborhoods: areas commonly perceived as dumpsters for the poor, the deviant and the misfit tend to be avoided by outsiders, ‘redlined’ by banks and real estate investors, shunned by commercial firms, all of which accelerates decline and abandonment (Wacquant, 2008, p. 29).

At the same time, this territorial stigmatization which leads to a decline in social cohesion and an increase in social mistrust, undermining community-building efforts.

Nonetheless, the term “periphery” is frequently used as a sign of pride, as belonging to a community that not only suffers but resists. The formation of community initiatives across the periphery to fight for racial, socio-economic, political, and legal justice are examples of this resistance (Alves & Silva, 2017; Sclofsky, 2016). Yet, many residents see and feel “periphery” as oppression, as a place that has no future, as a place that they need to abandon to become someone, as commonly said in Brazil, “to become gente.”11 However, as we will see in the next section, when residents of the periphery move out permanently or temporarily they are seen as being “out of place” and negative encounters with the police outside of the periphery, reminds them what their place is.

The Post-Metropolis Flow and Being “Out of Place”

Marcelo was sixteen years old in his last year of high school, when he went with his friends to visit a private school at Moema, one of São Paulo’s upper class neighborhoods. The visit was part of a school project in which they had to compare the resources private schools at upper class areas had compared to the resources the public school they attended in Capão Redondo had. Together with his classmates, they took the bus to Moema, at that time there was no metro connecting the two areas.

11 Gente translates to people. It actually refers to the condition of being considered a human being, a citizen with rights, someone to be respected.

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It took us two hours to get there, we had to take two buses. One of the teachers in Moema was waiting for us outside the school, so we had no problem in entering the place. My school had security at the entrance, but nothing compared to the fortress this school was. We spent time inside visiting the building and the classrooms, it was a complete different world. It felt that we had travelled abroad. Once we finished, we left the school and walked back to the bus stop. A couple of blocks from the school, a Military Police patrol stopped us. They ordered us to stop and face the wall. They asked us what were we doing there, and that this was not a place for favelados like ourselves. One of my friends told the officer we came for a school project, but the officer slapped him hard and told him that bandido does not go to school. They started kicking and slapping us. They kept telling us that this was not a place for us to be, they accused us of coming to sell drugs. They hit us with their batons, they hit us in our legs, our backs, and in the groin. One of my friends began crying, saying we did nothing, that it was only a school project. They opened our backpacks and took everything out; we had done nothing bad. At the end, they allowed us to go, and told us never to come back, “your place is in the favela, not here, I don’t want to see bandidos here,” the officer said. We were so embarrassed, we were treated as dirt, we were ashamed. On the way back nobody talked, we couldn’t. We arrived home and we didn’t tell anything to our parents. I remember I cried all night, not because of the pain, I cried from anger, from being seen as a bandit, for having agreed to go Moema, knowing that I was out of place (Marcelo in conversation with the author, São Paulo, October 2015).

Marcelo’s story vividly represents one of the many instances in which residents of the periphery learn their place in society. In this sense, the police act as an “educational” force, teaching periphery residents their proper place in the city and society.

“Place matters to the quality of human existence,” Sharon E. Sutton and Susan

P. Kemp (2011a, p. 1) argue. As several scholars show, place influences your access to jobs, service, consumer’s options, culture, and education (Dreier et al., 2004; Harvey,

2005b; Kruijt & Koonings, 2009; Massey & Denton, 1993; Sutton & Kemp, 2011a). This may seem as odd, considering that the advancement in technology and communication appears to have conquered space (Dreier et al., 2004). In an era of interconnected global cities, when commodities and capital move unremittingly, when advancement in transportation and communications allow people to move easily from one place to

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another, being fixed to a specific place and having this place determine your future, contradicts the image of the urban flow which characterizes the postmetropolis as argued by Soja (2000) and Telles (2011). “Mobility”, Vera Telles indicates, is one of the central features of the city, it symbolizes the end if the “Fordist city”, the urban-industrial world organized under the aegis of the wage-earner labor, and the binary relation of house-work, a hierarchical territorial arrangement and the segregationist effects that derive from it. To move through the city has become an answer to the difficulties of our time, the formation of social and spatial networks has become part of the survival kit in this new world of uncertainty (2010, p. 7).

However, when place determines your access to a series of material resources, from employment to education, to food and air, then we cannot discard the effect a place has in its residents (Sutton & Kemp, 2011a). More important, when certain places are constructed as “peripheries,” indicating not only that they are excluded from the material resources mentioned, but that they reflect the racial and ethnic social segregation, and represent places of violence, lawlessness and deviance, the place matters. And not only do these places need to be constantly surveilled and policed, but their residents, who carry the negative features of the place, need to be policed too. As

Marcelo’s story shows, when periphery residents move out from the periphery, they need to be reminded of their place, both physical and symbolic, as Marcelo’s story shows.

Manuel Castells (1977) indicates that the patterns of circulation in urban area is an expression of the city’s flow. While communication and transportation has improved significantly, experiences such as Marcelo’s, show how the flow pattern is dictated by

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the construction of periphery. When those who are identified as periphery residents move out of their area, they are exposed to police practices that remind them what their place is. In other words, the flow of global cities is not open or undetermined, but rather responds to a certain logic determined by the socio-economic, racial and spatial structure of the city. Take for instance the case of João, a middle-aged, Afro-Brazilian lawyer, activist in the Afro-Brazilian movement, who has moved out from the periphery and now lives with his wife and three children in a middle-class neighborhood in São

Paulo.

It is nice and frightening to live around here. It is frightening because at the end of the day I don’t really belong here. They see me as a service provider, as a doorman, a security guard, or someone who came to bring something; they never see me as a resident, especially the police. Every time I see a Military Police patrol car I shiver. They constantly stop and frisk me, they ask me what am I doing here, and unless I show them some proof that I live here they won’t believe me. They’ve been always polite with me, very different from the way they act in the periphery, but still, for them I don’t belong here, and I don’t have the right to be here unless I am providing a service. Nowadays, every time I see a police officer I act as if I am delivering documents or private mail to some place. And even then, they stop me. They tried to open my briefcase many times, and I tell them that they have no right to do so and that I am carrying legal documents; they don’t care. A black man in this area, even my age, cannot be doing something ‘honest’ in their eyes. I am out of place here. (João in conversation with the author, São Paulo, October 2015.

“Society,” Tim Cresswell argues, “has levels of power and influence related to class, gender, race… and a host of other variables” (1994, p. 3). These power levels and power relations, Cresswell indicates, are reflected in space and produce a series of expectations about behavior that are related to positions in the social structure. When residents transgress these expectations, as Marcelo and João did, they are deemed to be punished and taught what the expected behavior is. In other words, they are “out of place” and need to be brought back in place.

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In the case of Los Angeles, Edward Soja (2014, p. 158) has showed how the new globalized post-Fordist economy has reconstituted a social structure that has become more fluid, fragmented, decentered, and rearranged in complex patterns. This rearrangement, Soja indicates, has accentuated the socioeconomic inequalities that had always existed in Los Angeles. Furthermore, despite the existence of ethnic enclaves across the city, these enclaves have become more racially mixed, making the old urban dichotomies of bourgeois versus working class neighborhoods, or Black versus white areas, as obsolete. This does not mean that the older polarities have disappeared, but that a more polymorphous and fractured social order has taken shape from the restructuring of social boundaries and the multiplication of crosscutting divisions (Soja,

2014, p. 158). This polymorphous situation is exemplified by the presence of the

University of Southern California, a private, elite institution, in the middle of South L.A.

Surrounded by a low-income, majority Latino population, the presence of such an elite institution is seen by many residents as “out of place.” Yet, it is sometimes the residents who seem to be out of place.

As we saw in the previous chapter, several young residents have been harassed by police officers under the excuse of an increase in bike threats. Furthermore, surveillance, police presence, and USC’s private security patrol has substantially increased in recent years, particularly after two USC students were killed in drive by shooting near the main campus in April 2012. Kimberly, an African-American resident of

South L.A., experienced this feeling of being out of place on her first day as a student at

USC several years ago.

It was my first day at USC. I was moving into the campus dorms. I was bringing up some of my stuff, and I got into the elevator behind a blond

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girl. I was looking for my keys or something so I didn’t push any button. When I saw the girl pushing to the same floor as I was going, I kept looking for the keys. I felt she was staring at me, but I didn’t care. She came out of the elevator and I came out behind her. There was one only one hallway so we both went the same way. I noticed she began walking quickly and got into to her room. Mine was a couple of doors after. I got into my dorm, and after a couple of minutes someone knocked hardly into my door. I was startled. I went to the door and when I opened it there were two police officers, with their guns drawn! They ordered me to get on the ground. I was shocked. I suddenly found myself spread-eagle on the ground with a cop on top of me securing my hands. I yelled them that I was a student and that that was my room. After a while they figured out that I was telling the truth and let me go. I learned later that the blond girl felt threatened by me and called the cops. I imagined when they heard a blond girl being threatened by a big black woman who entered the next room, they assumed I was a menace or something. That was my first day at USC, it wasn’t a very welcoming reception. From day one, I felt I didn’t belong (Kimberly in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, May 2015).

On the one hand, the presence of an elite institution, such as the University of Southern

California, in the heart of South L.A. may symbolize the postmetropolis era, in which the fix borders that demarcated the city’s different areas are blurred and everything mesh into a polymorphous urban space. On the other hand, when residents, such as

Kimberly, venture out of their place, they are reminded, particularly by the police, what their place is. The transgressions to the urban structure, and the reaction to it, reinforce the power structures that organize space, and give meaning to periphery and to those who come from the periphery. The ability to define what constitutes appropriate behavior, and, in this sense, being in place or out of place, is one fundamental form of power (Cresswell, 1994, p. 25). The police are one of the institutions that exercise this power by reminding those who are out of place what their place is, but also by the differential ways in which they act in the periphery. This begs the question why space and place is so central to the police.

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Policing Space. The control of space, Steve Herbert (1997) argues, is at the heart of contemporary policing. Territorial control is an inherent outcome of the bureaucratic organization of the police. Police departments are organized in territorial jurisdictions and exercise their power by controlling these spaces, this is the basis of police efforts at social control. Many police strategies to create public order involve enacting boundaries and restricting access, “It is certainly the case that the police would be largely impotent without the capacity to create and enforce boundaries, to restrict people’s mobility in and around certain areas” Herbert says (1997, p. 11). In their daily work, police officers attempt to enforce a specific social order and by doing so they define and seek to control the spaces they patrol. The way officers interpret space will have an effect in the way they act. As we saw, defining a specific region as a war-zone or a place of criminality, will lead to stronger efforts at surveillance and use of force, extreme and unlawful force in many instances. In other words, the combination of an institutional and bureaucratic organization based on territoriality, together with an internal culture that portrays spaces in different ways, define the ways in which policing is conducted in different regions. The existing violence and criminality in the periphery is augmented by surveillance and policing strategies, which reinforce the sense of exclusion these places have. In many ways, space and policing are in a symbiotic relation, by which the manner the space is structured and conceptualized reinforces the way in which policing is conducted, which ends reinforcing the construction of the space as periphery.

Police officers do not merely enter into an existing space and act based on the existing conditions of the region they are working in. Their own actions, which generally

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reflect preconceived ideas of the area, work to reinforce the way space has been conceptualized in that region. Policing produces and reproduces space as much as it regulates the conduct of those inside that space (Samara, 2010). Violent police actions, for example, reinforce the idea that those areas are violent ones and only through violence public order can be enforced. Furthermore, the systematic violation of rights, violently or not, work to strengthen the perception that residents of that area have no rights in the first place. “I think people believe that the only strategy we have is to put a lot of police officers in the street and harass people and make arrests for inconsequential kinds of things,” former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates declared. “Well, that’s part of the strategy, no question about it” (cited in M. Davis, 1990, p. 284). This strategy is not about bringing more security to the city, but works to assert police power and enforce a specific social order.

The conceptualization of “peripheries” as “war zones” not only affects policing tactics, but also the attitude of individual officers towards these areas. “There are three kinds of officers who come work in the periphery,” a police officer in São Paulo told me.

“Those who have some business in the area, or those who are being punished, or those who have no possibility of choosing or requesting transfer.” His testimony was corroborated by other police officers. According to these testimonies, the least prepared, the more frustrated, or those who commit illegal and violent acts are the ones who come to work in these areas; São Paulo’s periphery, for police officers, became a place of corruption, illegality, or punishment. In Los Angeles, according to the testimonies of some Senior Lead Officers, many LAPD officers volunteer to work in

South L.A. because there is where the action takes place. Senior Lead Officers

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Sasajima from Southwest and Linton from Watts argued that many police officers have a “macho-cowboy style mentality” looking to go to places where they can see “action.”

The problem, according to Linton and Sasajima, is that the search for action oftentimes leads to violent behavior by these officers. “Many police officers come from the military,”

Officer Sasajima told me, “and they think South L.A. is Iraq or Afghanistan.”

Beyond the particular characteristics of police officers, the expansion of the penal state has brought new approaches to policing, as the example of “broken windows” and

“quality of life” policing, or the expansion of surveillance showed. David Garland (2001) indicates in the last decades of the twentieth century a new criminology approach developed, “the criminologies of everyday life,” that influenced policing. This new approach combines rational choice with situational crime opportunity, to design new policing approaches to reduce the opportunities criminals will have to commit crimes.

The assumption is that criminal actions will routinely occur if controls are absent and attractive targets are available, whether or not the individuals have a “criminal disposition”… Attention should centre not upon individuals but upon the routines of interaction, environmental design and the structure of controls and incentives that are brought to bear upon them (Garland, 2001, p. 16).

Space and territory are central to policing and the new approach includes a series of partnerships to control territory and reduce criminogenic opportunities. The development of community policing, crime prevention panels, or community policing advisory boards, are efforts to build up internal controls and surveil those who do not adhere to the new social order. “The welfare of deprived social groups, or the needs of maladjusted individuals, are much less central to this way of thinking” (Garland, 2001, p.

16). Those who do not adapt to the new economy or new metropolis become invisible or are demonized as enemies (Soja, 2000, p. 151).

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The relevance of territorial control for the police does not rise exclusively from the institutional and bureaucratic organization of police departments in Los Angeles and

São Paulo. As I have argued, the penal state develops its most repressive features in those areas constructed as peripheries, and this is because those who have been most damaged by the economic and social transformations of the last decades of the twentieth century reside in these areas. Furthermore, the ethno-racial history of both cities led to the concentration of nonwhites in peripheries, combining in one space poor nonwhites, which posit a constant threat to the social order. The urban riots that took place in Los Angeles in 1992, or the widespread protests that took place in São Paulo in

2013 and 2014, were cynically used as examples of the threat these periphery residents posit to the existing social order. These riots and protests are fueled by the ethno-racial injustice rooted in discriminatory treatment and a class logic pushing those left behind by the post-Fordist economy to protest against economic deprivation and widening social inequalities (Wacquant, 2008, p. 18).

A further element to consider in São Paulo has been the PCC’s dominance since the late 1990s across the periphery, and the sporadic show of force by this gang, as happened in 2006 when authorities declared a state of emergency and implemented curfews across the city. The PCC has taken advantage of the economic dislocations generated by the new economy, despite the social advancements achieved during the

PT government (Malvasi, 2012; Nunes Dias, 2013). “The PCC has become the perfect excuse for police repression and killings in the periphery,” São Paulo’s Military Police

Ombudsman, Dr. Fernandes Neves in conversation with the author, argued.

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The riots, protests, and gang presence in the area, with its illegal drug business, are oftentimes portrayed as symptoms of moral crisis, pathologies of the lower class, and the breakdown of law and order (Wacquant, 2008, p. 24). The answer to this law and order breakdown has been the expansion of the penal state (Gottschalk, 2014;

Lerman & Weaver, 2014; Wacquant, 2003; Weaver, 2007), especially in the periphery where the greatest threat to the social order is located. This has led, as we will see in the next chapter, to the maintenance of patterns of authoritarianism in São Paulo, legacy of the military dictatorship; and the existence of an authoritarian enclave in Los

Angeles.

Conclusion

Neoliberalism is not only a new mode of capitalist production, which assumes that human well-being can be best achieved through free market and free trade, in which the state’s role is to create and promote an institutional framework that seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market (Harvey, 2005a). Neoliberalism also represents a way of governing space defined by socio-economic and ethno-racial structures (Samara, 2010). The neoliberal agenda has moved from the dismantling of the welfare state and welfare programs, to the construction and consolidation of new mode of governance and the new divisions of labor with managers, financial analysts, creative workers, and other high-tech experts at the top, and a lower-echelon of service providers dedicated to child-minding, janitorial work, taxi drivers and even security services (Peck & Tickell, 2002; Scott, 2014). These changes greatly affected global cities, such as Los Angeles and São Paulo, in which traditional manufacturing gave way to high-tech industries with their high-skill jobs, the expansion of financial and banking services, together with low-paid and unstable service jobs, an increase in employment

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insecurity and unemployment for those who had no opportunity to keep up with the new globalized job standards, and an increase in the reliance on the informal economy

(Garland, 2001; Sassen, 2001, 2014; Soja, 2000; Telles, 2010; Wacquant, 2008).

Several authors have shown how these changes, which took place during the last decades of the twentieth century have given rise to what they call the “carceral state,” a series of policies and institutionalization processes which include the transformation of the penal approach from rehabilitation to incapacitation, with the concomitant substantial increase in incarceration rates; the adoption of “tough on crime” policies, including an increase in surveillance, the implementation of mandatory minimum sentences with an increase in punishment for most offenses, and new policing tactics, which emphasize a proactive approach in control tactics; the expansion of police presence in low-income communities with the implementation of community-policing, and the deployment of “broken windows” and “quality of life” approach, which address low-level offenses and criminogenic situations; and finally, the formation and deployment of militarized units and tactics, as the Metro Unit in L.A. or ROTA in São

Paulo do, in so-called “hot-spots” areas (Alves & Alves, 2015; Burke, 2013; Garland,

2001; Gottschalk, 2014; Murakawa, 2008; Wacquant, 2009b).

In this chapter, I showed how the expansion of the penal state assumes its most repressive features in those places constructed as “peripheries”. Peripheries concentrate the population who has been most damaged by the passage from the

Fordist manufacturing to the post-Fordist era. Both, in South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery, many of the old manufacturing industries have gone, leaving behind relatively few well-paid union jobs with relatively good social benefits. Furthermore, these areas

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have seen the influx of immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America in Los Angeles; some South American and African immigrants in

São Paulo with the constant influx of migrants from the Northeast of Brazil. These historically segregated places, have become even more segregated along ethno-racial lines, with the formation of ethno-national enclaves in South L.A. and the continuous expansion of favelas together with commercial areas in São Paulo’s periphery. Once in a while, the sense of discrimination together with the increased levels of inequality and socio-economic despair have led to uprisings and protests as it happened in South L.A. in 1992; or the continuous protests going on in São Paulo’s periphery, with its peak in

2013 against the increase in the cost of public transport.

Portrayed as gang-infested areas, war-zones, as spaces of lawlessness and immorality, the state response was an increase in repression through aggressive police action and surveillance. While the penal state has expanded to different urban areas and spaces, from schools to upper-class gated communities; it is in the periphery that constant surveillance, police abuse, police corruption and police killings take place.

These police actions combined with the socio-economic deprivation and ethno-racial discrimination construct the notion of “periphery”. Defining periphery exclusively as a geographical term in relation to an urban core (Park, Burgess, & McKenzie, 1967), or rejecting the notion of a periphery due to the lack of a proper urban core or the development of a polymorphous urban space (Dear & Dahmann, 2011; Dear & Flusty,

2002; Soja, 2014), is too narrow a way of conceptualizing periphery. Furthermore, it does not respond to the ways in which residents of these areas construct their spatial identities.

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The negative, generally violent, experiences residents have with the police, the sense of being under siege, of being “out of place” when they encounter the police outside the periphery, leads residents of these areas to develop a spatial identity, which reinforces the image of second-class citizenship, discrimination, marginalization and deprivation that entail to being a periphery resident. These sentiments, frequently develop a sense of alienation and despair, feed interpersonal mistrust, undermining the possibilities of communal organization (Anderson, 1999; Wacquant, 2008). In other instances, these experiences become the rituals which give content to what being from the periphery means, generating communal bonds and modes of resistance (Alves,

2014; Holston, 2008; Sclofsky, 2016).

The experience of periphery residents, particularly the hardships of illegal residence, house building, land conflict, and more importantly police violence, have given place to the development of a second-class citizenship that challenges the quality of democracy in these areas. While this sense of deprivation promoted what James

Holston calls “insurgent citizenship”, referring to periphery residents’ struggle to take control of their neighborhoods and claim agency in the urban governance (Holston,

2008), as we will see in the next chapter, the negative and violent experiences periphery residents suffer in the hands of the police, allow us to define these regions as authoritarian enclaves, areas which feature the absence of the basic components of democracy; they lack the safeguarding of rights necessary to guarantee free and fair elections and a state apparatus sufficiently responsive to election winners and autonomous from social and economic forces (Mickey 2015, p. 13); but they violate the intrinsic equality embedded in democratic regimes in which citizens, regardless of race,

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class or social status, have their basic rights protected and therefore have the ability to exercise political agency. As Edward L. Gibson (2012) correctly points out, these enclaves are not an exception, but they are the product of strategies of territorial control and governance by local and national elites; strategies which have been depicted throughout this chapter.

The socio-economic and cultural transformations of the last decades of the twentieth century deepened the spatial segregation defined by race and class that always existed in São Paulo and Los Angeles. The expansion of the penal state and the repressive forms it has taken in these areas, has led, as we shall see, to a systematic violation of periphery residents’ rights generating a mass of second-class citizens dispossessed from material and legal recognition.

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CHAPTER 6 SHARED EXPERIENCES III: CONSTRUCTING A SECOND-CLASS CITIZENSHIP

In the previous two chapters, we saw how the negative, mostly violent, encounters between residents of South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery with the police influence the way residents construct their racial identity and their sense of space.

Through their actions, the police reinforce a series of racial stereotypes, linking blackness with criminality and emphasizing the notion that black and brown bodies are worthless and disposable. In doing so, these encounters reinforce the existing racial hierarchies.

Moreover, we saw how the negative interaction between the police and community residents construct the notion of periphery. Rather than defining periphery in geographical terms, we need to see periphery as a concept that reflects the precariousness of these areas, where the penal state develops its most repressive features. The notion that these areas are spaces of crime, backwardness, poverty, a threat to the social order, is produced and reproduced by repressive and violent police actions. Peripheries have become authoritarian enclaves, under a constant state of exception, in which residents have their rights systematically violated by state agents.

Throughout this chapter, we shall delve into the different ways in which police actions, and the negative experiences residents of these communities have with the police reproduce among residents their second-class citizenship status, reinforce the notion that these areas are authoritarian enclaves.

Authoritarian Enclaves, Citizenship and Inequality

Several authors have highlighted the prevalence of authoritarian practices at subnational levels and have come to label these subnational units as authoritarian

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enclaves. As Edward L. Gibson (2012) indicates, the existence of authoritarian enclaves in a democratic landscape is far from unusual. These authoritarian jurisdictions flourish not only in less developed nations of the so-called Third World, but also in highly institutionalized nations; and these territories are often tolerated by the national government. They are not simply an exception, a roadblock in the expansion of democracy by the national government; these enclaves are a product of strategies of territorial control and governance by local and national elites. These enclaves lack the basic guarantees needed for residents to exercise their political rights (Mickey, 2015).

While this literature provides an important way of analyzing the development of democracy inside national units, and acknowledge the regional variation in the level of democratic practices, it focuses exclusively on the ability or inability to exercise political rights, in particular the guarantee of political participation and competition (Benton,

2012; Gibson, 2012; Giraudy, 2010; Kelemen, 2017; Mickey, 2015). Some authors contend that the intervention of the national or federal government, directly or through the intervention of national political parties, can exercise pressure on local authorities to democratize or allow these local powerholders to continue with authoritarian practices as long as they deliver the necessary electoral support to keep the national party in power (Gibson, 2012; Mickey, 2015). Furthermore, Carlos Gervasoni (2010), contends that the threat of central government intervention can lead local authorities in authoritarian enclaves to refrain from blatant authoritarian practices.

Notwithstanding the important contributions these scholars provide for our better understanding of the variations of democracy at subnational level, they fail to consider the practices of state agents in particular areas inside municipal units, which, as we

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shall see, produce and reproduce a second-class citizenship status of its residents through violent and abusive practices, but also through lawful and nonviolent actions.

As it has been argued in the previous chapter, it is in peripheries where the penal state adopts its most repressive forms, and these repressive forms are to be considered part of the features of authoritarian enclaves. Even when political rights are guaranteed, and free and fair elections at the municipal level take place, the prevalence of authoritarian practices by state agents leads me to characterize these areas as authoritarian enclaves.

As Guillermo O’Donnell (1999) argues, there is a closed connection between democracy and certain aspects of equality among individuals who are posited not just as individuals but as legal persons, and consequently as citizens. If the deprivation of certain capabilities due to extreme inequality results in a person being unable to exercise her autonomy, then, O’Donnell contends, “it seems wrong, both morally and empirically, to posit that democracy has nothing to do with such social determined impediments” (1999, p. 307). O’Donnell further argues that there is an intermediate level between the political regime and the socio-economic structure, which consists of the extent to which full citizenship, civil and political, has been achieved by the entire population. Whatever law there is, this law is fairly applied by the relevant state institutions, this means that the application is consistent across equivalent cases without taking into consideration the class, status, or power differentials of the participants in such processes.

Following O’Donnell’s reasoning, if blatant abuses committed by state agents against residents of the state were to happen and these actions would remain

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unpunished, it would be inappropriate to consider these regimes as democratic. As

Daniel Brinks (2008) sustains, citizenship, or a high “quality democratic citizenship”

(2008, p. 2), is one which endows all citizens with the full complement of rights guaranteed in constitutions and laws. As we shall see, both in São Paulo and Los

Angeles, abuses on the hands of the police take place on a regular basis rendering the idea of a democratic citizenship a mere illusion. Making things even more complex is the fact that most of the police actions which lead residents of South L.A. and São

Paulo’s periphery to develop a sense of second-class citizenship, are actually legal.

Oftentimes, it is a series of daily benign actions, which lead to the unevenness of citizenship rights.

Max Weber (1978) showed how rights where a source of power of which “even a hitherto entirely powerless person may become possessed” (1978, p. 667). It entails, according to Weber, the protection against interference by third parties, especially state agents, who may impede the exercise of basic freedoms. While in many cases, individuals are able to ask the state to redress the abuses, this ability depends on the individuals position in the socio-economic and racial structure (Alexander, 2012; Brinks,

2008; Galanter, 1974; Tonry, 2011).1 Furthermore, when individuals have their rights systematically violated through abuses, but also through legal means, even when some of them may have the abuse redress, they still develop a sense of second-class

1 In recent years, individuals, in the United States, have filed civil suits against police departments for abuse and wrongdoings. The cost of resolving these police misconduct cases have soared in the last years. According to a 2015 Wall Street Journal report the ten cities with the largest police departments have paid $248.7 million in 2014.

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citizenship, which defines rights as existing only in paper, and the principle of political equality is violated.

Democracy is fundamental for the development of citizenship rights (Dahl, 1989).

Yet, political democracy, Caldeira and Holston (1999) sustain, is not enough to secure the civil rights of citizenship or produce a democratic rule of law, and without these two elements, the realization of democratic citizenship is hindered. As these authors indicate, although political democracy may be strong in some states, and the legal codes express democratic values, the civil component of citizenship remains seriously impaired if citizens suffer systematic violations of their rights. While Caldeira and

Holston believe this to be a problem of “new democracies”, especially in Latin America, I argue that this disjunction exists in “old democracies”, such as the United States, too.

The tension between citizenship and inequality has deep historical roots.

According to T.H. Marshall (1964), citizenship involves the access to various rights and powers, and has three basic components: (i) civic, which includes a set of individual rights, such as liberty, freedom of speech, and equality before the law; (ii) political, which includes the access to the decision-making process through universal manhood suffrage; and (iii) social, which includes welfare, security, and education. Marshall shows that these different components developed through a long period of time, beginning with civic rights during the eighteenth century leading to the adoption of social rights as part of the concept of citizenship during the twentieth century due to the political action and mobilization of the working class. While the extent and range of social rights is contingent to each society, the civic and political components of citizenship rights have been, at least in theory, well established.

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As with democracy, the principle of equality is central to the development of citizenship. Starting at the point where all men were free and, in theory, capable of enjoying rights, it grew by enriching the body of rights which they were capable of possessing. Equality, according to T.H. Marshall, “is a status bestowed on those who are full members of the community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed” (cited in Lipset, 1964, p. x). Yet, if citizenship rights imply equality, the class structure is a system of inequality, and this creates a tension between opposing principles, rights may be established by law, but with the existing social inequalities they do not mean much (Marx, 1978 [1843]; Marx &

Engels, 1978[1848]). This tension, Marshall believes, is one of the driving forces behind the expansion of citizenship rights. The egalitarian tendencies of citizenship, Marshall argues, while they are in conflict with capitalism, keep advancing rights, because they are based on the conception that we are part of the same community. However, when specific sectors of the community are seen as “dangerous others” due to their race, ethnicity, class status, or place of residence, their membership in the community is questioned, and their status as citizens too.

In this chapter, I will describe different police actions which are examples of the repressive features the penal state developed in these authoritarian enclaves. It will further show, how the violent experiences residents of São Paulo’s periphery and South

L.A. have with the police reinforce their second-class citizenship status. Moreover, it will demonstrate how a series of legal, nonviolent, and seemingly benign police practices, reproduce this second-class status.

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Police Killings and Extreme Violence in São Paulo’s Periphery and South L.A.

August 13th, 2015, Osasco, São Paulo’s western periphery, 8.30pm, ten people shot, eight of them died immediately, while two were seriously injured. This was the beginning of one of the bloodiest nights in the city, when off-duty police officers, in reprisal for the killing of a municipal guard two nights before, allegedly killed nineteen people in one night. The killing spree, which began at 8.30pm at a bar in Jardim

Munhoz in Osasco, continued through the night spreading to the neighboring region of

Barueri. The victims were between the ages of fifteen and forty-one, the majority of them black, poor, and residents of the periphery. Leticia Vieira, a fifteen-year-old student at one of Osasco’s high-school was the youngest victim. Claudio, a high-school teacher in Osasco, recalls the night of the killings:

I had a bad feeling that night. Two nights before a municipal guard was killed here in Osasco. We have been talking at school and with friends that we should expect a reprisal, the police never stay put. I went out for a beet and on my way home, I knew something had happened. There is a boca on the street corner near my house and when I walked through there was nobody there, that’s a sign that something happened. I learned about the massacre the next morning. We were lucky that they went to the other side of town. They were targeting the small bars in the community, if they had come this way, they could have hit the bar where I was. Drinking a beer has become a dangerous business. (Claudio, high-school teacher in Osasco, in conversation with the author, São Paulo, August 2015).

Leticia Vieira was a student in the same high-school where Claudio worked. He learned about Leticia the next day went before going to school. Leticia was coming back home from a friends’ house, when the assailants began shooting at a bar in the middle of the street and hit her. She died a couple of days later. Leticia was not the only teenager killed that night in Osasco. Rodrigo Lima da Silva, sixteen years old, was also one of the victims of the massacre. Rodrigo was also a student in Osasco, he had just quit school.

Rodrigo’s girlfriend was pregnant and Rodrigo had decided to get a full-time job to

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support his new family. He was having an ice-cream with his girlfriend, when the assassins drove by and shot him. “When you are preto, pobre, periférico, you are a walking target,” an acquaintance of Rodrigo told me. “Around here, you don’t have the right to even buy an ice-cream.”

A number of Military Police and Municipal Guard officers were arrested and, contrary to many of the previous massacres that took place in São Paulo, three Military

Police officers were sentenced to more than one hundred years.2 According to Vitor, an

Afro-Brazilian activist and former resident of Osasco, the press coverage of the massacre was something new, “they cannot ignore what happened now,” Vitor said. In

2015, when I spoke to him, he was skeptical regarding a possible arrest or sentence to the officers in charge. He believes the press coverage is part of society’s voyeurism, but that nothing will really change. In 2017, for instance, the number of people killed by the police in São Paulo jumped to approximately 800 people, compared to the 577 in 2015, according to official numbers. Vitor’s feeling that nothing will change, may seem accurate:

Now the press is all over the massacre, and that’s new. So they may arrest someone. But it doesn’t make any difference. At the end of the day nobody cares. Press coverage is part of the general voyeurism, but nothing else. They will keep discriminating us, they’ll keep beating us, and they’ll keep killing us. There is a state-sponsored genocide going on, and it will keep going on, mainly because nobody cares. So what if there are nineteen negros pobres less? Who cares? (Vitor in conversation with the author, São Paulo, August 2015).

2 These three officers were not the only participants in the massacre, but were the only ones arrested for it. In 2016, the suspect who allegedly killed the municipal guard, which sparked the massacre, was killed by Military Police officers.

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These feeling of having no rights, was shared by most of my informants across São

Paulo and Los Angeles, expressing their sense of being second-class citizens who had no protection from police abuse.

According to São Paulo’s Secretaria de Segurança Pública or Public Security

Department, from 2010 to 2015, two-thousand six-hundred and one people were by the

Military and Civil police, in the city of São Paulo and its outskirts; an average of 434 people per year. In 2015 only, there were 577 people killed by the police; these numbers are armed conflict numbers.3 If one assumes that part of police work is to prevent crime, and that police officers attempt to avoid killing civilians, we could expect to see a higher number of people wounded. This is not the case in the city of São Paulo.

In that same six-year period, the average of people wounded by the police stood at 335, an approximate ratio of seven people killed for each five wounded.4

Part of the police justification for the level of police violence is related to the presence of the PCC, the main criminal gang in São Paulo. In conversation with Military

Police officers regarding the Osasco massacre, they expressed these generalized feelings of working in a state of war, in a context in which “you kill or you get killed,” as one of the officers said to me.

3 Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis (2000) define civil war as an armed conflict in which one of the conditions is that it causes more than 1,000 deaths in a single year. While the number is completely arbitrary, it has become widely accepted in the literature. In the case of São Paulo, where there is no declared war or civil conflict, state agents killed 548 people in 2014 and 577 in 2015. If we look at the whole state of São Paulo, in 2014 there were 879 deaths and 645 in 2015.

4 It is important to consider that these are official numbers. This means, that the numbers reflect official reports filed by police units and/or reported by official medical examiner. While the numbers include civilians killed by police officers off-duty, the numbers do not consider the many victims who disappeared or who were not officially classified as “police killing”. In personal conversations with leaders at the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, personnel working at the Human Rights Office the Public Defense Attorney’s Office, and journalists covering this issue, they argue that the numbers are probably half of what the actual numbers are.

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If we follow this argument, we may assume that the police if compelled to use lethal due to armed confrontations with gang criminals. If this was the case, we may expect to see a high level of police officers killed or wounded in the same period.

However, in the period between 2010 and 2015, an average of thirteen police officers were killed, and two-hundred and seven wounded. The approximate ratio between civilians killed and police officers killed is sixty-five to two; the approximate ratio between civilians wounded and police officers wounded is five to three.

What the data and the stories show is a systematic killing of civilians, especially young, black, males from the periphery, at the hands of police officers. Samira Bueno, the executive director of the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, considers these killings as an “institutionalized police practice. It is engrained in the institutional culture and it has become a common and accepted practice” (Samira Bueno, Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública Executive Director, in conversation with the author, São Paulo,

July 2014). When one of the most basic rights, the right to live, is being systematically violated, then the rights associated with the status of citizen, have little worth.

While the intensity of violence and the number of killings are not nearly as high in

Los Angeles as they are in São Paulo, police killings have taken place in Los Angeles too. The first problem regarding police killings in the United States in general, and in Los

Angeles in particular, is that, contrary to Brazil, there is no official data regarding this type of homicide.5 Nonetheless, several individuals and institutions have attempted to

5 This fact is quite surprising considering the impressive amount of data collected by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting created in 1929, which began systematically collecting data on all crimes since 1930. Only recently, has the FBI decided to begin collecting data on police use of lethal force. In a speech on February 12, 2015, FBI Director James Comey (2015) declared that the FBI will begin collecting data on police lethal use of force and on December 2015 he signed the Criminal Justice Information Service Advisory Police Board recommendation for collecting this data.

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create a database recording these homicides. According to data provided by

FatalEncounters.org,6 in the period from 2010 to 2015, one-hundred and forty-six people were killed by police officers in Los Angeles. Thirty-eight of them were African-

Americans and fifty-eight Latinos. In the same period of time, five LAPD officers were killed in the line of duty. If we observe the data provided by The Guardian,7 forty people have been killed by the LAPD or the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department in 2015, and thirty-seven in 2016. From those killed in 2015, nine were African-Americans and twenty-two Latinos, and in 2016, seven African-Americans and twenty-three Latinos were killed.

One of the most well-known cases in Los Angeles, was the case of Ezell Ford, a twenty-five year old African-American male, suffering from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, who was shot by two LAPD officers on his way home in South L.A. The killing of Ezell Ford sparked a series of protest across South L.A. While LAPD Chief, Charlie

Beck, believed the officers acted according to policy, a Police Commission that looked at the incident declared that one of the officers violated department’s policies, while the other acted according to policy. Los Angeles County prosecutors decided, in January

2017, not to file charges against the officers involved in the killings. According to a Los

Angeles Times report (Mather, Queally, & Gerber, 2017), Ford was walking through

6 Fatal Encounters was created by D. Brian Burghart through news report and crowdsourced information. As many of the other databases, this means that they recollect those cases known to the public. As Patrick Ball (2016) argues, this is a very important caveat. In his experience collecting similar data in El Salvador, South Africa, Congo, Colombia, and Kosovo, between other countries, on behalf of the UN and truth commissions, the data regarding crimes committed by state agents is always partial.

7 The British newspaper The Guardian has been collecting data on police killings in the United States since 2015. The data combines Guardian reporting with verified crowdsourced information (Swaine, Laughland, & Lartey, 2015).

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what was described as a gang area and ignored the officers’ commands to stop. One of the officers grabbed Ford, believing, according to the officer’s testimony, that Mr. Ford was trying to discard drugs. A fight ensue, in which Ezell Ford was fatally shot.

Community activist, Kim McGill expressed the shared sentiments of the community at a protest on behalf of Ezell Ford, opposite LAPD’s main headquarters:

We are tired of seeing our kids being killed by the police across the country and here in L.A. too. [LAPD] Chief Beck, says the officers acted within policy, but he ignores the context in which the murder of Ezell took place. They saturate our communities with police, they declare our communities as “gang zones” and then any young black or brown person who walks in the area becomes automatically a suspect. They deploy these gung-ho officers, who are ready to pull the trigger, and when their orders are disregarded, they go after that person full force. Ezell was in his right to ignore the officers, and he had mental health issues, which may have caused him to ignore the officers. Stating that the officers acted within policy because they were responding to Ezell’s reaction is to ignore the context in which policing is being conducted in South L.A. Is to ignore that for the police, and many people in this city and country, Black lives do not matter (Kim McGill, Youth Justice Coalition, in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, June 2015).

In the same way Vitor in São Paulo believed nobody cared that nineteen pretos, pobres, and periféricos were killed in Osasco, Kim McGill thought nobody cared that Ezell Ford and many other black and brown residents of Los Angeles were killed by the police.

Explaining the Difference between São Paulo and Los Angeles. Despite the shared feelings and violent experiences in both places, it is important to explain why so many people are killed in São Paulo compared to Los Angeles. The one-hundred and forty-six people killed during 2010 and 2015 in Los Angeles, according to the Fatal

Encounters database, amounts to the number of people killed in a single trimester in

São Paulo. If we look at the rate per 100,000, Los Angeles had 3.7 people killed by police per each 100,000 inhabitants, compared to 12.4 in São Paulo.

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As we already saw, in a historical and social context in which those at the lower echelons of the socio-economic and racial ladder are seen as worthless, where black and brown bodies are considered disposable, and black and brown spaces are considered areas of social disorder, violence, and crime, the use of extreme, even lethal, force becomes a natural occurrence. Nonetheless, this does not explain why the police in São Paulo kill so many more people than their counterparts do in Los Angeles.

Furthermore, scholars argue that police violence against low-classes in Brazil are the result of an incomplete, illiberal or disjunctive democracy (Caldeira & Holston, 1999;

Collier & Munck, 2001; Holston & Caldeira, 1998; O’Donnell 1993; Pereira, 2000).

However, as I will discuss later in this chapter, considering the abuses and injustices committed by the police against residents of South L.A. we cannot consider Los

Angeles as a complete democracy either.

Ronald Ahnen (2007) argues that police violence in Brazil was partly a consequence of the transition to democracy. Democracy gave citizens the opportunity to choose leaders who run tough on crime campaigns when dealing with the issue of crime and violence. “When such candidates take office,” Ahnen argues, “they often institute changes in public safety policy that repress crime in ways that violate citizens’ basic rights” (2007, p. 142). Police killings, Ahnen shows, are higher when state governors come from the center, center-right, or right. Since 2007, São Paulo’s governor came from the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB),8 who had a

8 Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira or Brazil’s Social Democratic Party, was created in 1988 by former São Paulo’s governor, Mario Covas. They won Brazil’s presidential elections in 1995 under the leadership of Fernando Henrique Cardozo. While some of their founding members consider the party as being center-left, its neoliberal policies, their fierce opposition to Lula’s and Rousseff’s Workers Party (PT) and their role in Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, led many to consider the party as being center or center- right.

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tough on crime agenda. This could help explain the high level of police killings.

Nonetheless, there has been important variation in the number of police killings through these years. During governor Alckim’s government, for instance, police killings remain relatively stable during his first years in office, dropped by more than two hundred deaths from 2012 to 2013, and then soared from two hundred and fifty-seven in 2013 to five hundred and forty-eight people killed in 2014.9 These new measures seem to have work, at least for the year 2013. While the political echelons were able to influence the police, neither the effect of the measures nor political pressure lasted long. After the

2013 and 2014 widespread protests and subsequent police repression of protesters, the police went back to business as usual. Ahnen’s (2007) argument may be correct, considering Alckim’s support for the police and its special unit ROTA. However, Ahnen’s argument does not consider the level of autonomy enjoyed by the police and the effect other institutions, such as the judicial system, may have on police violence.

Several authors highlight the incompleteness of the state and its inability to implement the monopoly of the legitimate use of force as an explanation for police killings (O’Donnell, 1993, 1999; Pinheiro, 1999). Following this argument, police officers would not be acting as state agents but rather as private agents who, in the same manner as gang members or paramilitary groups, exercise violence to enforce private control. Even if we consider the fact that the official numbers register mainly those

9 Observing the numbers, 2013 appears as an outlier regarding the number of extrajudicial killings. Part of the explanation is that after the public security crisis of 2012, when police forces and the PCC went head to head, producing an increase in violence, including police killings, Alckim’s administration took a series of measures to curtail the level of police violence. One such measure was the prohibiting the police to carry wounded civilians. A common practice by the police was to carry civilian wounded by the police and execute them on their way to the hospital. The new measure, combined with local and international pressure two years before the 2014 World Cup, led Alckim’s government to put pressure on the police.

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cases in which police officers are on duty, and are not considering the cases in which police officers kill off duty, on duty police officers killed four hundred and twenty-one civilians in 2015.

A stronger explanation offered by the literature argues that the prevalence of police extrajudicial killings is the result of the lack of proper mechanisms of accountability, especially judicial accountability. A Human Rights Watch 2009 report on police killings argues that despite the many reforms in São Paulo’s police forces, including the creation of an Ombudsman office and new training programs, “impunity for extrajudicial executions committed by police officers remains the norm” (2009, p. 2).

Daniel Brinks (2008) arrives at a similar conclusion, indicating that unless the victims or victims’ relatives are able to mobilize private resources, including media coverage, the probability of having the abuse redressed by courts is minimal. Caco Barcelos (2003), in his journalistic coverage of the extrajudicial killings committed by a ROTA unit, shows not only that the courts are incapable or unwilling to condemn those in charge of committing these crimes, but, furthermore, the perpetrators were generally rewarded for their actions.

One of the reasons for the court’s inability to prosecute police officers for carrying out extrajudicial killings is related to the fact that they are dependent on the police itself to investigate the crimes. Daniela Skromov, head of the human rights office at the

Public Defense Attorney’s Office, argues that the judicial system is completely dependent on the police and prosecutors and courts tend to yield to the police.

“Because the prosecutor and the courts depend on the police to do the investigation, the possibility of solving a case of police killings is almost impossible,” Skromov argued.

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What matters is not the crime that was committed but the relevance and socio-economic status of the victim. If the victim has resources or the media takes action, then there is a chance that the police officers who perpetrated the crime will be prosecuted. The police can kill someone in the middle of the day, in the middle of the street, and the people in charge of investigating will not question anyone or do anything. (Daniela Skromov, Human Rights Office Director, São Paulo’s Defense Attorney’s Office, in conversation with the author, São Paulo, June 2014).

Julio Cesar Fernandes Neves, São Paulo’s Police Ombudsman, shared many of the arguments and feelings expressed by Daniela Skromov:

Impunity in this city is huge. There is a strong sense of camaraderie and corporate spirit in the police and this makes it even more difficult to investigate and punish those who abuse their power. When you combine this with the fact that the victims are the least powerful people in society, it becomes very difficult to investigate and punish (Julio Cesar Fernandes Neves, São Paulo’s Military Police Ombudsman, in conversation with the author São Paulo, August 2014).

Accountability can take place outside of the courts too, and the creation of the

Ombudsman Office in 1995, was a way of improving horizontal accountability10 and providing for civilian overview of the police. Yet, the Ombudsman is appointed by the

Secretary of Public Security and they are financially dependent on this department.

Nonetheless, the Ombudsman is a civilian authority and, by law, he cannot be a former police officer. Despite this institutional innovation, police killings have not dropped substantially. Fernandes Neves complained that with the meager resources he has, it is almost impossible to investigate these crimes. In 2013, Fernandes Neves complained, they had nine thousand reports of police misconduct, and there were only fifteen employees at his office to investigate these reports.

10 O’Donnell (2003) defines horizontal accountability as “The existence of state agencies that are legally enabled and empowered and factually willing and able, to take actions that span from routine oversight to criminal sanctions or impeachment in relation to actions or omissions by other agencies of the state that may be qualified as unlawful” (2003, p. 34).

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If we look at what takes place in Los Angeles regarding accountability, we observe that the situation is far from perfect and only partially explains the difference.

Despite the recent conviction of Sheriff Lee Baca to three years in prison for corruption and abuse in the County Jail system, the Police Commission finding on the Ezell Ford’s death, which established that one of the officers acted contrary to LAPD’s policy, and the amount of civil lawsuits settlements against the city for police abuse, there are still many flaws in the accountability system in Los Angeles. Since the 1992 uprising in the aftermath of the Rodney King incident, a series of measures were taken by Los Angeles authority to improve community police relations, including the creation of civilian review boards (Ogletree Jr., Prosser, Smith, & Talley Jr., 1994). This has not eliminated police brutality in Los Angeles, but the existence of a semi-autonomous review board increased the possibility for condemning instances of extreme violence.11 A further, and quite common method to exercise accountability is through civil suits against the city for the actions of its police officers. While these suits neither condemn the particular officers involved in the abuse nor the LAPD directly,12 they still are a type of warning against the city for the misconduct of their officers. For instance, in the period 2002 to

2011, the city of Los Angeles paid more than one hundred million dollars in civil suit settlements for police misconduct (Los Angeles Times, 2012). Nonetheless, criminal charges against police officers for abuse or misconduct are rare. According to the Los

11 My description of civilian review boards as semi-autonomous has to do with the fact that there are former police officers in the commission, henceforth, it is not formed 100% by civilians, they can only issue recommendation and have no subpoena power.

12 Settlement money is paid by the city, it does not come from LAPD budget.

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Angeles Times, L.A. County prosecutors have not charged a law enforcement officer for an on-duty shooting in fifteen years (Mather, 2016).

Activist across Los Angeles have been fighting to increase the level of accountability and establish a strong civilian overview of the police. One such activist is

Mark Anthony, Director of Health and Wellness at Dignity and Power,13 who has been working together with Dignity and Power’s founder Patrisse Cullors, to establish a community oversight over the Sheriff’s Department and LAPD as well.

There is no real civilian oversight. We are talking about the largest Sheriff Department in the country with the largest jail population in the country and there is no civilian oversight. LAPD has to be one of the largest police departments with the highest budget in the country, and there is no real civilian oversight. Around 80% of the people in jail are black or brown. Blacks are 9% of the county’s population but 30% of the county jail population. This means that the existing police violence and violence in jails has had a particular impact on black and brown communities. The Sheriff’s Department also controls the largest mental health facility in the country, which is a jail. This is why we are fighting for civilian oversight. We demand the oversight board to have five features: subpoena power; that no current or former law enforcement member should be part of the commission; from the nine members, five should be selected by the county supervisors and four by community organizations; it should have independent legal counsel, it can’t be the county counsel, because it represents the Sheriff’s Department; and the commission should have control over the new Inspector General’s Office (Mark Anthony, Director of Health and Wellness at Dignity and Power, in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, May 2015).

Dignity and Power has recently had an important victory in their fight for the formation of a civilian oversight commission, when in November 2, 2016, the Los Angeles County

Board of Supervisions decided to create such commission; although it still lacks

13 In 2011, the ACLU launched a class action lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for abuses in the jail system. Influenced by the lawsuit report, Patrisse Cullors decided to create a performance art piece highlighting her brother’s story of being abused in the county jails. After a year presenting the piece across L.A. County, the Coalition to End Sheriff Violence project began, and from here Dignity and Power was created (Dignity and Power).

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subpoena and disciplinary powers (Elmahrek, 2016). A further problem faced by activists against police violence in Los Angeles has to do with the draconian laws which protect police officers’ privacy. California law prohibits the release of details about police misconduct, including instances where officers were found to have use excessive force.

Recently, a California Appeals Court temporarily blocked the Los Angeles Sheriff’s

Department from sending a list of deputies with histories of misconduct to prosecutors

(Dillon, 2017). Police accountability in Los Angeles suffers from many limitations and has not been able to curtail the level of police violence and abuse. Nonetheless, the amount of money paid in civil lawsuit settlements, the conviction of Lee Baca, and the fact that police officers involved in abuse of power have not been rewarded with promotions, as it still happens in São Paulo, are important examples of a system that, with all its flaws, has done more than what the system in São Paulo was able to achieve.

Notwithstanding, the lack of accountability only tells part of the story. The other part of the story has to do with São Paulo’s police institutional culture and their glorification of violence and police killings. We need to recall that São Paulo’s police organization and the decision to have a Military Police to patrol the streets was a product of the military dictatorship, as ROTA was. Furthermore, if we observe the symbology of São Paulo’s Military Police, we see a series of elements that glorify a complex history of repression and violence towards Afro-Brazilians, indigenous populations, and working class.14 Several Military Police officers with whom I talked

14 The Military Police coat of arms, for example, is formed by a Portuguese shield covered by eighteen stars indicating eighteen historical marks in the history of the corporation. In the middle of the shield, the flag of the State of São Paulo was represented, on the right flank a militia man from the time of the colony, and on the left flank a Bandeirante, the slave hunters that served the colonial powers in their fight

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expressed their pride in serving an institution “with such a glorious past,” as one of the officers interviewed said, “We have always been, we are, and we will always be the force of order and progress.” Another officer stated, “we saved the nation from communism, and now we are saving the nation from all this vagabundagem.”15 The symbols of the Military Police glorifying a past of violence and repression, combined with the tropes of war, the identification of periphery residents as bandidos, the praising and administrative promotion and reward of officers involved in extrajudicial killings as documented in Barcelos (2003) work, are signs of an institutional culture that not only accepts and condones these violent practices, but actually promotes them.

This acceptance and glorification of police killings is not only limited to the police, several sectors of Brazilian society support these killings too. In a 2016 survey conducted by Datafolha, fifty-seven percent of Brazilian agreed with the idea that a

“good bandit is a dead bandit.” São Paulo’s federal representative, Sergio Olimpio

Gomes, known as Major Olimpio, of the Solidaridade Party, former president of São

Paulo’s Military Police Officers association, has constantly supported extrajudicial

against indigenous populations and later against slaves. The sixteen stars represent iconic moments in the history of São Paulo’s police forces: the fight against the Southern rebels who attempted to secede from Brazil’s empire, in the Farroupilha rebellion; the colonization of Campos de Palma in the south and the decimation of the Coroados or Caingangues indigenous tribes; the struggle against the liberal rebellion of 1842, leaded by Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, the Barão de Caxias; their participation in the Paraguayan War of 1865-1870, when forces of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay attacked the Republic of Paraguay, killing around eighty percent of their male population, and almost destroying the country. The war in Canudos in the Northeast; the repression of workers and the labor movement in 1917, the fight against Carlos Prestes and his attempt against Brazil’s authoritarian regime in 1926, the combat against the Communist attempt in 1935, and finally the last star symbolizes the police force participation in the 1964 coup, when, according to the official Military Police history, the São Paulo police took arms against President João Goulart to save Brazil from the communist menace that was threatening the nation.

15 Vagabundagem can be translated into vagabondage and refers explicitly to the people killed by the police in São Paulo’s periphery.

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killings by the police, and recently encouraged the killing of prison inmates across Brazil

(Calgaro, 2016; Globo.com, 2017).16

As we saw in chapters 4 and 5, ascribing to certain individuals, communities, and spaces the label “bandido” leads to the justification of police violence against these subjects. Furthermore, the police are praised and even required to take these bandidos out of the streets. Even if we assume that the victims of police killings were involved in criminal activity, in a democratic state, ruled by established legal proceedings, there is an expectation that the presumption of innocence will be held, and it is the state, through pre-established and publicly known procedures, that has the burden of proving the contrary. State agents cannot execute individuals at will, just by arguing that they were bandidos.

This glorification of violence, the institutional and certain popular support for extrajudicial killings is an important factor, combined with the elements mentioned above, which explains the prevalence of police executions in São Paulo and why the numbers are much higher than in Los Angeles. In my research across South L.A. I did not find an officer nor resident who justified police killings in the way they did in São

Paulo. Police officers in Los Angeles would justify certain instances in which lethal force had been used, but there was neither a glorification of officers who used lethal force nor support for a tougher approach, at least not in public. As Alberto Retana, Community

Coalition President, stated:

16 There are a series of Facebook pages, including Major Olimpio’s page, which openly support extrajudicial killings. For instance, the pages “Apoio Policial,” “Politicamente Incorreta,” and “Polícia Online,” include videos and pictures of civilians killed or abused by the police and praise messages for officers accused of committing these killings (https://www.facebook.com/FanpageApoioPolicial/, https://www.facebook.com/Incorreta.Oficial/, https://www.facebook.com/PoliciaOnlineOficial/).

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The days when [LAPD Chief] Daryl Gates could openly express his racism are long gone. If a chief of police says that black people’s blood is worse than white people’s blood, or that black people get what they deserve, that chief will have to go. This does not mean that there is no racism in LAPD or that the police don’t act violently against blacks and browns, but I do think that the fact that they cannot openly express these feelings is an advancement (Alberto Retana, Community Coalition President, in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, May 2015).

The authoritarian past, weak mechanisms of accountability, the political acquiescence and even support for police killings, the existence of institutional practices which reward police officers who commit these crimes, and a culture, which, historically and in present times, glorified these actions, helps to explain why the number of killings in São Paulo is much higher than in Los Angeles. Yet, killings have taken place in both cities, and in both cities police officers were seldom convicted for these crimes. For the residents of these areas, this means that their lives are not worth the protection of the law or that the protections established by the law do not apply to second-class citizens.

Notwithstanding the importance of addressing this extreme form of violence, and despite the large numbers of people killed in São Paulo, in both cities, police killings are not the most common type of encounter between residents and the police. If we are to understand how these negative encounters affect the way residents develop a sense of second-class citizenship we need to broaden our spectrum and examine instances of police abuse as well a series of legal, benign actions, which end generating this disjunction between the written rights and the real ones.

Police Abuse

Defining police abuse has been an elusive enterprise. Jerome H. Skolnick and

James J. Fyfe have argued that police brutality and police abuse defined as “the lawless exercise of force employed in excess [resembles] hardcore pornography, we may not

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be able to define it, but we know when we see it” (1993, p. xvi). Instances of police abuse and brutality have been a recurrent issue across South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery.

Angel, a young Latino resident from Southeast L.A., has had a long and tragic experience with violence in the city, including police violence. Angel’s mother was killed by gang members from a rival neighborhood when Angel was eight year old. It did not take long for Angel to join one of the gangs in his area. When he was a teenager he was shot and became paralyzed from the waist down. He spent time in a juvenile detention facility and later in prison. Angel told me he was out of the gang and he is not living in the area where he grew up because of his former ties with the gang. However, having been involved with gangs, and having a felony record does not help much in his interactions with the police.

Those bastards keep pulling me over. And it’s always the same cops. They know my car, the moment they see it, they stop me. The routine is always the same. Hands up, get out of the car, handcuffs, search. Not long ago I was stopped by some cops I didn’t know. They run the plate and saw it was registered in my name. They pulled me over, and a cop comes from my side, handgun out, and orders me to get out. I told him I can’t, that I’m disabled, paralyzed from the waist down. He didn’t give a shit. The officer kept ordering me to get out. I tried to explain him that I can’t move my legs. His partner came, also with his gun out, opened my door and pulled me out of the car. They left me on the ground, handcuffed until they finished searching the car (Angel in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, May 2015).

I naively asked Angel if he could have refused to have his car searched. “Are you kidding me? They can do whatever they want. Nobody has rights here, even less if you have been in prison,” he replied. “Have you ever filed a complaint?” I insisted. Angel laughed, “I get beaten and shaken once in a while by the police without complaining, and you want me to file a complaint? Do you want me to get myself killed?”

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For Angel, as for many others across South L.A., the concept of citizenship and rights has no real meaning. As many authors have pointed out, once you have been convicted and you enter the category of felon, it is as if you have forfeited your rights

(Alexander, 2012; Cole, 1999; Ogletree Jr. & Sarat, 2009; Tonry, 2011). In the context of the penal state, embedded in the notion that crime is inevitable and rehabilitation is a utopia at best, or a grave risk at worst, “there is no such a thing as an ‘ex-offender’,” as

David Garland contends, “only offenders who have been caught before and may strike again” (Garland, 2002, p. 14). David Garland (2002) sustains that in the past, when the goal of the criminal justice system was to rehabilitate offenders, stigmatizing a former- felon was seen as counterproductive because it hindered the prospects of reintegration.

Nowadays, the stigma has become useful once more; the stigma works as a never- ending punishment for the crimes committed and it alerts the community to his danger.

Police abuse towards former felons is one of the many ways in which offenders are reminded that there is not such a thing as a “former” felon, and their lives are constantly exposed to this type of abuse.

However, not only former felons are victims of police abuse. Kimberly, an

African-American lawyer in her late forties, who studied at the University of Southern

California (USC), shared one of the many instances in which she suffered police brutality. It took place at USC a day her boyfriend, also a student, came to visit her.

I remember one day when my boyfriend came to visit me at the dorms. He had forgotten his student ID, and was stopped by campus police. Instead of going back and get his ID, he began arguing with the police. The argument began heating up, so they [campus police] called LAPD for backup. When LAPD came, they tried to arrest him and he resisted, so they beat the hell out of him. I was inside the dorms building walking out towards the parking lot when I heard screaming and saw the brawl. When I realized they were hitting my boyfriend, I went crazy. I ran to help him. I

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was out of control. I couldn’t believe my eyes. He had been thrown to the floor and they kept beating him. I started to shout and cry for help, which was ridiculous because those who were supposed to help were the ones beating him. I tried to pull the officers off him and I kept yelling and crying. The police arrested me for disturbing the peace. As a student at USC I was sent to the student ethic review board to explain my actions. They were beating my boyfriend for no reason and I had to explain why I was crying for help. And this is a big part of the problem, you are the victim but they transform you into the offender, they make you feel it is your fault that you have become a victim. They beat my boyfriend in the middle of the parking lot, but it was me who had to go and explain why I “overreacted” (Kimberly in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, May 2015).

The sense that you have no rights, that you are the problem, that you are responsible for the way the police mistreats you is a common feeling shared by residents of South

L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery. Being categorized as a “felon” or a “bandido” serves as a way of justifying the violence exercised against these individuals. Victims of police violence are rapidly transformed into responsible for the violence they suffer. Yet, it is not the individual actions which led to police mistreatment, but the way the racial and spatial identities of the victims are constructed. A black or brown person from the periphery always runs the risk of becoming a victim, and her victimization is always justified.

Being considered as a constant threat, it is residents’ responsibility not to become a victim. As we saw above, police officers and community organizations have emphasized the need for residents, especially young residents, to learn how to act when stopped by the police. These procedures can definitely save lives,17 and that is why community organizations have gone through great efforts to teach them. However,

17 There is no guarantee that following these procedures will save an individual from being abused by the police. As many of the testimonies in this work show, police abuse is rarely a reaction to an individual’s actions.

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police officers use this as a way of justifying their actions. As a police officer in South

L.A. stated in conversation with the author: “if young residents do what they’re told, if they follow our orders, then nothing will happen. The problem is that they don’t follow orders, and then we are forced to use force.” Similarly, police officers in São Paulo, justify certain violent behavior on their part by stating that it was the victim that led them to act in this way.

For the human rights organizations everything looks easy, but here in the periphery it’s not. These people [young residents of the periphery] are tough and violent, you never know. Many of them are gang members or are involved with the [drug] traffic. They don’t respect authority, they are very disrespectful. If they would act properly, then nothing would happen (São Paulo Military Police Officer in conversation with the author, São Paulo, September 2015).

Acting disrespectfully, oftentimes, means attempting to assert your rights. And trying to assert your rights may have negative consequences. Talking with a group of young residents of Jardim Ângela, in São Paulo, they attested that when and if they try to assert their rights police officers would get angrier and they may get beaten for this.

“That would make things worse,” Maicon said. “They don’t expect or like when youth from the periphery challenge them, it’s better to shut up and do what they tell you to do.”

“Yes, if you challenge them they’ll beat the hell out of you. Lucas, tell him,” said Junior.

“I tried that last week and look, they beat the shit out of me,” Lucas replied. Lucas rolled up his jeans and showed me the marks of the beating. He was beaten by police officers the week before, near the school where he goes, when he was walking back home in the evening. They beat him with their batons above the knee in the upper thigh and the marks were still there.

A similar experience was shared by young students in South L.A. Kimberly, as a lawyer and community activist, had been working with young residents of Southwest

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L.A. teaching them what their rights were, especially when it comes to interactions with the police. “It is extremely frustrating,” Kimberly said, “we talk about rights, we do role playing, I even invited a Senior Lead Officer to talk to them; but then they go back to the streets and the police don’t give a shit about their rights.” A young African-American student shared his experience with me.

Here [in the meeting with Kimberly] everything looks nice and clear. We know our rights, we know they [the police] cannot stop us without reason, and they cannot search us without our consent. But out there in the streets, it is a complete different world. I was driving my car with my girlfriend on my way back home and the police pulled me over. I knew I had done nothing wrong, but they still stopped me. When the officer came to my window, I asked him why he stopped me and he just ordered me to get out of the car. Another officer came from the other side and ordered my girl to do the same. I asked them again why they pulled me over, but nothing. When I said I was not getting out if they didn’t tell me why, the officer on my side put his hand on his gun. I was terrified, so I slowly open the door and got out of my car. They shoved me out of my car and began frisking me. The one behind me told me to shut up and do what I was told if not the night may end badly (African-American student and resident of South L.A. in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, June 2015).

For those, such as Kimberly, who work with youths in the community, being witness to police harassment and abuse is not an easy task. The emotional toll is high. In more than one occasion, these activists’ intervention can save a young kid from further harassment and abuse, which required community activists to be constantly vigilant to what the police does, and sometimes risking their own welfare.

Luana, Simone and Deca, are social workers, working at a Santos Mártires parish in the outskirts of Jardim Ângela, in São Paulo. They have witness and suffered police harassment many times. Many of the young kids who participate in the parish activities have gone through the juvenile detention system, have had trouble at school, or at their homes. Most of them live in the surrounding favelas, they experience poverty, discrimination, lack of opportunities, gang violence, but most of all, they suffer a lot of

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police violence. “Working with the police has been a huge challenge. They see us as part of the problem, as defending bandits,” Luana said. More than once the police have tried to enter the parish to search the place and look for crime suspects. “If we let them in and take some of the kids, these kids will get beaten and even tortured, so unless they come with a court order, we don’t let them in.” Simone told us about the time the police wrongly arrested two kids from the community and beat them.

A couple of months ago, two kids, eleven and twelve year old, were wrongly arrested by the police. They were walking back home, a truck had been assaulted and it was in the middle of the street. The police saw the two kids walking towards the truck, stopped them and took them in. They had no evidence and they couldn’t think the kids did it. The kids were here at the center at the time of the robbery so we knew they had nothing to do. Yet, the police needed to arrest someone, so they took the first black kids they saw. Their mother came desperately to us and asked us to do something. We immediately went to the police station and asked to see the kids. At first the police denied having arrested them, when we told them that we had witnesses who recorded the police arresting them, they acknowledged they had them, but denied us access because we had no legal authority. Only when Serginho called Father Jaime, who then called one of the Military Police commanders, they allowed us to see them. They had been handcuffed and beaten (Simone, social worker at Santos Mártires, Jardim Ângela, in conversation with the author, São Paulo, October 2015).

“How can we talk about citizenship and citizen’s rights, when the police, which should be protecting their rights are the ones violating them?” asked Deca, who had been working on issues of citizenship with the youth.

There is no doubt that police violence is the worst problem here. The other day Simone and I were walking to the bus-stop and two Military Police officers had caught a kid from here, they grabbed his backpack and threw him violently to the floor. They kicked him, took his backpack and began searching him. We run towards them and told them to leave him alone. They accused him of stealing a cellphone but they found nothing. Thank God, I was wearing my municipal worker tag, and when they saw that I worked for the municipality, they stopped and released him, not before telling him that he was lucky that we came, if not he would have ended up in the morro, which you know, that’s a death threat. How can I then talk about their rights? How can I teach them that they have the right not to be

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searched, beaten or killed by the police? (Deca, social worker at Santos Mártires, Jardim Ângela, in conversation with the author, São Paulo, October 2015).

Oftentimes the police would harass workers who intervene or attempt to intervene in their activities. This happened to Simone when she tried to help an elderly man who was being beaten by the police at a bus stop in Jardim Ângela. When the officers saw

Simone recording them they jumped at her. “Things got really scary at that moment,”

Simone recalls. They ordered her to give them her cellphone. When she refused, they ordered her to delete the video. One of the officers violently pushed Simone to the side of the patrol car took her cellphone and asked for the code. Simone refused and was shoved into the patrol car together with the old man, who had been fiercely beaten by the officers. They put both of them on the back part of the police van, as there are no seats there, both were lying on the metal floor. The man, already beaten and handcuffed, was left in a position that every time the car bumped he would hit the floor.

“Because I was free I could hold myself, but the man was hurt and looking bad,” Simone remembered. “I was terrified, I didn’t know where they were taking us.” They were taken to a police station. The old man was taken into the station. Meanwhile, the officer that had pushed Simone, helped her out of the car.

He ordered me to wait. We were at the station’s parking lot. After a couple of minutes, he came out again. “Listen well,” he told me, “I have a daughter your age, if you think I’ll have any problem making you disappear, you’re wrong. Never again pull one of those tricks with us,” he said.” I was crying. I didn’t say a word. He ordered me to get into the car and asked me where I lived. I had just moved back with my mom and I didn’t want her to get upset, so I told him to take me to my aunt’s house. When we arrived, he gave me back my cellphone, and told me to be careful. I thought of reporting them, but the next evening I saw them driving by my street and when the officer saw me, he just waved his hand and said, “good evening,” with a creepy smile. For weeks, they kept coming back and he would wave at me every time he saw me. At that point, I was too afraid to report them (Simone, social worker at Santos

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Mártires, Jardim Ângela, in conversation with the author, São Paulo, October 2015).

In South L.A. the experiences of those working with youths and addressing the issues of police violence can be as dangerous as in São Paulo. Kimberly remembered one night when she was coming out from the community center where she works with youths from the community. She had notices a couple of police officers surveilling the place, so she reported it to the Senior Lead Officer of the area, with whom she had a good relation. A couple of days later, Kimberly was pulled over by the two officers, they asked her to step out of the car, handcuffed her and sat her on the curve. They then made her wait there while they were supposedly checking her background. When they came back, they release her and told her to be careful with what she teaches the kids.

Kimberly was definitely lucky for being a lawyer and having the officers know she had contacted the Senior Lead Officer in the area. Other residents of South L.A. are not so fortunate. Two gang interventionist workers from Imperial Courts complained at the

Watts Gang Task Force meeting about the actions taken by LAPD’s Metro Unit the weekend before the meeting. According to their testimony, a Metro Unit was deployed in

Imperial Courts on Sunday evening, several residents were arrested, and property destroyed. “They had no excuse to come in that way, there was nothing going on,” one of the community leaders said. “We almost had a Baltimore situation last week,” said an

African-American woman, who also works as a gang interventionist, referring to the shooting of Freddie Gray by a police officer in Baltimore the previous year. “The police were coming hard at the playground, and the young ones were seeing their parents being handcuffed,” she complained. “You come and take everyone because you are looking for suspects, but not everyone is a criminal. When you do that, and you take

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everybody, all those on parole get fucked up!” she insisted. “People got hurt, young kids were beaten by the officers. The kids are fed up, they have no place to go, and when you come in with full force, arrest them or expel them from their park, they get angry, and shit happens,” said the other interventionist. “We then have to go back to the community and try to calm things down, but now they think we are selling them out to the police, that’s dangerous!” the woman said. A few days later while visiting Imperial

Courts I spoke with some of the residents there. The atmosphere was tense due to the

Metro Unit actions, and residents complained about the beatings that had taken place accusing the gang-interventionist of selling them out.

In some instances, the abuse is psychological as much as it is physical. Police action, especially inappropriate action against women, reinforces the position of almost absolute power the police have over the residents of these communities. Nicole, a young Latino resident from South L.A. remembered an encounter with the police a couple of years ago, when she was a teenager.

I remember we had just finished school, it was early in the afternoon, and on our way home some friends and I decided to hang out in one of the corners near the school. We were smoking cigarettes, which we were not supposed to do, but it’s not that we were doing something terrible, or we were doing any gang activity. Suddenly two cops came from nowhere and they already had their hands on their guns. We were just kids smoking, we were terrified. They ordered us against the wall and told us to put our hands on our heads. Two other cops joined them. Two of them stood behind us with their hands on their guns, while the other two started searching us. I didn’t know back then that male cops cannot search girls. We were three girls and they frisked the three of us. I felt violated, we were just kids doing stupid things, but we were not doing anything dangerous or criminal (Nicole in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, May 2015).

Similar negative experiences take place in São Paulo too. Samuel, a fifty year old resident of Jandira, in São Paulo, who owned a small kiosk in the area. He is the father

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of three, two daughters and a son. His youngest daughter had her cellphone stolen and

Samuel went with her to file a complaint at the local police station.

We arrived at the station and there weren’t a lot of people there. We were asked to sit down and wait. One of the officers in charge came in and starting looking at my daughter in an inappropriate manner. My daughter is sixteen year old and this officer was staring at her. He then called her to the counter. I stood up and went with her, but he ordered me to get back to my seat. He asked her about the cellphone, but then he started asking her all these personal questions. My daughter was embarrassed with all these questions. I stood up again and told the officer that we were here only to file a complaint about the cellphone. “Sit down, sir. I’ll call you when and if I need you,” the officer said. I felt terrible, ashamed that I couldn’t do anything. I knew that if I reacted or said something things could get worse, so I sat back down. At the end the officer wrote the complaint and we left. On our way out he said, “take care of your daughter, you have a nice piece there.” My daughter cried all the way back home, I held my tears, but I wanted to cry too. You feel like you are nothing (Samuel in conversation with the author, São Paulo, October 2015).

This type of behavior is not simply inappropriate, it is abusive. It is a way in which the police exert its power over those who are powerless, who are considered not simply as

“others,” but as nobodies, with no rights and no personhood.

As was the case with police killings, in those instances in which a complaint is filed against a police officer for misconduct, the officer is rarely sanctioned. According to data reported by the Office of Constitutional Policing and Policy from LAPD, in the period covering 2010 to 2013, 19,182 allegations of police misconduct were filed against LAPD police officers.18 From these allegations, only 1,189 were sustained, this is 6.2% of the total allegations. In this period, 1,369 officers were punished, the most

18 The allegations include biased policing, discrimination, ethnic remarks, false imprisonment, improper remark, sexual misconduct, shooting violation, unauthorized force, unbecoming conduct, and unlawful search. There generally are more complaints than allegations, in order for a complain to become an allegation some type of evidence needs to be submitted. Furthermore, different allegations can be made against one officer for a similar incident, hence the elevated number.

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common punishment being an official reprimand (42.8%). Thirty-two percent of the officers sanctioned received a harsh penalty for their misconduct.19 If we analyze the data in more detail, there is a certain tendency by LAPD to disregard a series of problematic allegations. During the period 2010 to 2013, there were, for instance, 1,602 allegations of police bias, but none of them were sustained. There were 3,060 allegations of false imprisonment, but only fifteen (0.5%) were sustained, 4.160 allegations of unauthorized force and only thirty-three of them sustained (0.8%), and there were 1,552 allegations of unlawful search and only four were sustained (0.3%).

When we analyze the data regarding LAPD’s Southern Bureau, which covers all

South L.A., we observe a significant dissonance between the data reported by LAPD and the testimonies in the street. In the period 2010 to 2013, there were no allegations of police bias, discrimination, ethnic remark, or false imprisonment against the Southern

Bureau. There were seven allegations for improper remark, one for a shooting violation, three for unauthorized force, and two for unlawful search. As we have seen from the testimonies, residents in this area tend not to file reports against police officers.

Furthermore, and even more problematic, is the fact that many residents have naturalized the violence and abuse; henceforth, they do not report it.

Regarding São Paulo, the Office of the Ombudsman for São Paulo’s police forces regularly receives complaints of police misconduct. If we observe the data reported by this office we see that between the years 1998 and 2015, 28,504 complaints were filed against police officers across the whole state of São Paulo. From all these complaints, 8,632 were examined, which amounted to 11,887 police officers

19 By harsh penalty I mean being demoted, discharged, removed, suspended, or terminated.

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being investigated.20 From all these officers, 5,495 were administratively punished, this amounts to 46.2% of the officers being reported for violating police procedures.

Considering the institutional challenges the Ombudsman’s office faces, the percentage of officers punished is quite high. However, we have no information on the type of punishment. According to the Ombudsman, Dr. Fernades Neves, the vast majority of officers were disciplined with a temporary leave without pay, and in very rare occasions an officer would be dismissed from the police force. If we look at the percentage of cases solved compared to the investigations opened, the numbers are very low. In the period 2010 to 2015, only 5.6% of the cases under investigation were concluded, and this includes cases which were dismissed for lack of evidence, or because the victim withdrew the complaint.

In her analysis on the use of torture by the police in São Paulo, Gorete Marques

(2009) shows that in the period 2000 to 2008, two-hundred and three officers were accused of torturing civilians; one-hundred and forty of them were absolved by the courts. In most cases, according to this author, those accused of using torture were absolved due to lack of evidence. In conversations with Gorete Marques, she indicated that it may take months for a person who is arrested to see a judge or a medical examiner; by that time signs of torture may have disappeared. The fact that most of victims are portrayed as bandidos, does not help, as their credibility is damaged.

Furthermore, a police officer, as a public official, enjoys the benefit of public faith,

20 It is important to remember that these are complaints filed by civilians against the police. The Office of the Ombudsman established a mechanism in which civilians can anonymously file complains through phone or through their website. In conversations with the Ombudsman, he declared that the number of complaints is much lower than what actually takes place in the streets of São Paulo.

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consequently, when it comes to the word of the police officer versus the victim’s statement, the word of the officer is stronger. There have been attempts to reform the system and force officers to bring the detainee to court in twenty-four hours, but

Marques does not believe this will change much. “The only way to change this is if the victim has economic resources to hire lawyers and investigators and get media coverage to put pressure on the judicial system,” Marques said, “If you are from the periphery, good luck with proving that you were tortured.

One of the many consequences produced by these regular negative experiences with police violence, from killings to abuse, and the lack of punishment regarding these violent interactions, is the naturalization of violence by residents of South L.A. and São

Paulo’s periphery. Residents of both places become accustomed to this abuse accepting it as part of their daily lives or even failing to identify these instances as police abuse.

The Naturalization of Violence. This naturalization process, which leads to accept police violence as a legitimate consequence for certain acts, is shown by Roger, a young Afro-Brazilian resident of Jardim Ângela, who suffered many instances of abuse at the hands of the police. I met Roger at a Santos Mártires youth center in

Jardim Ângela’s fundão.21 Roger was already eighteen year old when I met him, and was older than most of the participants in the center; as he said, “it’s better to be here than running around in the streets.” Roger has had several close encounters with the police, he even spent some time in a juvenile detention facility. I asked him about the last time he got arrested.

21 Fundão refers to the outskirts of Jardim Ângela.

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It was early in the evening; I was having fun, you know, doing some shit with one of my friends up in the morro,22 when suddenly os homens came from nowhere with their guns out, we were taken by surprise. My friend was able to run away, but for me it was too late. Two of the officers hold me tight, while a third one began slapping me. That’s the routine, man. They get you, they slap you, maybe a couple of kicks, before they even ask you something. A robbery had taken place a couple of blocks away and they needed to arrest someone. I told them I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but they kept slapping me, accusing me of stealing the cellphone. They then accused me of selling drugs. They kept beating me. At certain point, one of them told me he was going to give me a way out. He told me to run and if nothing happened they would let me go. If I’d run, they would have shot me. So I said no, I told them I was not going to do it. They shoved me into the patrol car and took me up the hill near the bushes. I knew that they execute people there, so I was terrified, but I tried to be calm. One of the officers gave me a gun. I said no, but he kept saying that I had to take the gun. They kept slapping and kicking me, hitting me with their batons too. I still refused to take the gun and told them to take me to the station. They shoved me back to the patrol car and took me to the station. They booked me for drug dealing and sent me to juvie.

I asked Roger what did he feel about the fact that they were about to shoot him. “Well,”

Roger answered, “I was doing shit.” In one sentence, Roger explained the complexities of living in these regions. He never saw the police actions as illegal, illegitimate, or even unfair. For him, “doing shit” was enough to justify the officers’ actions. At a very early age, residents of São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A., discover that they are at the mercy of police discretion and this becomes naturalized.

These violent experiences shared by many residents across São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A. resembles Fanon’s (2004 [1961]) description of the colonial situation. Fanon argues that the violence of colonialism is so intense and embedded in the colonial institutions and experiences that he describes it as being atmospheric, something you cannot escape, it constitutes the spaces in which you live and the

22 “Fazendo merda”, “doing some shit” in English, means that they were doing something illegal, which in this case it could be that they were selling marihuana or most probable smoking marihuana.

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experiences you go through in those spaces. For residents of these areas, violence, especially police violence, has become part of their daily life. And violence is not necessarily physical; being harassed, constantly stopped and frisked, is violence too.

Violence in general, and police violence in particular, have become so common that it is the natural state of many residents’ lives.

Stalin, a Latino bike shop owner in his late thirties, has lived in Watts since he was a child. His bike shop has become an iconic place in the area, and both Latino and

African-Americans spend time there not only repairing their bikes but sharing experiences with Stalin and other clients. I asked Stalin about the police and his experiences with them. “The police are a big part of the problem here,” he answered.

“They act like a gang too. Actually they are a much more dangerous gang. They have the legal power to beat you, even kill you,” he said. Stalin described the violence he saw in Watts, the many times he fought against gang members, but he never acknowledged having been a victim of police abuse. I decided to ask him directly about this. “The police was constantly stopping me and harassing me,” he said.

I know some of the officers and they don’t bother, but others do. And if Metro comes, they don’t care who you are, they’ll beat the hell out of you. A couple of weeks ago, I was coming home from out of town and a couple of officers stopped me in the streets. I haven’t seen them before, I don’t know if they are new officers of what. They pushed me to the wall and ordered me to spread out. I asked them why and they told me to shut up and if I didn’t collaborate they would call the migra. I told them I was US citizen, and in the army reserve! They didn’t give a shit. They frisked me, searched my bag and let me go. I felt like shit. But it is what it is.

“What do you mean ‘it is what it is?” I asked Stalin. “That’s part of our daily live,” he replied, “the police stopping and frisking us, it is what they do. I don’t like it, but I’ve accepted that this is part of the normal life in Watts.” Being stopped, frisked, questioned, threatened to be turned over to immigration authorities even when you are a US citizen,

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is part of the daily routine for many residents of South L.A. The constant pressure accumulates and in rare occasions it explodes, as it did in 1965 and 1992. In the meantime, residents get used to it and find mechanisms to cope with the constant violence, to the point of not realizing that these police actions are actually an abuse.

A similar situation takes place in São Paulo. Vitor, the Afro-Brazilian activist working in Osasco, is a good example of this naturalization of violence. He studied sociology and graduated several years ago from PUC-SP.23 He has been working for a long time with youth in Osasco, is an activist in the Afro-Brazilian movement, and participates in the cultural encounters of resistance that take place all along São Paulo’s periphery. In other words, he is very much conscious of the social and racial injustice which exists in the country and the city of São Paulo. During our first meeting, Vitor made it clear at the beginning that, while he witnessed and knows many stories about police violence, he was not a victim of police brutality. However, an hour into our first conversation, Vitor mentioned, as if it was a side note, that he was stopped and beaten by the police in Vila Madalena, one of the “noble neighborhoods” in the city. I asked

Vitor why when I asked him if he had ever been a victim of police abuse he said no.

“Well, I never thought about this as police violence. It is so normal to get stopped and slapped by the police, but yes, you could say that it is police abuse,” Vitor answered.

On the one hand, Vitor refuses to be seen as a “victim”. As a proud Afro-

Brazilian, he wants to be seen as strong and powerful; henceforth, he denies having being victim of police abuse. On the other hand, in Vitor’s eyes, this mistreatment at the

23 PUC-SP (Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo), São Paulo’s Catholic University, one of the many prestigious universities in the city.

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hands of the police is not seen as “police violence,” it has been naturalized as part of the day-to-day life of São Paulo’s periphery residents.

This naturalization of police violence and abuse implies a grave risk regarding the recognition and advancement of citizenship rights. If we follow T.H. Marshall’s logic, the tension between the intrinsic equality found in the core conception of citizenship and the inequality generated by the capitalist system is what led to the advancement of citizenship rights from civil, to political, to social. Those who were most affected by the unequal structure fought to achieve the equality established in the idea of citizenship.

Police violence and abuse is a product of unequal socio-economic and racial structures that treat certain individuals as more equal than others. If we accept police abuse as normal, as a natural occurrence of our daily lives as brown or black residents of South

L.A. or São Paulo’s periphery, then the possibility of resistance is diminished. Once we accept our status as second-class citizenship as legitimate, the possibilities of transforming the structures that allow for these violent experiences wane.

Yielding to police authority even when it is your right to refuse their request happens not only under violent and abusive circumstances. On the contrary, much of the construction of second-class citizenship takes place through legal and seemingly benign actions. In many instances, the police, acting within the legal framework, end up reproducing the residents’ perception that they have no rights. “Legal inequality”

Brodwyn Fischer (2008) argues, “has to be sought not in the letter of the law but instead in the practices of the law” (2008, p. 5). Therefore, as Charles Epp and his colleagues have done (Epp, Maynard-Moody, & Haider-Markel, 2014), we need to look at those

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instances in which the police, acting legally, shape the construction of a second-class citizenship among residents of South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery.

Police Investigatory Stops and the Reproduction of Second-Class Citizenship

Epp, Maynard-Moody, & Haider-Markel argue that “police stops convey powerful messages about citizenship and equality” (2014, p. 2). These seemingly benign experiences influence the way people perceive their civic status. In a police stop the person stopped is arrested for the duration of the stop, she is not free to leave, and is sometimes subjected to thorough interrogations. Most of these stops are conducted in a polite manner and are in every sense legal. However, for many nonwhite residents, as we will see, being constantly stopped, interrogated and searched, generates a sense of second-class citizenship.

Andre, an African-American male in his late forties, who has lived most of his life in Lemeirt Park, Southwest L.A., has been pulled over several times through the years.

In the last year I’ve been pulled over at least once a month, and there was only one time which I can say it was justified. I was tired and they may have thought I was drunk, but all the previous instances there was no justification. Every time they pull me over, they made me get out of my car, sit on the curve, they handcuffed me, and they searched the car. They were always polite, very respectful, but also showing authority. They always asked my permission to search. In theory I can refuse, but in practice you can’t. When you are handcuffed, sitting on the curve, and a police officer comes and asks your permission to search the car, you can’t say no. It is quite frightening, with all what’s going on, when you see a police officer with his hand on his gun approaching you. I always keep my hands on the wheel so they can see them, and I tell them beforehand every move I will make. Several times, a second police car would come as backup. Do they actually need four officers to stop me? (Andre in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, May 2015).

Most of the testimonies I recorded in Los Angeles speak of a similar pattern. Residents are pulled over by the police, officers ask for their documents, drivers are then politely and respectfully requested to get out of the car, they are sometimes handcuffed while

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they wait sitting on the curve and even patted-down, officers obtain consent for searching the car, they then search the car, and most of the time the driver is released with an apology for the time wasted. This pattern is what Charles Epp and colleagues

(2014) describe as an investigatory stop.24 These stops are legal, they are conducted in a polite and respectful manner, and, with the exception of the handcuffs, do not include any physical violence. Nonetheless, for those who go through these kind of stops, they generate a feeling of being under constant surveillance, a sense of fear and resentment, of having no rights in practice.

Randall is an African-American lawyer in his mid-thirties, he lives in Baldwin Hills and worked near downtown L.A. There was time in which he would get pulled over almost every morning on his way to work.

There was a month that almost every morning they would pull me over. They said they had information regarding drugs or gang activity, or whatever, and that’s why they would pull you over. The funny thing is that I never saw a white driver being stopped. They would ask for my documents, they then would ask me to get out of the car, most of the times they would ask me to sit in the curve and sometimes they would handcuff me. And then they would ask to search the car, and once they are done searching they would apologize and let me go (Randall in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, June 2015).

I asked Randall why did he allowed the police to search his car. “You can’t say no,” he replied, “I once said no, and they handcuffed me, sat me on the curve, and I waited for two hours while dogs sniffed the outside of the car. Only then they let me go,” Randall told me. “So it is very easy, you know,” Randall continued, “you say no, and you’ll have

24 Epp, Maynard-Moody, & Haider-Markel (2014) distinguish between regular traffic stops and what they call investigatory stops. In these stops, justified by minor violations or suspicions of violations, police officers pursue intrusive lines of questioning and searches. They are conducted in a very polite manner, which allows officers to get the consent of the person stopped to search and investigate them. According to these authors study, while most whites go through regular traffic stops, African-Americans and Latinos go through investigatory stops. For nonwhites, these investigatory stops are part of their daily life.

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to wait there for two hours. You say yes, it’ll take thirty minutes. I have nothing illegal in the car, so I say yes and thirty minutes later I’m on my way to work.”

In theory, Randall had the right to refuse the police request to search his car; however, this would have meant that he would have been under temporary “arrest” for a longer period of time. Henceforth, one could ask if he actually had the right to refuse the police request. From Randall’s perspective that right exists only in theory; police officers create the conditions that force you, in practice, to give consent to their requests, and this is done through a legal, non-violent, and seemingly benign way. The Fourth

Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right of any citizen to refuse such searches. According to the United States Supreme Court, consent has to be knowing, intelligent, and voluntary.25 At the same time, the Supreme Court has stressed that consent searches are an important investigatory tool and a balance between the need for searches and the rights established in the Fourth Amendment needs to be achieved

(Cole, 1999). Henceforth, the Court has accepted situations in which individuals have given consent even when the police creates an environment that makes it difficult for certain people to refuse (see Cole, 1999, pp. 31-32), as the aforementioned cases of

Andre and Randall show.

The situation in São Paulo is not much different. Angelica, an Afro-Brazilian anthropologist, resident of Capão Redondo, was born and raised in Grajau, a neighborhood south of Capão. Angelica worked many years at one of the high-schools in the area and with youth at the local cultural center. Angelica described the how young kids are being stopped, frisked, harassed and beaten by the police almost daily.

25 This was established by the Supreme Court in Johnson v. Zerbst, 304 U.S. 458, 464 (1938).

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There was a time when the police would stop and frisk kids right here around the corner. I would come back from work in the afternoon, not even late at night and you would see the kids being pushed to the police car, frisked and slapped. They are doing this in the middle of the day, at least before they would do it at night, now it seems they don’t even care to be seen. They are kids from the neighborhood, many of them were my students. What frustrates me is that I cannot do anything. If I open my mouth, they’ll stop and frisk me and then beat the kids. Many people talk about rights, and how we should assert our rights, what rights do these kids have? The moment the police stops you, you are at their mercy (Angelica in conversation with the author, São Paulo, September 2015).

Being constantly pulled over and identified as a suspect is part of the daily life of many of São Paulo’s periphery residents too. Carolina is a young student from Jardim Ângela, who told me how her mother was constantly being pulled over because she drove a nice car.

They [the police] cannot understand how a woman from the periphery, half black, drives such a nice car. And even when she shows them all the car papers, they make her get out of the car, search her and the car, and only then they let her go. They always ask her what is she doing driving such a nice car, it’s insulting. And you cannot complain or protest. If you say something then they take you into the patrol car, they may plant drugs in the car, and then they argue that they found drugs and you are in trouble. You have no other choice but to shut up and comply with what they say (Carolina in conversation with the author, São Paulo, October 2015).

As we saw, residents of South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery are constantly seen as suspects, as potential criminals that need to be under constant surveillance. In conversations with young residents in both cities, they shared their annoyance about being considered as suspects. “I don’t know what else to do,” a young kid from Osasco told me regarding how to act when he sees a police officer. “If I lower my head, they think I’m avoiding them, so they stop me. If I look them straight, they say I’m being disrespectful and they stop me. If I walk slowly they stop me, if I walk quickly they stop me; I don’t know what the fuck should I do!”

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Sometimes being parked may be considered a suspicious activity. Kimberly was talking with a client in her car when the police came, ordered the out of the car and searched them and the car.

We were parked and talking about some legal stuff, when a police car approached us. An officer came out and asked us to get out of the car. I told them I was a lawyer, and that the Black man sitting beside me was my client. Yet, he made us get out of the car and searched the car. At first I told them they couldn’t search the car. But my client insisted, and I let them. He was afraid the officer would invent something and he would get into trouble. He was already under some legal trouble. I don’t know why they approached, probably it was driving while black. And I wasn’t even driving, we were just talking. It was early in the evening, so I imagine that a Black woman and a Black man talking in a car looked suspicious. (Kimberly in conversation with the author, Los Angeles, May 2015).

Slowly, residents begin to internalize this feeling of being constantly seen as a suspect and get used to being constantly pulled over. Even when police officer act respectfully and those being stopped suffer no legal consequences, as Epp and his colleagues show (2014), during the stop, you are under temporary arrest, your rights are temporarily suspended, and the sense of being a second-class citizenship becomes ingrained.

As we see, it is not only in instances of extreme violence and abuse that residents of South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery feel they are second-class citizens that have no possibility of exercising their civic rights. This sense of being deprived of one’s rights also takes place through a series of legal and seemingly harmless encounters residents have with the police. Asked about what does it mean to be a citizen, young people in São Paulo and Los Angeles shared similar impressions. A young student in Capão Redondo responded, “it means to be part of this nation, to be a full member of the state and the city.” “It means to have rights and have these rights being protected,” said another young girl. “It means not to be killed or abuse by the

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police,” a third member of the group indicated. I asked them if they felt like citizens. “In theory, yes. I have my ID issued by the state, I can vote, I have rights on paper,” a young Afro-Brazilian answered, “but here in the streets of Capão it has no meaning. We are at the mercy of the police.”

James Holston (2008) argues that Brazilian citizenship included a series of paradoxes that led to a disconnection between the enactment of citizenship rights and the consolidation of inequality through these same rights. For instance, at the beginning of the republic, the Brazilian state denied education as a right, but then demanded literacy tests to exercise political rights. While expanding citizens’ rights, they created different classes of citizenship. In the United States, once the exclusion from legal citizenship was brought down by the Civil Rights movement, similar exclusionary policies led de facto to the formation of a different class of citizenship. This is why, in

South L.A., similar voices as those in São Paulo can be heard. “The only rights I have,” a young resident of South L.A. told me, “is the right to be stopped by the police whenever they want, the right to be ordered out of the car, to be frisked, to have my car being searched, and to thank them for not beating me.”

Being constantly pulled over and investigated by the police, even if it is done in a legal and polite manner, produces a sense of frustration and even despair in many of those who constantly go through these processes. While many of the interviewees acknowledge their status as citizens who are entitled to civic rights, they express serious doubts about the real meaning of this status. They begin to question their condition as citizens and their capacity to exercise their rights, assuming a second-class citizenship identity, and accepting the violation of rights as a natural outcome of their

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second-class citizens’ condition. It is not only that the state is incapable of protecting citizens’ rights against lawless violence, as Brodwyn Fischer (2008) states regarding

Brazil, but it is the state that through lawless and legal actions weakens and even violates these rights.

Conclusion: Can we call these places “democracies”?

In the previous chapter, I concluded by arguing that it is in peripheries where the penal state adopts its most repressive forms. I have shown throughout this chapter, how, from extreme instances of police violence to more regular, lawful, and seemingly benign interactions between residents and the police, the second-class citizenship status of periphery residents is reproduced. It is because of the limits to the exercise of political rights, or the lack of free and fair elections, that I argue that these places should be considered as authoritarian enclaves. They are authoritarian enclaves, because state agents repeatedly violate residents’ rights, almost with impunity. In the context of the penal state, in which the police have become the almost exclusive state agency in these areas, these negative experiences residents have with the police reflect a complex relation with the state, who has not necessarily abandoned them, but has transformed its role into a highly repressive one.

As it has been mentioned, the existence of authoritarian enclaves inside democratic regimes is far from unusual (Gibson, 2012). The advancement of the penal state and the expansion of police role in low-income communities of color, has led to a systematic violation of rights leading to the formation of a mass of second-class citizens dispossessed from material and legal recognition.

The violent and authoritarian practices that take place in South L.A. and São

Paulo’s periphery are not the product of a few rotten apples, an exceptional situation, or

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a bump in the road to the promise land of liberal-democracy’s equality. They do not represent a disjunction between these nations’ ideals and the action of certain individuals and groups. The United States was founded on the premise that certain people were neither humans nor equals and were denied legal and later de facto citizenship (Glaude Jr., 2016; Taylor, 2016); and while in Brazil there was no legal exclusion, the de facto denial of citizenship rights existed. This subordinate position is reproduced in the negative and violent experiences residents of South L.A. and São

Paulo’s periphery have with the police.

Saskia Sassen (2002), as T.H. Marshall did, posits that the contrasts between the subordinated position in which these groups are situated and their legal status as full citizenships fuels the struggles that are forcing changes in the institution of citizenship. However, if second-class citizenship becomes naturalized, as illustrated in some of the instances of police violence, then the struggle for the translation of legal rights to substantive ones may be hindered. Nonetheless, Sassen (2002) reminds us that the progression in the evolution of citizenship rights is not linear. While some may have accepted violence and their second-class citizenship status, others do not. The emergence of new movements against police brutality, such as Black Lives Matter or the periphery’s cultural movement in São Paulo, may well lead to changes.

Furthermore, as Holston (2008) shows, an “insurgent citizenship” may develop as a consequence of the exclusion for formal citizenship. Periphery residents, faced with the unsurmountable challenge of surviving in a context of oppression and deprivation, find ways to fight local government, city elites, and land swindlers.

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On the other hand, we could accept, as Jeffrey Edward Green (2016) suggests, that second-class citizenship is an unavoidable consequence of liberal democracy.

Despite the promise of free and equal citizenship, there is a shadow of unfairness in liberal democracy, a shadow which cannot be overcome. As Green states, “no ordinary citizen in a liberal democracy… can be expected to feel fully free and equal” (2016, p.

3). Ordinary citizens, Green indicates, need to realize that they will never hold high office or positions of political power, and the lack of economic resources diminishes their political voice. Consequently, Green indicates, the experience of democracy for ordinary citizens is one of indignation.26 Green is correct in highlighting the intrinsic inequality that exists in liberalism and capitalism, despite liberalism’s claim that all men are equal. However, beyond the fact that in certain countries some ordinary citizens were able to hold high office and positions of political power, Green’s assertion that the experience of ordinary citizens is one of frustration and indignation, fails to recognize the violence by which liberal democracy (and capitalism) maintains itself.

As we have seen, the experiences residents of South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery go through when encountering police officers, is generally violent, both physically and emotionally. The construction of a second-class citizenship status is not produced only by the fact that ordinary citizens have little or no access to political power. The construction of this second-class status is produced through the violence that is exercised in the maintenance of an unequal socio-economic and racial structure.

26 Green (2016) advocates for three measures ordinary citizens should take: 1. The envy against the privileged should lead ordinary citizens to place unique burdens against the privileged. 2. Ordinary citizens should engage in what he calls “principled vulgarity”, they should abandon liberal obligations to treat others as free and equal, to make public arguments according to deliberative standards, and to promote civic friendship. 3. Ordinary citizens should protect their happiness by adopting Epicurean insights about life limits and develop a critical indifference towards public life.

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These places should be conceptualized as authoritarian enclaves, not simply because ordinary citizens cannot expect to be free and equal from a political perspective. They are authoritarian enclaves because residents of these areas, while they may have rights on paper, they have limited rights in substance.

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CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION

“I’ve been having this nightmare for a long time,” Kimberly told me. “I see myself as a child in school surrounded by all my friends, but as I move forward and I get older, my male friends begin to disappear,” she recalled. “This is our reality here in South L.A.

A world in which many of our friends are gone. They are either in prison or are victims of violence, especially police violence.” For Kimberly, as many other residents of South

L.A. or São Paulo’s periphery, living in these areas means living under the shadow of the penal state, in a context of violence, constant surveillance, abuse and harassment.

Victor Rios (2011) suggests we need to explore both the individual experience and society if we wish to understand both. Throughout this work I have explored the experience of individual residents of São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A. in order to understand the different ways their negative encounters with the police affect their lives.

At the same time, I have situated these individual experiences in the context of the development of the penal state and the expansion of police presence and powers in these communities. The social, economic, and political changes that took place in São

Paulo and Los Angeles in the last decades of the twentieth century, led to a reconfiguration of the state in which the welfare state receded and a punitive state expanded taking its place, putting the police at the center stage. The individual stories have allowed us to understand the centrality of the police in constructing race, defining periphery, and reproducing a sense of second-class citizenship among periphery residents.

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Constructing Race, Space, and Second-Class Citizenship Status

Three words were regularly repeated by my interlocutors in São Paulo when I asked them who they were: preto, pobre, periférico. These three words, meaning black, poor and from the periphery, are said with pride and pain. They are associated with the pain of living in poverty, having few opportunities, suffering segregation and discrimination, and above all, having to cope with the ordeals of police violence, abuse and harassment. They are also associated with the pride of resisting all this. While there is no exact equivalent expression in South L.A., the essence of being preto, pobre, periférico, was shared by most of my interviewees in South L.A. too. Being from South

L.A., for many of them, means being marginalized to the periphery, having to face poverty, and also police violence, abuse and harassment.

Growing up in a middle-class neighborhood in Uruguay, I rarely recall ever being stopped by the police. As a child during the military dictatorship, I remember being asked for my documents by police officers, and seeing their menacing presence throughout the city, but they were never a central part of my life. As I grew up, and democracy advanced in Uruguay, the place occupied by the police became even less important. However, for those living in São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A., the police are a central part of their lives, affecting the ways in which they define themselves, the way in which they experience their living space, and how they reinforce their feeling of being a second-class citizen.

The advancement of the penal state in the last decades of the twentieth century has given the police a central role in the administration of social life in peripheries. While the police always played an important role in the lives of periphery residents, it was not the main state agency present, nor the main institution in the production of social order.

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The restructuring of the state away from welfare, the elimination of stable employment, the policies leading to greater urban decay, led residents to perceive the police as the main, or only, institution working in the area. The new approach to crime control, which focuses on exclusion, incapacitation, and repression, rather than rehabilitation and social welfare, has become the rationale for dealing with the social problems faced by these peripheries. Mass incarceration of low-income people of color has been one of the main consequences of this process. A less studied phenomenon has been the central role the police have played in the administration of social life in these areas, and how this administration has influenced the lives of periphery residents. In other words, how do the regular negative experiences residents have with the police give content to the expression “preto, pobre, periférico.”

Constructing “Preto”

Regular negative, oftentimes violent, encounters with the police, have led residents of São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A. to identify themselves as black. The interplay of socio-historical context, space, violence, and police intervention lead residents of these areas to distinguish themselves racially from those who do not experience similar abusive encounters with the police.

Racial identity and racial prejudice was historically constructed, according to

Oracy Nogueira (2006 [1954]), based on an individual’s mark or color, or based on origin. The former was mainly developed in Brazil, while the latter refers to the United

States’ system of racial categorization. Ben Penglase (2014) adds a third category, the prejudice of crime or criminal spaces. The way the police associate certain spaces and individuals with crime is connected to the way in which race is constructed. The constant police abuse and harassment faced by periphery residents, constructs their

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identity as black, reinforcing the historical association of blackness with criminality.

While the police may be influenced by prejudice of mark or color, for residents of São

Paulo’s periphery or South L.A. it is the experiences they have with the police which oftentimes defines their blackness. “It doesn’t matter how light-skin I am, or the amount of black blood I have in my veins, the moment the police think I’m black, I’m black,”

Marcelo, a resident of Capão Redondo, told me. In other words, as they say in Brazil, “if you want to know who’s black, ask the police.” Police actions reinforce the old prejudice that connected blackness and criminality. Blackness continues to be seen as a sign of deviance, as a threat to society, which requires constant control, surveillance, and repression.

Furthermore, police actions not only affect the way individuals define their racial identity, it also influences the way in which community is defined. Police actions determine who is in and who is out of the community, who is a respectable member of the community and who is a threat to it. By depicting residents, in particular young residents, as bandidos or “problem people,” the police criminalize them, excluding them from the community, and enforcing a social order that perpetuates the segregation of these regions. With the expansion of community-policing initiatives, in particular across

South L.A., a series of institutional frameworks have been created to formalize the relations between the community and the police, and bring these sides closer to each other. As we have seen, both at CPAB meetings in South L.A. or at the CONSEG meetings in São Paulo, the police construct, together with a small sector of the community, what are the norms and accepted behavior, defining who is a respected member of the community and who should be put under surveillance or even expelled.

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Street vendors, young residents, homeless people, unemployed, and gang members, they all need to be controlled and dealt with by the police. Even when the community attempts to develop a charity program or activities for the youth, they are all in coordination with the police, which usually have the final word regarding these initiatives.

Finally, police actions have helped to fuel intra-communal conflicts. In particular, the police have played an important role in deepening the cleavages between African-

Americans and Latinos across South L.A. These two communities have lived together in the city for a long time, sometimes fighting each other, sometimes fighting together. The structure of the labor market has posited these communities against each other, generally competing for employment at the lower side of the job market. This has not changed, on the contrary, the socio-economic transformations of the last decades of the twentieth century have in many ways increased this competition, as there are less and less well-paid jobs, and the competition for unskilled, low-paid jobs, especially in the service sector, has increased. But it is also police actions which have influenced the conflict. For example, by excluding Latinos from the Watts Gang Task Force or other community-police meetings, Latinos feel unrepresented and unwelcomed, channeling their frustrations against African-Americans. On the other hand, in other areas of South

L.A., as Aaron Roussell (2015) demonstrated, the police praise Latinos for their work ethic while African-Americans are described as the problem needing more discipline and policing. While in São Paulo, the cleavages respond less to ethnic divides, the pejorative use of the terms “nordestino” or “bahiano” to refer to those who live in the

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favelas, who work in the informal market, or are “bandidos”, as Caldeira (2000) described, also generates divisions inside the community.

The fact that these negative and violent experiences periphery residents have with the police define their racial identity, does not mean that periphery residents are passive objects in the process. Affirming their blackness has become a sign of pride for many of my interviewees. The statement “because I’m black,” was not only used to explain why the police acted against them in the way they did, but also to indicate a sense of belonging to a class of people who, despite everything, keeps fighting. For my interlocutors, being “preto” means to resist as much as it means to be a victim. From the development of survival tactics, artistic expressions, community organizing, political activism, protests and urban uprisings, periphery residents have found ways to respond to social segregation and police violence asserting their blackness in more positive ways.

Constructing Periphery and “Periférico”

I have argued that rather than defining periphery exclusively as a geographic term, either in relation to an urban core (Park, Burgess, & McKenzie, 1967) or by denying its existence because there is no defined urban core (Dear & Danhmann,

2011), we should conceptualize periphery in relation to the socio-economic structure, the racial structure, and the democratic state and its legal system. Periphery is defined by material conditions: the lack of proper housing, jobs, health and social services; the prevalence of illegality and informality; by racial features: as a space where the lower echelons of the racial structure live; and in particular by policing practices: killings, police abuse, constant surveillance and control. It is in peripheries where the penal state adopts its most repressive features. From the extreme cases of police killings to regular,

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lawful, and seemingly benign police stops, periphery residents have their rights systematically violated. Peripheries live almost a perpetual state of exception, where police killings become the norm, and killing spots become part of the neighborhood landscape. Young residents in particular, are regularly harassed, beaten, and abused by the police. The road-blocks and checkpoints, the use of open and hidden surveillance cameras, the drug raids, and the display of military-style operations by special police units, are many of the ways the police attempt to assert control and define their spatial authority. Consequently, these areas should be considered as authoritarian enclaves, even when the institutions of political democracy exist. These institutions may allow for free and fair elections to take place, but when these do not translate into a protection of basic rights, then the quality of democracy is limited.

Several authors have argued that the transitions from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economy and the new era of high-technology and extended communication networks, have blurred the urban territorial boundaries, transforming the city into a constant flow

(Soja, 2000; Telles, 2011). Yet, place matters, it influences your access to jobs, service, consumer’s options, culture, and education; it very much determines your life chances

(Harvey, 2005b; Massey & Denton, 1993). Furthermore, as Steve Herbert (1997) demonstrates, the control of space is at the heart of policing. Police departments are bureaucratically structured around specific territories and it is their goal to assert control over these territories and its people. In certain ways, police departments contradict the postmetropolis notion that cities are in a constant flow and that territorial limits do not matter anymore. And the police take great efforts in controlling and defining territory.

They do so by regularly establishing roadblocks at the entrance of peripheries, by

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deploying their special tactical units in these areas, and by exercising a series of illegal and extrajudicial actions. Territorial control includes not only the physical space, but controlling its residents too. Through their actions inside and outside peripheries, the police “teach” periphery residents what their place in society is. When caught out of their

“natural” space, many of my interviewees were harassed and abused by the police for being “out of space.” In this way, the police define periphery and its residents as a threat to society that needs to be surveilled and controlled.

Reinforcing the Second-Class Citizenship Status

Finally, I have described through the experiences of periphery residents how the range of negative encounters with the police reinforce residents’ second-class citizenship status. As mentioned above, it is in peripheries that the penal state adopts its most repressive features. These range from police killings, abuse, harassment, surveillance, to regular and lawful investigatory stops. The right not to be killed, not to be arbitrarily stopped and frisked, the right not to be harassed and under constant surveillance have little meaning across São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A. Police killings and abuse are rarely punished, despite the creation of new mechanisms of accountability and police oversight. In the case of São Paulo, police officers who commit these crimes, not only are seldom punished, but oftentimes receive commendations from their superiors or are even promoted. It is common to see these officers being praised publicly for killing bandidos, reinforcing this criminal behavior. In some cases, police violence has become so common that residents begin to naturalize police abuse.

As the case of Vitor in São Paulo or Stalin in Los Angeles demonstrate, police abuse has become part of what means to be poor, black or brown, and from the periphery, that they do not see their own victimization as such.

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The feeling of impotence shared by residents of both regions when police violate their rights, when a father suffers in silence while a police officer acts improperly towards his daughter, as was the case of Samuel in São Paulo, when a teenager is frisked by male officers but is afraid to report them because they patrol her neighborhood and she believes they may retaliate, as was the case of Nicole in Los

Angeles, generate a feeling that they have rights only on paper. When young residents in Los Angeles and São Paulo are afraid to assert their rights when they are stopped by police officers because the officers may react angrily making matters worse. When lawful and nonviolent actions, such as regular stops, are done in such a way that create a situation which allow officers to search individuals and their cars and investigate them.

When refusing police officers request for search may have detrimental effects, such as being under temporary arrest for hours until the officers decide, using their discretionary power, to release the individual and let him go with his day. All these reinforce residents’ second-class citizenship status.

Under these circumstances, I argue that these areas should be seen as authoritarian enclaves. As Edward L. Gibson (2012) has shown, the existence of authoritarian enclaves in a democratic landscape is far from unusual. These authoritarian jurisdictions flourish not only in less developed nations of the so-called

Third World, but also in highly institutionalized nations; and these territories are often tolerated by the national government. They are not simply an exception, a roadblock in the expansion of democracy by the national government; these enclaves are a product of strategies of territorial control and governance by local and national elites (Gibson,

2012). The advancement of the penal state has created these authoritarian enclaves,

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which include a systematic violation of rights leading to the formation of a mass of second-class citizens dispossessed from material and legal recognition. The construction of this second-class citizenship status is not produced by the lack of access to political power ordinary citizens have, as Jeffrey Edward Green (2016) suggests. This second-class citizenship status is produced through the violence exercised by the penal state. These places cannot be called democracies, not simply because ordinary citizens cannot expect to be free and equal from a political perspective. They are authoritarian enclaves because residents of these areas, while they may have rights in paper, have limited rights in substance.

The Penal State and the Expansion of Police Power

In order to understand these individual stories, we need to situate them in the socio-historical context in which they take place. As it has been shown, in the last decades of the twentieth century a series of socio-economic, political, and cultural transformations led to the development of the penal state in the United States and later in Brazil. A reconfiguration of the state took place in which welfare programs gave place to a punitive approach to social problems. Many of the social problems created by the neoliberal phase of capitalism were seen as the aggregate of individual failures to adapt to the new logics of the market. Furthermore, the expansion of the penal state was directed by a political conservative turn, which considered the problems suffered by low- income communities of color as the consequence of the erosion of traditional family values, the product of deviant behavior, in particular drug consumption, and the irresponsibility and inability of these individuals to adapt to the new economic situation.

As a result of their own individual and collective failure, these communities do not deserve welfare programs. Welfare programs, as the conservative discourse goes, will

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just reinforce the individual irresponsibility, will reward failure, and will perpetuate their dependency. What is needed is greater control, surveillance and punishment. In this new penal mode, what is needed is to reduce the opportunities for these individuals to commit crimes, to take advantage of the system, as Ronald Reagan constantly reminded us with his “welfare queen” stories, or Bill Clinton in his attempt to reform welfare as we knew it, or Barack Obama scolding African-American males for not taking responsibility.1

The rise of the penal state responds not so much to an increase in crime, but to the dislocations provoked by the retrenchment of the welfare state, the imposition of precarious wage labor as the new norm of citizenship for those trapped at the bottom of the class structure, who are disproportionately nonwhite. The political responses given to these problems, as well as the reaction to the challenges the civil rights movement poses to the racial structure, favored the rise of the punitive approach to social and racial problems. The slow growth of law enforcement institutions throughout the Unites

States’ history, converged with political interests during the critical years of the late

1960s and 1970s, leading to the development of the penal state.

The expansion of this penal state led to a reformulation of the role of policing in modern societies. The police became a central agency in producing and enforcing control, it became once again responsible for administering social life and social order.

Broken-windows and zero-tolerance theories became dominant, and were incorporated into the deployment of community policing across the United States. Police functions

1 See President Reagan’s 1996 radio speech on welfare, President Clinton’s 1996 remarks on welfare legislation, and President Obama’s 2008 speech at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago.

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have gone well beyond crime control and repression. The police have expanded their presence and powers in low-income communities. They now not only perform a repressive function; the police have replaced many of the responsibilities that welfare workers used to have. The police have become social workers, mental health providers, educators, and community organizers. They have performed these duties through a law and order approach, which frames these social ills as potential criminal violations rather than social problems which need to be addressed through social and economic policies.

The penal state with its approach to social problems, including crime control, have been imported into Latin America. The development of neoliberal policies during the 1990s; the increase in urban violence and crime; and the export of the war on drugs, are the main reasons behind this import. Political leaders, local businessmen, and state officials in Latin America and in the United States have been key figures in this process.

The implementation of zero-tolerance policies has been celebrated by local politicians in

Mexico, Argentina and Brazil; and Rudy Giuliani and William Bratton, two prominent figures in the promotion of zero-tolerance policies have been invited to implement their policies across the region.

São Paulo and Los Angeles are two examples of global cities deeply affected by the expansion of the penal state and the development of new policing strategies guided by the rationale of the penal state. In the second half of the twentieth century, both cities went through a process of socio-economic changes, including the passage from a

Fordist to a post-Fordist economy. Relatively stable and well-paid unionized, manufacturing jobs were replaced by unskilled, low-wage, nonunionized jobs, in particular in the service sector. Furthermore, welfare programs were systematically

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eliminated, forcing individuals to rely more and more in the private market for their welfare, pushing many poor individuals to enter the informal and illegal economy. The appearance of new drugs, such as crack cocaine, together with a growth in crime and the development of gangs, created the conditions for the expansion of the penal state.

Low-income communities of color in these two cities suffered from the dual pressure of economic dislocation and the existence of a rigid and hierarchical racial structure, which considered black and brown people as disposable. Echoing an old Brazilian saying attributed to Brazilian President Washington Luís (1926-1930), social (and racial) problems became once again a case for the police to solve.

By understanding the way in which the penal state developed and how it expanded police powers, as well as observing how this process took place in Los

Angeles and São Paulo, I have situated the individual stories in a context that allow us to comprehend why the police have taken such an important role in their lives, why it influence the way in which residents define their racial identity, sense of space, and second-class citizenship status, and why these negative experiences, while not identical, are shared by low-income, nonwhite residents of both cities.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Throughout this work I attempted to give voice to those who are most affected by the growth of the penal state. As mentioned before, the perspective of the residents of the communities most affected by the expansion of the penal state and police powers has been missing from much of the literature on policing and the carceral state. The penal state has changed the ways in which criminal justice operates and has expanded its rationale of punishment and surveillance to areas beyond criminal justice, such as schools, employment, and social services. In order to understand how the expansion of

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the penal state continues to affect individuals we need to continue to open spaces for their stories to be told as some authors have done (Alves, 2014; Alves & Silva, 2017;

Brunson & Miller, 2006; Gascón & Roussell, 2016; Gonzalez Van Cleve, 2016; Rios,

2011), and we need to do so by situating these stories in the broader socio-historical contexts in which they take place.

Furthermore, we need to keep moving beyond the United States. The penal state, with its policies, criminal justice approaches, and policing recipes, grew out from the United States, but it did not stop there. It has been exported to different parts of the globe and adopted as a political response to the socio-economic changes that have taken place across different areas. The adoption and application of the penal state approach has been filtered through the political and criminal justice institutions of each particular place, and this filtering matters. Understanding the ways in which the penal state developed in different contexts, and more importantly identifying places in which this export and expansion was stopped, could be significant if we are to comprehend better the mechanisms that allow the penal state to expand and those who do not.

Moreover, this comparative work could allow us to identify situations in which the penal state has taken more violent features and those where it has not.

Very few scholars have analyzed the ways in which the expansion of the penal state has diminished the quality of our democracies (Alexander, 2012; Gottschalk, 2014;

Lerman & Weaver, 2014). We need to move beyond the study of democracy exclusively as a political regime, and ask to what extent rights are being protected or violated inside political democracies. Scholars have been pushing us to examine the ways in which national democracies can cohabitate with subnational authoritarian enclaves (Benton,

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2012; Gibson, 2012; Giraudy, 2010; Mickey, 2015; O'Donnell, 1993, 1999), yet, they focus primarily in the extent to which free and fair elections take place, or the extent to which the rule of law is applied across the national terriotory. We need to move beyond this and analyze how rights are protected or violated by state agents. Throughout this work I have demonstrated how police violence and also legal nonviolent actions can contribute to the reproduction of second-class citizenship. When state agents systematically violate the rights of residents of low-income communities, then we are looking at an authoritarian enclave, which territorially speaking may not represent a whole subnational unit, but rather a municipal area. In other words, following the authoritarian enclave literature, we need to examine smaller units too.

Finally, by learning from those individuals who have suffered most from this punitive approach, we can learn the different ways in which they have coped with police brutality and abuse, how it affects their daily lives, the repertoires of survival and resistance that have been developed as a response to the penal state. We need to acknowledge the agency these individuals have. As mentioned above, the concept of preto, pobre, periférico, is not simply imposed upon residents of São Paulo’s periphery and South L.A. Residents of these areas, reconstruct this concept and have transformed it into something that gives them pride, that identifies them with a broader community of struggle and resistance. The experiences of being preto, pobre, periférico, have been transmitted from generation to generation, creating a type of imagined community that crosses time and space. Examining the repertoires of resistance to the penal state are important if we are committed to bringing this punitive approach to an end.

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Dismantling the Penal State

By examining the development of the penal state and the expansion of police powers, as well as the negative experience residents of São Paulo’s periphery and

South L.A. have with the police, and how these negative experiences affect their lives, I have described the consequences of the expansion of the penal state for the lives of residents of these communities, and also contributed to the efforts of bringing the penal state down. It is not enough to interpret the world in different ways, we need to change it.

Dismantling institutions is never an easy task. Institutions create their own constituencies, and the feedbacks they generate oftentimes benefit different political and social groups from those who were behind the formation of these institutions. This is not different with the penal state. We need to examine who is benefitting from the penal state if we are to find ways to bring it down. And those who are benefitting are not always the general suspects, such as conservative politicians, business corporations benefitting from the prison construction boom, prison labor, or prison maintenance. John

Eason (2017) for instance, has shown how rural counties fight to bring federal prisons into their areas as a way of improving their economy. Some conservative politicians would be willing to join the forces of reform by arguing against the fiscal burden generated by the prison complex. One such politician calling to reduce incarceration has been Newt Gingrich in 2011, claiming that prisons are a budgetary burden (Dagan &

Teles, 2012). Yet, as Marie Gottschalk (2016) explains, prison costs are a relatively small part of state expenditures, and the costs of completely closing prisons and laying off correctional officers may have a huge political cost that few politicians will be willing to pay.

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Similarly, while there may be voices inside police departments who may not be happy with the expansion of their role in low-income communities, such as Capt.

Rodriguez from Newton, in South L.A. who complained to me about the fact that they need to deal with most of the social problems affecting the community, and asked the community “to stop thinking that we are the panacea for all their problems;” police departments have benefited from, at least from a budget perspective, the development of the penal state. The demand by community organizations in South L.A. to reduce 1% of LAPD’s budget and give it to social organizations has been an uphill and unsuccessful battle; significantly cutting police departments’ budgets will require risky political maneuvers and a lot of popular pressure.

In recent years, both in the United States and in Brazil, the calls for criminal justice and police reform have been increasing. While many of these reforms would be important steps towards reducing the effects of the penal state, they may not necessarily bring the penal state down. For instance, demands have been made for police departments across the United States to become more diverse and more representative of the communities they police. However, in Brazil, many of the police officers who patrol low-income communities look like those who are being policed, and come from similar communities; this has not reduced police violence. Programs to diversify the police force may be another way of increasing police budgets, as the request for training police officers on how to deal with social and health problems, and develop greater sensitivity towards the community may be costly. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that these programs will have a positive effect, as Alex Vitale (2017) has demonstrated. The call in Brazil to unify the Civil Police with the Military Police is no

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guarantee that the police will become less militarized; there is no military police in the

United States, yet, the level of militarization of police departments in the United States is high. The creation of more civic oriented police forces in Brazil, such as the Municipal

Guard, has created a new police institution producing the same ills that the other two police forces produce. This does not mean that reforms are not important. On the contrary, in the same way as the penal state was produced by the incremental building of law enforcement institutions, the incremental break down of some of the penal state features could lead to its dismantling. And for the millions who are suffering from the effects of the penal state, reforms are important. The move by San Francisco District

Attorney to dismiss marijuana-related convictions (Aiello, 2018), for example, is a welcoming move for those affected by this.

We need to remember that the penal state grew up in a process of welfare retrenchment and developed the approach that social ills are to be dealt through law and order and criminal justice. Crime rates and the fear of crime in the United States may well be moving down, but unless we recognize that the problems facing low- income communities cannot be addressed through the police, and that zero-tolerance, broken-windows, and harsher punishments do not solve neither crime nor the socio- economic problems affecting low-income communities of color, we will continue to have a penal state. Fiscal conservatives may well be willing to dismantle a couple of prisons to reduce state budgets, but that does not mean they will be willing to invest in community development. The penal state has metastasized into areas beyond criminal justice (Beckett & Murakawa, 2012; Gascón & Roussell, 2016; Lerman & Weaver, 2014;

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Simon, 2007); consequently, we need to bring down the institutions supporting the penal state together with the political ideology that maintains it.

What is needed is the formation of a broad political coalition ready to make criminal justice and police reforms part of a larger socio-economic and political reform.

We need to make our communities more democratic, we need to invest in social, educational, and public health programs to develop low-income communities. Making our democracies more democratic, investing in low-income communities, and producing social reform, means also listening and learning from the experience of the residents of communities such as those in South L.A. and São Paulo’s periphery. No one knows the communities better than those who live in them; henceforth, we need to hear their stories, listen to their voices, and learn from their knowledge.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Sebastián Sclofsky earned his PhD from the University of Florida in 2018.

He was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. Sebastián studied law at the Universidad de la

República in Montevideo Uruguay. In 2002, he immigrated to Israel, and completed his

B.A. in International Relations and Communications at the Hebrew University in

Jerusalem. He later earned his master in political science also at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Sebastián has worked in issues related to human rights in Uruguay and Israel, including the fight for justice for relatives of those who disappeared during the military dictatorship in Uruguay, and the struggle of African refugees residing in Israel.

Sebastián has also worked in non-formal education in Uruguay, Brazil and Israel, working with youth-in-distress living in street conditions.

He came to the University of Florida in 2011. At the University of Florida, he has taught courses on political theory, law and society, and Latin American politics. He is a member of the Law and Society Association, where he presented several papers at their annual conferences. Sebastián has published articles in the Journal of Social

Justice, International Studies Review, and International Studies Perspectives. In 2017, he received the Alec Courtelis Award for outstanding academic achievement in academics, university, and community service, and in 2018 he received the Graduate

Student Teaching Award from the University of Florida’s Department of Political

Science.

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