This article discusses ethnographically how police patrol styles interfere in interpellation situations and responses that involve the interaction between police and residents in urban areas. It analyzes how the resident’s condition is mobilized by military police from an area covered by the Round the Block Policing Program, in the city of Juazeiro do Norte, south of the state of Ceará. This experience of community policing, called “the good neighborhood police,” also employs conventional elements of ostensible police work and the residents of this community are morally classified by the police in various labels, represented by the opposition between “bum” and” good citizen.” These police ways of talking about residents are intermediations of power that attribute subjective forms to residents. The meaning of “law enforcement” becomes polysemic, in that residents are affected by these labels, and are validated, revalidated, selected or ignored in every situation.
Good neighborhood police; Police work; Resident condition