ABSTRACT
Brazil’s Federal Constitution of 1988 provides that policing should be carried out based on the citizen’s interest, limited by law, and subjected to external control. However, in the post-redemocratization decades, the actions of the military police remained violent and arbitrary. Attempts to eliminate authoritarian police pratctices involved both incremental reforms, which were not successful, and structural reforms, which were not approved. By means of a critical review of the literature produced in social sciences, this articles seeks to contribute to the debate on the difficulty of promoting democratic reforms in the military police.
Keywords:
Police reform; public safety policies; military police in Brazil; institutional reforms