When the State kills: challenges to measure crimes against life by police

Abstract

The article discusses the processes and taxonomies used to classify homicides practiced by police in Brazil, taking the state of São Paulo as a case study. Based on an empirical study about the production and use of criminal statistics by institutions that constitute the criminal justice and public security systems in Brazil, the article brings some reflections in dialogue between the fields of sociology public security and sociology of quantification. The objective here is to demonstrate how the dispute over deaths resulting from police interventions is part of a larger dispute over the meaning of public security policies, and that the adopted nomenclatures consist of tactics that seek to guarantee the legitimacy of the use of lethal force by the police. The creation of multiple categories to measure the result of deaths perpetrated by police officers and their registration apart from intentional homicides is a strategy that obscures the complete understanding of the meaning of these occurrences and it reveals how much opacity is still present, in the country, in the way of governing and responding to demands for more efficiency in controlling crime and maintaining public order.

Keywords
police; statistics; lethality; murder; violence