“Aiming to repel unjust aggression”: a sociology of police accounts and investigations into police lethality cases in Minas Gerais

Abstract

Between 2012 and 2021, 1,146 people died because of police interventions in Minas Gerais. In almost all these cases, the official narrative of police reports was that these deaths occurred in situations of “confrontation”, in which police officers, acting in “strict compliance with legal duty”, used “moderate force” to “repel unjust aggression”. Literature in Brazil demonstrates that the mobilization of this grammar since the initial records is the first stage of a chain of procedures that, will eventually, almost always, result in the legal application of the “exclusion of illegality” to police lethality. Dialoguing with this production, this article presents the main results of a case study on inquiries into military police lethality in Minas Gerais. Adopting an ethnomethodological approach, we sought to understand how a complex system of representations, discourses and cognitions shared among police officers supports the construction of accounts on lethality cases, giving them the legal form of “legitimate self-defense”. In methodological terms, the study uses the analysis of 3,605 B.O. on deaths and injuries resulting from police interventions, registered in the state between 2013 and 2018, as well as 25 interviews with key-actors from the police forces and the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The research reveals that, in the discursive field, the Military Police of Minas Gerais has adopted institutional strategies to standardize the narratives of lethality records (official reports and military police investigations), activating, already in these documents, the grammar necessary for justifying the exclusion of illegality at the judicial stage. In procedural terms, the corporation has not only undertaken the investigations on its own lethality cases, but also interdicted attempts of external investigations made by the Civil Police. In the political/institutional sphere, the Military Police has systematically ignored determinations of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, fraying possibilities of external control of its activity.

Keywords police organizations; police lethality; external control of police activity; police violence; investigation