What are they saying about the police in Brazil? A literature review

Abstract

This article reviews a selected bibliography on policing issues in Brazilian social sciences during the last 20 years. The paper has three parts. The first discusses the history of the construction of “policing” as an object of research in Brazilian social sciences. The second discusses the predominance of two topics: the research agenda's commitment to the issue of Human Rights violations; and the tense coexistence of two policing models (authoritative/repressing and community/ proximity). The third section reviews a set of papers specifically seeking to identify its main analytical axes. The article provides insights of the analytical treatment given to policing in Brazil to be read comparatively in academic scenes of other countries.