Práticas estratégicas em segurança pública: a tensão relacional micro-macro no policiamento comunitário de uma Unidade da Polícia Militar de Minas Gerais

Abstract

The serious and complex scenario of public security in Brazil originates debates and proposals that evaluate the roles of the Military Police and the practices of the Community Police. Police organizations that practice community policing seek to prevent crime through close community relations and programs that promotes a sense of security and minimizes fear of crime, gaining support and respect of civil society. The purpose of this research is to analyze the strategic practices of Community Police, conducted by members of an Operational Unit of the Military Police of Minas Gerais, in Uberlandia. The research question is: how does micro and macro relational tension presents itself in the strategic practices of community policing, in a context of public security that seeks the approximation between police and civil society? The research was based on an interpretative perspective of the strategy as a social practice. The research public was: (a) macro level: Military Police of Minas Gerais and the police blog called Police Approach; (b) micro level: the operational police officers of the 17th Battalion, who was daily dealing with community policing practices. Considering an ethnomethodological approach, the following data collection techniques were applied: documentary research about laws and regulations on police action in Brazil and Minas Gerais; research on police blogs, including their publications and readers' comments; 26 episodic interviews; participant observation (106 hours) of operational police and managers practices that work on community policing, emphasizing the Protected Neighbors Network program; and, participant observation in 32 groups of WhatsApp, referring about the virtual relationship between police officers and citizens who participated of the program. The results demonstrate that the strategic practices of community policing are characterized in a micro-macro relational tension. The micro level, that is immerse in local and immediate particularities, seeks to daily transform the rules and regulations created by macro level to guide in a general and idealized way the micropractices of community policing. The research revealed that community policing practices pass between the preventive and repressive paradigms, and between the assumptions of Community Police and Traditional Police, not yet overcome. The results show the existence of these tensions through the guiding principles of police practices, namely: (a) image: the image of police officers and civil society is fractured and socially constructed by the military; (b) interaction: police interaction with civil society is done through a community configuration that, in the formation of outsiders, under a fractured image, promotes the militarization of “good citizens” and criminal persecution of “bandits”; (c) management: the management of fear through statistics promotes an epistemological crisis, in which, through managerialism, it deals with criminal indices while at the same time seeking to treat the sense of security; (d) objectives: the plurality of community policing objectives also lead to contradictions between the focus on the criminal incident and the focus on the fear of crime; and (e) expected results of police practices: the unfeasibility of fear management through statistics and the anxiety of practitioners of community policing strategy shows the need for a new epistemology for public safety. The perspective of strategy as a social practice reflects about the current emphasis on managerialism, seen as a solution to public security problems, and opens possibilities for future research in the field of public safety and community policing.