The emergence of private security guards and organizations that supply informal policing poses new problems for civil rights in Brazilian society. This paper analyzes State control over private security, through a focus on Federal Police activity during the 1996 -2000 period. Taking the way this control is dealt with in other countries as a crucial reference and using analysis of legal documents as well as interviews with those who are directly involved in the control of private security, we examine the following phenomena: the legal instruments that the Federal Police has at its disposal for the control of private security; the mechanisms that encourage internal and external control over private security and the watch that is kept over private security and other organizations and agents which engage in informal forms of policing.
Private Security; Federal Police; Fiscalization; Agents
