Our paper discusses the role of the Civil Police within a democratic scenario in which citizenship is supposed to be completely institutionalized. For these purposes, we use quantitative and qualitative data on 235 different Brazilian police stations, collected as part of the Third "Week of Visits to Police Stations" (2009) and international research that seeks to engage citizens, as potential users, to evaluate the way police stations deal with the public and the transparency of the services they offer. We seek to relate theoretical definitions of solidarity and justice to particular perceptions of citizenship that can be inferred from the evaluations that were carried out. We thereby structure the following article into three sections, including introduction and conclusion. The first section explains the "Week of Visits to Police Stations" in its different dimensions. The second contextualizes the concepts through which we plan to analyze Brazilian Civil Police actions, that is, civil citizenship and its deficits. The third section discusses how individuals represent the practices they observe in police stations and questions the extent to which these representations converge with the concept of "citizenship deficit" introduced in the previous section. Finally, we present some notes on how the quality of public services provided through police stations can help us understand how in Brazil it is hard to make ideals of justice and solidarity compatible, from a universal perspective. Our results indicate that the attention police stations provide is inadequate and therefore does not mesh with the "principles of justice and solidarity" that give shape to the notion of citizenship itself.
Citizenship; Justice; Solidarity; Civil Police; Quality of Police Services
