State, police and public safety in Brazil

Abstract

This paper seeks to associate the theoretical and academic debate to the public safety overview in Brazil, highlighting agenda items of the area that would be a priority for the public debate, especially in a moment when a new and unexpected variable enters the field and needs to be considered, namely, diffuse demands that marked the social protests and demonstrations that took the streets of major Brazilian cities in 2013. The article proposes that the problems of the area are better directed from structural reforms of the institutional architecture that regulates the functioning of public safety in Brazil, understood as the construction of links between the adoption of incremental modernization measures of the management of police forces activity and the defense of more substantive legislative changes.

Public safety; Brazil; structural reforms; police forces; violence