Suspicious element

Realizing the lack of research on issues related to the criminal justice system from a racial perspective, social scientist Silvia Ramos and anthropologist Leonarda Musumeci wrote Elemento Suspeito: Abordagem Policial e Discriminação , which has become a must-read today.

In theory, anyone walking the city streets is subject to being stopped and searched by the police. But in practice, only a few will be chosen, and this selection is not random, but rather based on prior suspicion criteria, in which race is the predominant factor. In "Elemento Suspicioso: abordagem polícia e discriminação" (Suspect Element: Police Approach and Discrimination ), by Silvia Ramos and Musumeci, it is demonstrated that the combination of age (young people), gender (men), race (Black people), and class (poor people)—determined by living in a favela—is what most identifies what would be a typical "suspicious element," in police jargon, or "camburão brakeman," in the slang of young people from the outskirts.

Suspicious Elements: Police Approach and Discrimination is based on extensive research, the analysis of which was based on interviews with residents and police officers in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The first was to understand the experiences of the Rio de Janeiro population with the police, particularly in the context of stop-and-frisk operations. This aimed not only to identify variations in the quantity and quality of these experiences across different social segments but also to understand how they affected perceptions and opinions about police work. The second was to understand the mechanisms and criteria used by military police officers, responsible for overt policing, to assess the possible influence of social and racial filters in defining "suspicious elements," that is, the people most likely to be stopped and searched by the police.

"The symbolic relationships between race and crime in Brazil, although historical and evident, do not correspond to sufficient studies that indicate how they develop, what their mechanisms are, and to what extent stereotypes linked to race and color affect the system," the authors say.