Entre o documentável e o indocumentável: uma etnografia sobre responsabilizações de violências policiais

Abstract

This study aims to describe and analyze a project conducted by public prosecutors from the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Campinas, São Paulo, between 2015 and 2018, which sought to hold police officers accountable for acts of violence committed against youths classified as juvenile offenders. For this analysis, access was granted to 51 civil investigations designed to gather evidence in order to classify such acts of violence as administrative misconduct. The lead prosecutor referred to this legal framing as a “workaround” (gambiarra). Document ethnography proved to be the most suitable methodological approach, as it enabled an examination of the capacity of documents to produce trajectories, relationships, silences, moralities, ambiguities, and hierarchies. As the investigations assembled a heterogeneous collection of documents originating from different branches of the justice system—including the Civil Police, Military Police, Internal Affairs divisions, the Forensic Medical Institute, and the Public Prosecutor’s Office itself—the analysis made it possible to identify forms of agency extending beyond those mobilized by the prosecutors. In doing so, the study illuminates how different institutions developed documentary techniques for managing cases involving allegations of police violence during encounters related to juvenile offenses. From this perspective, the ethnography sheds light on both the documentable and the undocumented dimensions of police investigations, capturing the documentary mechanisms through which state violence is silenced. Regarding the documentable aspects, particular attention is drawn to the centrality that police narratives acquire within textual economies. The undocumented aspects manifested themselves both in the absence of information concerning police officers’ race and young people’s narratives in police reports, and in officers’ requests to turn off recording cameras during hearings conducted by the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The documents thus revealed the multiple layers that sustain police narratives within the justice system and, in the process, exposed how racial, class, and gender inequalities are continuously reproduced through the entangled workings of this institutional apparatus.