CRIME-BRAZIL: Participation and Data are Powerful Weapons

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil, Jun 2 2000 (IPS) - The police are on their way to revolutionising public safety through a programme that focuses on citizen participation and the efficient use of data in this south-central state capital, one of Brazil’s major cities.

The public safety problems overwhelming Latin America’s urban areas have forced local governments to take steps toward prevention, as with any epidemic.

To fight the crime epidemic in Belo Horizonte, capital of Minas Gerais state, the security forces are arming themselves with geographical and statistical knowledge as part of the “Police with Results” programme.

Based on a wide range of data, the police divided the city into 25 districts and then invited citizens from each area to take part in the project. Beginning June 7, a Public Safety Community Council, made up of local leaders and neighbourhood representatives, will be inaugurated in each district.

The councils will have the power to plan, in collaboration with the authorities, policing activities and will evaluate the results every three months. To do so, they must be familiar with the resources the local police station has available and the area’s crime statistics, explained the city’s police chief, colonel Severo da Silva Neto.

The city has reached a final stage in a process begun a year and a half ago here in co-operation with two academic institutions that study urban violence and with the municipal information systems centre.

Combining interdisciplinary knowledge with extensive statistical data allowed Belo Horizonte officials to design a “Map of Violence” for the city, which like other urban areas in Brazil suffers a serious crime crisis.

The police command divided up the territory under its jurisdiction, which extends to some neighbouring municipalities, with each of the 25 districts entrusted to the local military police section. The project covers the entire metropolitan area, with a population of some three million.

The maps also identify what the police call “crime hot zones,” averaging four or five in each district, where homicide, drug trafficking, gun possession, assaults and robbery tend to be concentrated.

The first three crimes on the list are generally found in the city’s ‘favelas,’ or slums, indicated Da Silva Neto. Car theft, meanwhile, is on the rise in wealthier neighbourhoods, where “families do not have enough garage space for all their cars, so they have to park them on the street.”

The numerous maps that identify the critical points and characteristics of each part of the city allow authorities to better distribute the 8,000 military police officers in this state capital, concentrating their efforts in the hot zones, he explained.

Escalating crime intensified the public’s demand for greater police presence, but “our material and human resources were not keeping up with advancing crime,” which prompted the improved efficiency in the police force, observed Da Silva Neto, who describes himself as a “police administrator.”

The traditional and computerised maps of the Municipal Computer and Information Company (Prodabel) give the officials at police headquarters a foundation to follow each incident or complaint, allowing them to know the precise locations and to co-ordinate the police response using the computer network.

The system immediately updates the database with the development of each case, all the way through to its conclusion, said captain Luiz Carlos Martins, head of the statistics group of the Belo Horizonte military police.

The maps are detailed with more than five million “objects,” including buildings, all types of businesses, and even streetlights and trees. They also indicate the level of human development and the general income distribution of each area.

This minute description of the city is useful to various service providers – of sanitation, electric energy and mail -, and now is helping the police, pointed out Angelo Rizzo Neto, Prodabel’s director of Basic Urban Information.

Upon this foundation of maps and computers, the police record the actions of each officer and the crimes reported by telephone and through other sources. Belo Horizonte police receive approximately 4,000 telephone calls reporting crimes each day, stressed captain Martins.

With this new wealth of information, the police “can overcome the exclusively repressive approach and focus on crime, working towards prevention through scientific means,” he said.

But a map’s objective data are not enough. Positive results must take into consideration the “subjective factor, the community’s perception of its safety,” which adds an important component, according to Da Silva Neto.

Community participation is also essential because “the police only act on the effects, not the causes,” he said.

The police chief explained that other sectors of society must resolve the problems of unemployment, education, and basic sanitation and “the socio-economic and environmental deterioration” in the favelas, which tend to foster crime, according to statistics.

There are “community tasks” to be done, such as providing better illumination of sidewalks and not just streets, trimming trees that darken public spaces, “encouraging people to use the plazas, occupying public areas so they are not left to criminals,” all of which can reduce crime and violence, Da Silva Neto pointed out.

The Minas Gerais military police – working with other sectors of society and sharing their plans with the community – are a pioneer in a country accustomed to police officers who keep their distance, said sociologist Claudio Beato, founder of the Centre for Crime and Public Safety Studies at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and participant in the “Police with Results” project.

The police relationship with the university began in the 1960s, under the initiative of the late Antonio Luis Paixao, a professor who led the way in of violence and recognising the growing importance of the police institution in Brazil, said Beato.

The military police, as a result of Paixao’s efforts, began to encourage its officials to pursue a broad education, with courses ranging from sociology to literature, at the university level.

The example set by the police in Belo Horizonte has begun to bear fruit. The military police in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo are creating their own “crime maps” and have sent more then 30 officers to the Minas Gerais capital to study at the centre Beato directs and to learn from the experiences of the local police.