The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime, and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil by Graham Denyer Willis (review)

It has become almost cliché to emphasize that Brazil has one of the world's highest homicide rates and that the police contribute in large part to the endemic cycle of violence. It is often poor and darker Brazilians who populate the homicide statistics and are shuffled through the prison system. While there has been significant studies on the police from a historical perspective in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and from a sociological angle in contemporary Brazil few researchers have had the privilege to observe the organization at work on the crime scenes and in São Paulo's drug infested slums as Graham Denyer Willis did. What makes Denyer Willis' work unique is both his methodological approach to the police and the city of São Paulo and a good dose of the researcher's luck. Denyer Willis began his research by accompanying homicide detectives to the crime scenes and in their offices to investigate police violence in São Paulo, Brazil's largest city and one of its most socio-economically unequal metropolises. A city in which the gap between the rich and the poor is stark and violence, from the police and gang activities, is a daily facet of the urban fabric.

The author is gracious enough to acknowledge that his foreign status (Canadian), his gender (male) and race (white) were pivotal in allowing him a rare entry into the world of everyday policing and investigation of the homicide detectives unit. But even then he faced significant dangers being associated as he was with a professional group that was the target of assassination by the city's powerful criminal organization, the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital). For the duration of his research, Denyer Willis had to wear a bulletproof vest. Consider that the PCC, as Denyer Willis argued shared governance with the state to regulate life and death in the city, killed more than fifty police officers and prison agents in 2006 and 100 police agents in 2012 in retaliation to police killings of its members. Denyer Willis was also privileged to have access to unedited PCC documents given to him by an agent of São Paulo's public security system that he used along with field research in a PCC-controlled community to analyze the evolution and bureaucratic structure of the criminal organization. One of this book's central claims is that the violence of the police in urban Brazil cannot be dissociated from an analysis of structures of inequality that divide the city of São Paulo into different zones of access to wealth, power, and privilege while relegating the poor to the periphery. Both the police and members of the PCC in fact share the dubious privilege of coming from the periphery for the most part but stand on opposite sides of the law. Low wages and a lack of resources produce a police force that institutionalizes killings and justifies it in internal investigative reports as resisting arrest followed by death, a category that laid the blame for homicide committed by the police on the victims.

Rampant police violence in the peripheries and in the prison system in turn generated the formation of powerful criminal organizations such as the PCC to resist and counter law enforcement and its arbitrariness. After São Paulo's Military Police squad, the ROTA, massacred 111 prisoners in the Carandiru prison in 1992, survivors created the PCC as a criminal organization that was funded by convicts and their families in and outside of the penal system to counter police violence. By 2000, the PCC had built an intricate network of corrupt police officers, gang members, and lawyers within and without the prison system. It began to fill in the vacancy left by the state in providing social welfare services such as electricity, water, and security in slums that...