WHAT IS “BEING A POLICE”? Tensions, continuities and ruptures in the Civil Police
public safety, civil police, identity
This dissertation proposes to try to identify and understand, through participant observation and the mapping of speeches and interviews, indications of continuities and ruptures in the practices and values of the Civil Police, specifically of the RN. The work is structured in three chapters. Initially, it presents a historical overview of the process of formation of police corporations in the nineteenth century, created to guarantee “public safety” in Brazil. Later, in dealing with the paradigms that build police identity, it deals with the police inquiry, which is considered the “heart of the Civil Police activity” and a central activity for its structuring. In a third moment, by focusing on the field data, I identify that the Civil Police is a corporation founded on paradigms of past centuries, but that begins to delineate new ways of acting and representing itself, which generates a constant process of questioning about "What is being a police officer?" Given this scenario, marked by tension and relations of continuity and discontinuity, we conclude that there are conditions for the denaturalization of old assumptions, which causes reflections on the ways of being and being in the corporation in contemporary times.