Policiamento Comunitário: Dicotomias e Imagens Fraturadas nas Práticas de Segurança Pública

Abstract

An ethnomethodological approach has been adopted for to analyze the images that guide the community police practices of an Operational Unit of the Minas Gerais Military Police. We used documentary research, interviews with police officers and managers, electronic research on social networks of interactions between police officers and the community and observation of police practices in the Protected Neighbors Network program. Public safety management studies and Social Theory support the research. The findings shows the dichotomies between traditional policing and community policing – repressive and preventive – produce fractured images of the police and civilians who guide police practice. The creators and enforcers of rules that define who are “the insiders” and “the outsiders” of the community, through social stigma, embody the fear of the “other” in police work, as well as the images of the feared police officer and the community-friendly officer, the images of the “good” citizen and the outsiders and “bad guys”.