Identifying, Classifying and Intervening: Practices and Discourses Of Police-Teachers About the Vulnerable Young People in Cidade de Deus

Abstract

The article discusses contemporary strategies of state management of urban conflict. From an ethnography of the routine of police agents of the UPPs assigned to conduct social projects in the favela Cidade de Deus, in Rio de Janeiro, I analyze the classifications produced by these police-teachers on vulnerable young people. In this effort to make it readable to intervene, the category vulnerability emerges as central, since it allows to group the vulnerable and to individualize them according to the potential risks of the different types of vulnerability. The argument is that this is, therefore, a device of poor people management, that combines social practices and repression to prevent and combat violence.