F*ck the Police!

Abstract

Brazil, as the country with the highest rates of civilians killed by the police, has seen a proliferation of anthropological studies on police violence and police culture within the last few decades. Not only have anthropologists dedicated increasing attention to the challenges and possibilities of democratic policing, but officers themselves have become ethnographers—or at least relied on some of ethnography’s techniques—in their attempts to provide “privileged” accounts of police praxis. This paper focuses not so much on the paradigmatic victims of police terror in Brazil, but instead on the critical role that urban ethnographers can play in demystifying the “war on police” and advancing an insurgent intellectual movement that pushes toward the abolition of this morally indefensible modern institution.