Police Reinforcements Show Limited Results in Rio de Janeiro

08/06/2018 - 07h06

"Everybody likes it," says housecleaner Maria Teixeira, 40, before boarding her bus at the stop bordering Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, a tourist attraction in the south part of the city that since the end of 2015 is patrolled from 6am to 10pm by policemen wearing orange vests.

Her opinion is universally shared by residents, shopkeepers and visitors from the five Rio districts included in a program called Segurança Presente (Active Security), coordinated by governor Luiz Fernando Pezão (MDB) and partly funded by Sesc-RJ, a nonprofit organization backed by the local trade association.

The project hires mainly off-duty policemen to reinforce security in spots like Arcos da Lapa and Museu do Amanhã (in downtown), Aterro do Flamengo and Lagoa (south side) and Méier (west side). On August 20th, it will also include Leblon, according to the neighborhood association.
But the results are far from solving Rio de Janeiro's public safety issues and are restricted to the streets patrolled by the agents, according to the policemen themselves.

	Ricardo Borges/Folhapress
	The project reinforces security in tourist spots

Although the state government discloses high numbers of arrests at the scene (12,000) and warrants fulfilled (809) in four and a half years, more general data from the city neighborhoods with Segurança Presente don't show a significant impact.

When one compares the number of burglaries (to pedestrians and bus passengers, that had their cellphones stolen), one year before the program and the years since it started, some patterns emerge.

In most cases, there is a drop in occurrences in the first 12 months, followed by an increase in the second year. The only exception was Rio's downtown, which saw a consistent decrease of burglaries - 6 percent in the first year, and 7 percent in the second.

My assumptions [for this pattern] is that maybe an integration of all public security policies is lacking, or the criminal activity moves; what is reduced in one area, becomes more frequent in the adjacent neighborhood," says Robson Rodrigues, a retired colonel and researcher at Laboratório de Análise da Violência at Uerj (Violence Studies Lab at Rio's state university).

Another criticism to the project, besides its palliative nature, is that it only covers places with high foot traffic, because of Sesc-RJ partial funding its R$ 41 million (US$ 10 million) annual budget.

Translated by NATASHA MADOV

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