Color in police approaches in the state of Goiás: 2016-2018

Abstract

Under the double premise that Brazilian society is racially unequal and that this inequality constitutes vulnerability for those who are subjected to a police approach, a study was carried out to verify if race/color characterizes patterns of the approaches carried out by the PMGO. Therefore, after eliminating the duplicities, 1,300,711 police approaches registered in the RAI of the SSP-GO were analyzed, from April 2016 to April 2018, with variables related to the police action and the person of the individuals approached, such as: nature (types approach), date/time of the incident, place of the incident, sex, color/race, date of birth, marital status and schooling. These data were compared with those of the IBGE in the continuous PNAD, which records the color/race of the inhabitants of the State of Goiás on a quarterly basis. As a result of a descriptive and non-inferential statistical analysis (Chi-Square applied to a non-representative sample), there is a negligence on the part of the military police in filling in the color/race variable in police approaches (98.8% blank), which is not mandatory to record, keeping the race variable in the invisibility field. Of the portion in which color/race was registered (1.18%), there was a 91.3% greater percentage difference in the approach of people from the male, black or brown class in relation to white people; compared to the same proportions observed in the population of the State, in the same period, there is a statistically significant difference in the sample of RAIs collected (15355 approaches; 1.18%) in the years 2016 and 2017, but not for 2018; which cannot be generalized to the entire sample space of RAIs (1,300,711 approaches).