Qualifying Violence: Visible Data, Invisible Lives in Recife, Brazil

Abstract

AbstractThis article brings attention to the rise of digital computing in policing in Brazil, where new technologies have been integrated into the criminal justice apparatus to surveil, manage, and police criminalized communities. I examine a reformist public policy called the Pacto pela Vida (Pact for Life) in Recife and foreground the process of collecting and interpreting data at crime scenes as a means by which to analyze how criminality is understood and conceptualized. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, I explore how data collected by the police link racial identifiers, places, and different types of offenses. Hence, I argue that the Pacto governmentality infers a preexisting logic of power and control over the Black poor using new technologies and policing models mainly imported from the United States. When police collect data at crime scenes and categorize it according to provided standards, the sociocultural context in which events occur become invisible.