Culture Homework #3 - Favelas

I feel that the most frustrating concept manifested in favelas is that the extremely costly police forces for the favelas of Rio are mostly ineffective. When you use the resources and lives that go into making a force like BOPE, then you expect this force to create a positive change in their assigned favela. According to Erika Larkins in "Performances of Police Legitimacy in Rio’s Hyper Favela", and the film "City of God", the police that work in favelas are mostly corrupt, ultra-violent, and all for show. 

Larkins speaks of how in one of the raids she witnessed in the El Dorado favela, the local traffickers simply paid a toll in the form of a couple tons of marijuana for the police to flaunt in front of the media, which they certainly did. Likewise, in "City of God", Lil Ze started a gruesome war with Carrot, the opposing drug lord of the favela, and simply had to pay the cops some cash when he was caught. Additionally, the weapons dealer for both sides of this destructive war was receiving his weapons supply from the local police. Therefore, while I'm sure some favela police are not corrupt, it is well known that many are, and a corrupt cop serves no purpose. Nevertheless, the government of Brazil still continually feeds these police forces into the favelas so that they can show the general populace that they're "tough on crime." While I can agree that this public perception of a successful police force is pivotal to governmental respect, it does nothing to stop the horrific acts of the favela gangs.

That is another important topic; the ultra-violence of the favela police. Larkins, eerily offhandedly, mentioned how police snipers shot and killed a "young kid" lookout for the gangs in El Dorado during one of their raids. The unfortunate part of this is that the gangs were already gone, having learned of the raid prior to it occurring. Therefore, the police, instead of incapacitating or arresting the lookout, murdered the young boy who's job meant nothing that night. a similar situation occurred in City of God when the police wrongly identified their suspect, and proceeded to chase down and kill an innocent child who was walking to school in the favela. While the police are nowhere near as brutal as the gangs in the favelas, their serving of violence with violence implies desperation, further convincing the favela residents that the state has no power compared to the gangs that serve them. Likewise, violence begets violence, so causing more violence with this outside force only inspires more internal destruction.