Entre o ethos e a lei: policiais civis do Rio de Janeiro, seus valores e práticas

Abstract

This doctoral thesis analyses the management of moral worths in professional practices of civil police officers in Rio de Janeiro state. Open-ended interviews, participant observations and a bibliographical survey were conducted in order to describe the respective frames for social actions. The concept of police situation is proposed, through which circumstances useful to this research are defined, with the aim of delimiting the analysis. Because civil police’s activities are characterized by being linked to law, here is suggested a reconceptualization into nomos, maintaining its meaning of a normative demarcation taken as basal, but considering specifically the individual obligations stemming from it. Thus, civic worth were established methodologically as the comparative reference for actual action, and other axiological arrangements are contrasted to them. This choice aims to make it possible for circumstances to clearly depict conflicts between contingent orders of worth and, through shifts between legal devices and cultural devices, broadly depict the social life of the agents taken as objects of study. As the active participation in a “war on crime” is a consideration that permeates Rio de Janeiro’s civil police culture today, the delimitation of a shared ethos among agents is referenced to purportedly warlike values, which are linked to different normative patterns. This confronts civic worths situationally, denying them in situation, and establishes circumstantial arrangements that justify and frame actions which are in principle considered fair and proper which try to be, consequentially, legitimate. In order to test the theoretical and methodological arrangements which are proposed in the first two parts of this research, the third part reports (in the most direct fashion possible) participant observations, so that they may serve as illustrations of the situations analyzed here.