Violência armada e educação no Rio de Janeiro: impactos educacionais das Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora

Abstract

From the end of 2008, the government of Rio de Janeiro state has begun a series of public security interventions, through the implementation of the so-called Pacifying Police Units (PPUs). This policy has been set to occupy the territories previously dominated by armed criminal groups, especially the retail drug trafficking ones, and then to install local police units and start local policing routines. The purpose of the PPUs is to be an alternative security policy to the traditional model of armed confrontation or war on drugs, and they have as explicit targets the recovery of territorial control and the reduction in armed confrontations. The main results of the exploratory evaluations have indicated the fall in lethal violence and in the exposure to armed violence, through a reduction in shootings and in the ostensible presence of firearms in the territories. Based on this context, the objective of this study was to analyze the effects on the school routine and to school outcomes, as there is a decrease in violence around the schools, supposedly generated by the installation of the PPU. For this purpose, statistical models of multiple regressions were used to test the effect of the PPU on several educational indicators. The main findings have showed a moderate reduction in the average number of days that the schools stopped exclusively due to neighborhood violence, and moderate decline in dropout and age-grade distortion. On the other hand, the PPUs seem to have no effect on the number of students enrolled and on the average achievement of schools measured by index called IDEB and by the standardized proficiency test called Prova Brazil . However, new studies will be required to evaluate possible PPU effects of medium or long term.