Mall Cop or Robocop? The Political Determinants of Police Militarization in Brazil

• Published date: 01 December 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129241268816
• Author: Juan Albarracín,Lucía Tiscornia
• Date: 01 December 2024

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(4) 1381–1396

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129241268816

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Mall Cop or Robocop? The Political

Determinants of Police Militarization in

Brazil

Juan Albarrac´

ın

1

and Luc´

ıa Tiscornia

2



Abstract

Police militarization is prevalent worldwide. Despite growing interest in the consequences of militarization, few studies

focus on its causes. Through the case of Brazilian municipal police forces, we explorethe connection between partisan

ideology and police militarization. Some research shows that leftist administrations in democracies are more likely to

emphasize human rights and less likely to militarize the police. However, leftist administrations might militarize police

forces more than centrist and right-wing parties to compensate for perceptions of lower competence to deal with

security issues, especially when they face high levels of violent crime. Using inverse probabilityof treatment weights, we

show an association between leftist mayors and higher militarization of municipal police forces. Furthermore, in contexts

of high homicide rates, mayors of Brazil’s leading leftist party, the Workers’Party, tend to militarize local police more

than others.

Keywords

police militarization, Brazil, issue ownership, parties, public security

From the incorporation of military materials and tactics in

the police,

1

to the domestic deployment of military units

and socialization processes, the militarization of internal

security has become common across the world. Examples

of this phenomenon are present in countries as diverse as

the Philippines (Kenny and Holmes 2020), South Africa

(Lamb 2018), or Mexico (Espinosa and Rubin 2015).

Recent research suggests that militarizing internal security

can lead to an increased likelihood of abuse by security

forces (Espinosa and Rubin 2015;Flores-Macias and

Zarkin 2024;Magaloni and Rodriguez 2020) without

reductions in crime or violence (Muggah, Garzón, and

Su´

arez, 2018;Mummolo 2018). In the United States, for

example, there is increasing scrutiny of how the growing

militarization of police departments is related to excessive

use of force (Delehanty et al., 2017;Gunderson et al.,

2021) and the violent repression of individuals based on

their race (Ross 2015). In Latin America, many countries

have militarized public security provision (Flores-Mac´

ıas

and Zarkin 2021).

Despite the prevalence of militarization and its per-

nicious consequences, we know very little about its

causes. In this paper, we focus on police militarization—

the process whereby police come to resemble the military

in the use of materials, tactics, and norms (Go 2023;

Magaloni and Rodriguez 2020;Mummolo 2018;

Tiscornia 2024)—as a phenomenon that, although related,

is distinct from the use of the military for public security

provision. Specif‌ically, we explore the political determi-

nants of police militarization and the limitations of

electoral processes as mechanisms for police reform.

Theoretical explanations for the causes of the milita-

rization of public security in democratic contexts mostly

treat it as a policy response to the rise in violent criminal

organizations (Magaloni and Rodriguez 2020) and crime

victimization more generally (Visconti 2020). Other

research suggests that increases in militarization are the

result of authoritarian policy preferences of right-leaning

governments (Holland 2013). Following these arguments,

1

University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

2

University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Corresponding Author:

Juan Albarrac´

ın, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois

Chicago, 1007 West Harrison St., Off‌ice 1110 BSB, Chicago, IL 60607,

USA.

Email: jgalba@uic.edu

one might expect right-wing governments to increase

police militarization, and leftist ones to decrease it and

emphasize the respect of human rights in policing. Not

surprisingly, advocates of criminal justice and police

reform often promote the election of progressive politi-

cians as a strategy to curtail abusive police practices and

reform police forces. Yet, research demonstrates that left-

leaning governments are no less likely to militarize the

police than their counterparts (Davis 2006;Durazo-

Herrmann 2017;Muller 2017). Building on theories of

issue ownership, we develop and test an explanation of

militarization resulting from lack of ownership of security

issues. We argue that left-leaning politicians, often per-

ceived as less capable to deal with security threats (Green

and Hobolt 2008), are forced to signal their competence in

this area by militarizing police more than non-leftist

politicians, especially in contexts of high levels of vio-

lent crime where security is a central issue.

We focus on the case of Brazilian municipal police

forces and their growing importance in public security as

our source of evidence. Previous studies have centered on

Brazilian state police forces and their entrenched mili-

tarized logic. This logic relies on perceptions of citizens as

threats (Magaloni and Rodriguez 2020), and it emphasizes

the control, and often elimination, of social groups his-

torically conceived as “enemies”of social order: slaves,

political dissidents, the poor, and Afro-Brazilians

(Machado 2014). These historical roots crystalized in

bureaucratic structures, making state police forces diff‌i-

cult to reform (Gonz´

alez 2020). However, municipal

police bureaucracies are less entrenched, which gives

local politicians more leeway to implement policing

policies and practices that conform to their and their

voters’preferences.

Brazilian leftist political forces have been associated

with a rhetoric and policy preferences that emphasize

respect for human rights and police reform. During and

after democratization, center-left and centrist forces were

committed to the defense of human rights as a pillar of

Brazilian democracy. While their ideological commitment

might create the expectation that leftist parties are asso-

ciated with lower levels of police militarization at the

municipal level, we argue that they will militarize local

police more than right-wing or centrist parties to com-

pensate for perceptions of lower competence to deal with

security issues, especially when they face high levels of

violent crime.

We test our hypotheses using municipal-level data

from the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics’

(IBGE) Municipal Information Dataset (MUNIC).

MUNIC compiles data on whether a municipal police

force (Guarda Municipal) exists in a given year, how long

it has existed, whether it uses weapons (lethal and non-

lethal), and other characteristics of its training and

operations. We exploit the availability of time-series

cross-sectional data and employ inverse probability of

treatment weights (IPTW) to achieve covariate balance

between treated and untreated observations while

avoiding post-treatment bias (Blackwell 2013). With this

pre-processed sample, we test the effect of electing a leftist

mayor on the training and functions of the municipal

police. After balancing on relevant covariates, our results

show that having a leftist mayor increases the degree of

militarization of the municipal police. Leftist mayors, in

particular mayors of the Workers’Party (PT), are more

likely to promote actions that improve police capacity for

the use of violence and the violent regulation of social

conf‌lict, especially when they face high homicide rates.

This behavior is striking since other studies have shown

that belonging to a leftist party is a signif‌icant predictor of

the enactment of progressive social policies and demo-

cratic practices at the municipal level (Sugiyama 2008).

Historically, voters have associated these policies with PT.

However, when PT politicians are forced to engage with a

salient issue their party does not own, they signal their

commitment to security by militarizing local police forces

more than mayors from other parties.

Our study sheds light on the political determinants of

militarization processes and the limitations of police re-

form carried out by elected off‌icials. Confronted by public

demands for more security, leftist politicians might mil-

itarize police forces, prioritizing electoral success over

their programmatic beliefs. Theoretically, we provide an

argument for the choice of security policy that incorpo-

rates politicians’strategic electoral considerations in

contexts of high criminal violence. We also highlight the

role of local politics in the def‌inition of security policy, an

arena typically left for the national or state level. Em-

pirically, our study of Brazilian municipalities and their

policing policies can provide important evidence about

the role of partisan ideology and issue ownership on

security policies.

In the following section, we def‌ine police militarization

and examine how it occurs. We then theorize the limits of

partisan ideology in shaping leftist off‌ice holders’choice

to reduce the militarization of police forces. We subse-

quently discuss Brazil’s legacy of police militarization and

municipal governments’increasing involvement in public

security through municipal police forces. Next, we present

our research design, discuss in more detail our outcome of

interest (the level of militarization of municipal police

forces), our independent variable of interest (the presence/

absence of a leftist mayor), and relevant covariates. Since

our initial independent variable might not quite capture

“true”leftist parties, in a second set of analyses, we ex-

plore the impact of having a PT mayor on the level of

police militarization. We conclude with a discussion of the

results and offer some remarks about the limits of electing

1382 Political Research Quarterly 77(4)