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Received: 5 February 2022    Accepted: 16 December 2022

DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12447

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Enforcing Trust: Race, gender, and the policing of citizenship in

Rio de Janeiro

Marta-­Laura  Haynes

Department of Anthropology, John Jay Abstract

College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY
Correspondence
Marta-­L aura Haynes, PhD Assistant
Professor, Department of Anthropology,
Room 9.63.16 NB, John Jay College of
Criminal Justice, 524 West 59th Street,
New York, NY 10019, United States.
Email: mhaynes@jjay.cuny.edu
Funding information
Social Science Research Council: Drugs,
Security, Democracy Fellowship; Tinker
Foundation
Policing in Rio de Janeiro is notorious for its brutality. For Unidades da Policía Pacificadora
(UPP), a proximity policing program marked by less overt violence, the forging of trust
became a strategy for reshaping the image of police and favelas. Yet, this policing model
reproduced racial and gender bias that was persistent in broader Brazilian society where
trust is coded as white and female while danger is coded as Black and male. In UPP,
these ideologies manifested in using lighter-­skinned and female officers to produce trust
through whiteness and gender. For residents, pacification underscored a longstanding
racial encoding of citizenship and trust as performances of whiteness and belonging.
Based on fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2015 among the military police and
in favelas, I examine in this article how Brazilian ideologies of race and gender intersect
with local notions about trustworthiness and class. For the UPPs, enforcing trust was at-
tached to the expectation of submission and uniformity—­ultimately strengthening white
supremacy. Through intimate ethnographic accounts of commanders' and residents'
experiences, I show the nuanced ways trust intersects with local ideas about race and
gender and how it served both as a vehicle for pacification and as a mode of citizenship.

KEYWORDS
Brazil, citizenship, gender, policing, race, trust, violence

LI K E I N “ R E A L” S O C I E T Y doorsteps, photographed the favela with fascination. Then, a Black

At the foot of the favela Santa Marta, a tour guide wearing a colorful
shirt saying “Rio Top Tour” ushered a group of tourists into a modern
funicular. The favela (working poor area or shantytown) is in an af-
fluent neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, but until recently, it had been
ruled by the Comando Vermelho drug gang. “This is crazy,” I heard
one young blond man say excitedly as the group slowly ascended the
steep hill and the visitors photographed the maze of brick houses.
Finally, at the top, the breathtaking landscape of Rio unfolded, fea-
turing a prime view of the Sugar Loaf and Copacabana Beach. “Look,
it's Michael Jackson!” Pedro, the tour guide, pointed proudly to a
bronze statue and giant mosaic of the King of Pop, surrounded by
1
simple shacks.   The group of gringos (the term for foreigner, usu-
ally American), under the watchful eyes of residents sitting on their
woman wearing a military police uniform came up the stairs onto the
viewing platform.
“Oi Pricilla! Come and meet our visitors,” Pedro said as he waved
the officer over. “Pricilla is great. Everything changed with the paci-
fication police here. That's how I got this job,” he informed his audi-
ence. At the time, the Unidades da Polícia Pacificadora (Pacification
Police Units, UPP), a community police effort, was a new attempt by
the Brazilian state to reestablish authority in territories ruled by drug
cartels. Circled by residents and tourists, Pricilla Oliveira de Azevedo,
commander of the city's first “pacified” favela, smiled for the cameras,
shook people's hands, and thanked Pedro for his kind words. Children
from the community ran up to Pricilla to give her beijinhos (kisses).
“Conseguimos transformar lugares temidos pelos moradores e vis-
itantes em áreas turísticas” (we managed to transform places that

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14    © 2023 American Anthropological Association. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ciso City & Society. 2023;35:14–26.

CITY & SOCIETY
were feared by residents and visitors into tourist areas), Pricilla de-
clared. She was referring to the elimination of shootouts and to what
I call the gringofication of the favela—­the infusion of favelas with for-
eign people and ideas that displace locals. After US President Barack
Obama's visit to the pacified favela City of God in 2011, celebrities
like Kanye West and David Beckham began buying real estate in
pacified favelas. Researchers like me were also the type of person
(foreign, educated) that the UPPs aimed to attract into the favelas,
hoping they would share their “transformation” with the Western
world.
Pricilla was cautiously excited by the opportunity to lead this ex-
periment of including favelas in the asfalto (formal city), as the paved
part of the city is called. “I never thought this would be possible—­to
talk with people in a favela, to be smiled at,” Pricilla told me in an
interview. Despite a long history of police violence, some favela
residents were eager to finally be recognized by the government
as cidadãos (citizen) rather than bandidos (which technically means
criminal but is common code for Black). Many were willing to em-
brace the bureaucracy and the feared police as symbols of such legit-
imacy. Pedro, for example, explained that “the violence has stopped.
People got official addresses and work permits. You must pay for
electricity and water. You cannot play loud music late at night.” With
a broad smile, he concluded: “It's now like in real society!”
The UPPs were launched when the Rio city government faced
international and domestic pressure to make the city safer and
the chronically abusive police more presentable for the 2014 FIFA
World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. Positive interactions between
Pricilla, Pedro, and the children were advertised as empirical evi-
dence that Rio's police were now trustworthy peacekeepers. A sur-
vey conducted by local sociologist Silvia Ramos further suggested
that the community policing efforts were working: A stunning 90
percent of residents allegedly stated they “trusted” their local UPP
(Ramos,  2015, presentation at UPP headquarters). In a city where
police kill more unarmed civilians than in any other place on earth
(Reuters  2021), the UPPs' claim to “soft” governance was a wel-
comed move away from zero-­tolerance, shoot-­to-­kill approaches.
Nevertheless, their proposition that residents should trust in the
police seems ludicrous in a country where a “George Floyd” is killed
nearly eight times per day.
Trust emerged as a powerful slogan for the civility, modernity,
and citizenship the UPPs would supposedly provide. Their strategy
was to saturate favelas with military police, disperse drug traffick-
ers, and begin “the recuperation of confiança [trust] and credibility
in the relationships between police and residents in low-­income
areas” (Governo do Estado do Rio de Janeiro 2014, my translation).
As a result, recruits to the police academy found comparatively lit-
tle warfare discourse in their training; instead, they experienced
increasing rhetoric of professionalism, human rights, and account-
ability. Nevertheless, then-­Governor Sérgio Cabral called such paci-
fication a “war” and a “reconquest” of regions and minds previously
occupied by drug cartels: “Isso é uma guerra. E, como em toda guerra,
você tem que reconquistar territórios” (This is a war. And like in any
war, you must reconquest territory) (Lemos 2010). As such, the UPP
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      15
force was designed to be more than a policing program; it was a
slum upgrading project aimed at regaining control over lost territory
and “unruly” people. Historically, the term pacificação (pacification)
has described the conquest of Indigenous Peoples who colonialists
represented as racially inferior (Rodrigues, Brancoli, and Kalil 2018).
Similarly, the UPP mission was framed as “civilizing” favela residents
and providing a sense of belonging in “real” society, making pacifica-
tion a citizenship project.
This article takes trust as its ethnographic object, working
through its racialized and gendered politics as well as how it has
been a mode of citizenship threaded into Rio de Janeiro's UPP. As
a taken-­for-­granted and ubiquitous part of everyday life, trust re-
mains an elusive social phenomenon essential to the functioning of
institutions and relationships. We often measure the strength of de-
mocracy by evaluating whether people trust the state, especially law
enforcement. However, what is the place of trust when evaluating an
institution—­the police—­that is, as Herman Goldstein (1977) famously
said, inherently anti-­democratic?
Most of the vast scholarship on the pacification project in Rio
centers on reducing shootouts as the crucial variable for creating
trust in the police (Cano, Borges, and Ribeiro 2012; Ribeiro and
Vilarouca,  2020; Zaluar and Barcellos, 2013). Another variable
often highlighted is the rather placative social projects many UPP
commanders started in pacified favelas, such as soccer practice
with children. However, after years of accompanying UPP offi-
cers in training and favelas, I observed carefully choreographed
racial and gender performances by police officers that used the
logic of white supremacy to signal trustworthiness and belong-
ing. I noticed that the UPPs were overwhelmingly recruiting light-­
skinned praça (patrolmen) and women without combat experience
(see Figure  1). This introduced a different public image of the
police and insinuated that the state sent its “best” professionals
to the favelas. These racial and gender biases reflected broader
Brazilian society, where trust is coded as white and female while
danger is coded as Black and male. In Rio, racial coding also
applies to space (Sheriff, 2001). The upper-­class asfalto is coded as
white, and while corruption and drug consumption are rampant,
this space is conceptualized as home to law-­abiding, trustworthy
citizens (Drybread, 2018). Conversely, favelas are coded as Black
and signify criminality, regardless of residents' phenotypes or
behavior.
In African diasporic geographies like Brazil, contemporary life
is often regulated through state-­sanctioned practices of militarism,
surveillance, and police terror. Trust presents itself as a histori-
cally fraught and racialized concept in these landscapes. It must be
read as more than a moral commitment, a character disposition, or
a dynamic set of interests negotiated between transacting parties
(Jiménez,  2011). Instead, contestations around trust—­and its ever-­
present shadow distrust—­allow us to think through the precarity of
Black life in the wake of the plantation (Sharpe, 2016). By approach-
ing trust as a verb rather than a noun (Coates, 2019), I explore not
simply what trust is but also the labor that it performs in police units
as well as in the favelas they serve. I show the nuanced ways trust
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16       ENFORCING TRUST: RACE, GENDER, AND THE POLICING OF CITIZENSHIP IN RIO DE JANEIRO
F I G U R E 1  Female UPP officers strolling through a pacified favela. Rio de Janeiro 2014. Photo by author. [This figure appears in color in
the online issue.]
intersects with local ideas about race and gender and serves as a
vehicle for pacification and a mode of citizenship, which one can
claim or exercise by demonstrating trust. Moreover, I challenge us to
consider distrust as a counterhegemonic articulation of resistance to
chronic police terror.
Brazilian social life—­especially public security—­revolves around
the dichotomy of cidadão do bem (good citizen) versus marginal (mar-
ginal, meaning thug). This dichotomy emphasizes a moral hierarchy
of citizenship rights (Andrade Costa, 2021). On the discursive level,
the “good citizen” operates as a moral delimiter of social segregation
and police violence in a society where “governing through death”
has become the dominant form of managing and controlling Black
and poor populations (Alves Amparo, 2018; see also Mbembe, 2003;
Vargas and Alves Amparo, 2010). The figure of the marginal is
regarded as ungovernable and neither citizen nor human, powerfully
verbalized in the common expression “direitos humanos para quem
é humano” (human rights for those who are human).
By forcing unwilling encounters between military police and
favela residents, conflicts like pacification can generate new and un-
predictable forms of trust that are not tied to social solidarity, equal-
ity, or kinship but to aspirations of visibility. They encourage coded
performances of “good” citizenship in highly divisive and unequal
societies grounded in conventions of good speech, narrative ratio-
nality, and embodied affect (McKinnon, 2009, 205). In Rio's pacified
favelas, I observed how residents employed confiança to develop
temporary and frail trust networks with the police as a necessary
performance to make themselves legible to the state. It is within
this context that the pacification police efforts need to be analyzed
to offer a deeper understanding of what trust in law enforcement
means, how it is produced, what it includes, and what it excludes in
places like Rio.
The UPPs drew inspiration from different community policing
models, including the Japanese Koban community policing model
and several US community policing models that are deeply influ-
enced by the works of Tom Tyler, who emphasizes procedural justice
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as the key to success. In their book Trust in the Law (2002), Tom R.
Tyler and Yuen Huo argue that the police need public support and
voluntary cooperation to be legitimate, theorizing that the police
achieve such cooperation based on trust if they are viewed as le-
gitimate legal authorities. However, in my experience in Brazil, the
degree to which the police can generate trust is only sometimes
demonstrated through legal actions. On the contrary, as I will show,
some residents lost trust in the local UPP because the police were
unwilling or unable to crack down on petty crime.
I look to the work of Aisha Beliso-­De Jesús (2020) and Laurence
Ralph (2014, 2020) for understanding the police as an institution of
white supremacy and making links between whiteness and trust.
This article shows the entanglements between white supremacy, the
production and reproduction of gender, and policing as a political
project. The following analysis centers on two figures, police officers
Pricilla and Achilles, who are ethnographically representative of how
trust is built on race and gender norms. The third ethnographic sec-
tion focuses on the complex impacts of a trust-­based policing model
on favela residents' experiences and claims of citizenship.
My research is based on several lengthy field trips to Rio
between 2008 and 2015, but my relationship with Brazil dates to
2002 when I was an exchange student. I have since returned annu-
ally. In 2009, I worked with a nongovernmental organization (NGO)
in Rio, where I had my first contact with police, favelas, and drug
traffickers during a terrifying police raid and shootout. I spent the
summers of 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2014–­2015 at a favela I
call Morro da Saudade (a pseudonym), which was pacified in 2011.
While I visited dozens of other favelas before and after pacification,
I spent the most time at Morro das Flores (a pseudonym), Saudade,
Providência, and Santa Marta, where I conducted interviews with
residents and police. The two latter favelas have distinct character-
istics and were widely publicized; thus, I refer to them by their real
names. However, I purposefully scrambled some dates, descriptions,
and events to protect research participants. As a white European
woman fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, I fit within the more extensive

CITY & SOCIETY
definition of who should be trusted and was, therefore, able to gain
access to both police and favela residents.
PR I C I LL A , TH E “A N O M A LY ”
In 2010, when I first conducted research in Rio, there were only
three female commanding officers in a handful of UPPs in Rio de
Janeiro. In 2008, Major Pricilla de Oliveira Azevedo oversaw the first
favela pacification in Morro da Santa Marta. From 2009 to 2011,
Pricilla was the commander, responsible for 123 officers serving
under her and a community of approximately 4,000 inhabitants. Her
relationship with Santa Marta residents seemed kind but firm, as it
was with the primarily male officers. For example, her officers re-
ceived a formal order to eat in local restaurants to establish rapport
with residents. Initially, the police and community were outraged by
the proposition, but eventually police officers would come to sit with
locals at lunch.
Given Pricilla's popularity, I was surprised to hear that she was
opposed to accepting this role. A year before taking over command,
she had been carjacked. When the perpetrators realized that she
was a police officer, they brought Pricilla to their drug lord. She was
beaten and tortured but later escaped. She told me that residents
caught her and returned her to the traffickers. Pricilla was eventually
rescued. After this traumatic incident, Pricilla admitted that the idea
of working with favelados repelled her. She thought the UPP was
“para inglês ver” (a façade). She tried to refuse the offer but soon
discovered it was an order.
“There were few other female officers with the necessary rank
and experience for the job. I had no choice. But in my mind, all fave-
lados  were bandidos (criminals),” Pricilla admitted. Soon, however,
“my thinking changed with the experience of good citizens” (my em-
phasis). According to Pricilla, the most challenging part was earning
people's trust. An elite police squad had temporarily occupied Santa
Marta in 1991. When the drug traffickers regained control, they ex-
ecuted residents they considered police informants. Pricilla had the
difficult mission of convincing people that the UPP was there to stay,
something she did not believe.
Pricilla presented on several levels as an exception and challenged
assumptions about what interracial comfort and trust can look like
in a society that still grapples with the legacy of slavery. In her mid-­
30s at the time, she was a Black woman who was single, childless,
and literally equipped to kill. In a society that defines womanhood
through motherhood and submission, Pricilla defied such precondi-
tions for trust and comfort. The Christian image of motherly purity
stands in opposition to the paternal state (Taylor, 1994). While Black
women and mothers are often assumed to not embody such purity,
racialization relies not only on looks but also on social performance
and language (Smith, 2016). In the case of Pricilla, the UPP invested
heavily in shaping her public appearances to achieve “situational
whiteness,” “a temporary racial status that does not entail feeling or
identifying as white, and it does not mean that dark-­skinned people
are ultimately viewed as white” (Roth-­Gordon, 2017, 39). However,
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      17
situational whiteness improves chances of respect, citizenship rights,
and employment in a society where Afro-­Brazilians are stereotyped
as uncultured and uncivilized. Those who live in favelas are taught
that the “good citizen” is the one who is deserving of safety, infra-
structure, and polite treatment by police. Those who do not belong
to this category are represented as a dangerous element associated
with marginal spaces, pollution, and contamination (Bueno, de Lima,
and Carvalho Teixeira 2016, 348). The notion of the trustworthy
good citizen reinforces structures of white supremacy, class, and a
dichotomy that regards Blackness as marginal.
Based on her life experience, Pricilla initially viewed the favela as
a dangerous space outside of “real society” whose inhabitants must
be controlled, subdued, and pacified. Beliso-­De Jesús  (2020, 151)
noticed the same ideology in her fieldwork with police officers in
the US, arguing that “these social Darwinisms imbue global fascist
intimacies into embodied police practice.” Didier Fassin describes
similar conditions in Parisian ghettos, where police “have been given
the task of pacifying neighborhoods described as a ‘jungle,’ inhab-
ited mainly by people of African origin who have been represented
to them as ‘savages’” (Fassin 2013, 52). Relatedly, favela residents
expressed to me their distrust of Black police officers, who they
thought were especially vicious.
Although Blackness in Brazil and the Americas, in general, is
constructed as ungovernable, in Pricilla's case, the UPP framed trust
around the notion of female care. This was no easy task because
Pricilla was socially considered past her prime—­at 36, she was sin-
gle and childless, attributes that caused many speculations about
her sexuality and credibility as a woman. The UPP's remedy was
to soften Pricilla's public persona by widely sharing her kidnapping
story—­depicting her as a victim rather than a perpetrator of violence.
The UPP public relations team choreographed interviews and public
appearances to emphasize her “docile temperament” (Costa, 2013)
by providing images that depicted her as crying, carrying children, or
holding flowers (see Figures 2 and 3).
Pricilla never liked using makeup, but it was recommended to
her on several occasions to soften her look, even though makeup
and nail polish are officially prohibited under the military proto-
col. Santa Marta residents noted with a hint of surprise that she
was “well-­spoken” and educada (polite and educated) despite being
“pretinha” (a “cute” Black woman). Pricilla's gender and status be-
came markers of safety despite her Blackness, but she also forged
a “situational whiteness” through her speech, employment, and ed-
ucation (Roth-­Gordon  2009, 18). These efforts seemed to work, as
Pricilla was widely referred to as a role model for UPP commanders.
Her Blackness legitimized the program as empathetic in a way that
whiteness probably could not have.
Pricilla's embodied performance of a soft, emphatic police force
was crucial to the emergence of local trust and confidence in law
enforcement. When Pricilla took her daily walks through the com-
munity, she decided not to carry a rifle but a pistol, a decision her
colleagues thought was reckless. Children, as well as adults, came
out to greet her publicly. In Rio's favelas, drug traffickers see anyone
friendly with police officers as an X9, a traitor and informant who
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18       ENFORCING TRUST: RACE, GENDER, AND THE POLICING OF CITIZENSHIP IN RIO DE JANEIRO

F I G U R E 2  Pricilla with two girls from Santa Marta who came to visit her at the UPP quarters. Rio de Janeiro 2010. Photo by author. [This
figure appears in color in the online issue.]

F I G U R E 3  Pricilla at a UPP ceremony in 2013. Photo credit: Bruno Gonzalez / Agência O Globo. [This figure appears in color in the online
issue.]

should be harshly punished. Hence, Pricilla being openly greeted,
hugged, and spoken to by community members is a highly unusual
sight that suggests those residents trusted they were safe from both
police and drug trafficker violence. Santa Marta enjoyed over six
years without shootouts, and its residents credited Pricilla.
In July 2013, Amarildo de Souza, a bricklayer from the Rocinha
favela, was kidnapped and disappeared by UPP officers. As a result,
the pacification program faced its first international scandal. Trust
began unraveling and the policing program came under fire. Many
say that the pushback against the UPP began with Amarildo's disap-
pearance and triggered what became known as the Rocinha effect
(Brooks, 2016). To appease the public, UPP leaders decided to put
Pricilla in charge of Rocinha to repair the relationship between police
and residents. They chose her precisely because of her gender, race,
and reputation.
The Rocinha inauguration ceremony had Pricilla standing in a row
of all-­white, all-­male police officers. She stood stoic but held back
tears. Some residents expressed approval, saying that as a woman,
Pricilla had a pulso fino [(“thin wrist,” meaning soft or “does not crack
down”). Pricilla was transferred from Santa Marta, a very small
favela, to Rocinha, one of the largest complexes in Latin America,
where the police had already developed far-­reaching networks and

CITY & SOCIETY
arrangements with criminal organizations. The timing was also in-
opportune as the city, and drug traffickers, were gearing up for the
masses of tourists expected for the 2014 World Cup. A few months
later, an investigation discovered that Pricilla's subordinates col-
luded with the local Rocinha gang to have Pricilla killed so they could
appoint a cop who was “friendly” with the Rocinha drug lord.
Race and gender are crucial to creating trust in the context of po-
licing Rio's favelas. The relationship between race, gender, and polic-
ing has several consequences for the model of trust employed on the
ground. First, race and gender must be understood as intersectional,
not separate, issues that produce economies of trust in conversation
with one another. Second, the cultural construction of masculinity is
central to understanding trust in the context of the military police
(Gripp and Zaluar, 2017; Hautzinger, 2007; MacDowell Santos, 2004;
Penglase, 2010). Thomas Salem and Erika Robb-­L arkins (2021) write
that the urban battles in Rio are structured by “wild masculinity,” a
concept that points toward racial and gendered dynamics of state
violence. Women are rarely employed in the field, and police officers
are, by and large, men who enter the force “thirsty for blood,” as one
cop told me.
The UPP framed such “wild masculinity” as a lack of profes-
sionalism. It required officers to participate in training sessions fo-
cused on dialogue, conflict resolution, and nonlethal weapons, all
locally coded as feminine (Salem and Larkins 2021). In addition, the
UPP assumed that women would have greater empathy than men
(Hautzinger,  2007). This call for an empathetic and professional
version of a historically brutal military police pushed women like
Pricilla to the forefront of the UPP, at least in how the program was
marketed. The pacification program was also an attempt to pacify
the military police and the violent masculinity that it represents by
replacing it with feminine characteristics of dialogue, empathy, and
social service. However, as I show in the following section, on the
ground, this involved a delicate balance between people's demand
for a less oppressive force and police desire to signal trustworthi-
ness through discipline, manliness, and whiteness.
AC H I LLE S : TRU S TI N G J U S T V I O LE N C E
In addition to employing the supposed docile temperament of female
police officers, the UPP has also employed whiteness and masculin-
ity to build confidence in the police within deeply traumatized com-
munities. I have witnessed this in several pacified favelas, but one
commander at the Morro das Flores is a particularly exemplary case.
The 2010 pacification of Morro das Flores was strategically timed
to coincide with Rio's hosting of the World Urban Forum just blocks
away in the city's port. It was also seen as imperative for ensuring
security and guaranteeing the long-­term viability of the expensive
Porto Maravilha port revitalization project. In Flores, ties between
residents and traffickers were strong and, as a result, the community
was more reluctant to welcome the UPP.
A significant dimension of citizenship that the UPP emphasized
in Flores was the importance of individual relationships between
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      19
citizens and the state, primarily developed at regular police–­
community meetings. Residents were encouraged to keep police
accountable but without the help of political brokers or the neigh-
borhood association (which was traditionally the link between drug
traffickers and the formal city). The state was asking for an open
display of trust in return for providing the right to security, social
services, and inclusion. Trust became an essential factor in such cit-
izenship performances, and it came with deeply ingrained racialized
and gendered qualifiers.
In Flores, the president of the neighborhood association re-
fused to come to the UPP inauguration ceremony and discouraged
residents from attending. However, the numerous residents who
attended seemed impressed by the police officer in charge, a hand-
some branco (white) man in his early 30s whom I call Achilles. In
Brazil's socio-­historical environment, Achilles fulfilled a racial ideal of
beauty and manliness. He was tall, muscular, and had straight brown
hair, cut military style. According to many women in the crowd, his
most admired feature was his piercing green eyes. Achilles became
a literal poster child for the UPP program (he was on UPP posters
and flyers) due to his boa aparência (good appearance), a euphemism
for whiteness. To residents, Achilles did not look like the police of-
ficers they usually encountered. The extremely violent police raids
residents were used to were traditionally performed by Black offi-
cers who grew up in favelas. In contrast, Achilles was presented as
emblematic of the professional, trustworthy peace officer the UPP
advertised: “polícia de primeiro mundo”—­a first-­world cop.
When we met, Achilles had just been promoted to captain.
Growing up in the middle class, Achilles had enough privilege to
obtain an economics degree and could afford the expensive lieu-
tenant's exam for lateral entry into the military police. Achilles was
motivated to apply to the military police by ideas of heroism, mas-
culinity, and adventure instilled in him throughout his childhood
through stories about family members. His grandfather was a pilot
in the Brazilian Air Force, and his father served in the Marines. Both
had served the military dictatorship (1964–­1985). However, unlike
most ranking officers, keen on the safety of a desk job, Achilles led
operations in favelas.
Achilles's first strategy to establish trust was to target the
Flores's youngest and most impressionable members by offering
free karate classes for youth, taught by a white police officer inside
the UPP headquarters (see Figure  4). For the first several weeks,
only a few students attended the classes. Eventually, more children
began to come, even though their parents would not set foot in-
side the UPP. The program quickly blossomed. Eventually, the karate
group qualified for national competitions, and Achilles raised funds
so that each child would receive a uniform and could travel to the
championship representing the UPP—­not the favela.
Seeing their children featured as role models in local news out-
lets, many Flores parents saw the UPP as an opportunity to enter
the sphere of citizenship. They trusted that the police were not
going to harm their children. Moreover, the karate lessons became
a match-­making opportunity for single mothers and police officers.
Decades of pronounced violence against and mass incarceration
 |
20       ENFORCING TRUST: RACE, GENDER, AND THE POLICING OF CITIZENSHIP IN RIO DE JANEIRO
F I G U R E 4  Local children at Karate training taught by a police officer inside the UPP. Rio de Janeiro, 2010. Photo by author. [This figure
appears in color in the online issue.]
of men have left many women-­run households (Barros, Fox, and
Mendonça,  1997; McIlwaine, 2020; Tribouillard and Eloy, 2022). A
long history of racism has also spurred the trope of the “broken Black
family,” which asserts the importance of a coherent, white family as
the paragon of what is good and orderly.
Achilles also organized a debutante ball in the favela. The press
widely covered the event and the images of young girls dancing
with ranking military police in white uniforms became one of the
most potent symbols of UPP's potential to build trust and promote
social inclusion. Giggling girls spun tales about marrying one of
those privileged officers, having green-­eyed babies, and moving
into an apartment in the asfalto. Six months after Flores's pacifica-
tion, a shift in perspective was perceptible among many children
whose role models switched from drug traffickers to white police
officers.
I realized this vital shift when Duda, a nine-­year-­old girl from
Flores, and her friends shared stories about their lives and experi-
ences. The clean uniforms of the police and the kindness of their
karate trainer, they said, made the police more appealing to them
than drug traffickers. I asked how they felt about the guns the po-
lice carry, but the weapons did not worry the children; instead, they
said the guns assured protection. Whiteness and other markers of
masculinity, such as power and weapons, helped convey a sense of
legitimate authority and fatherhood in the eyes of these young resi-
dents and hence, comfort.
Achilles's reputation as a leader with a capacity for violence had
preceded him—­but it was not interpreted as a hindrance. The ques-
tion for Flores residents was never whether police should use vio-
lence but when and to what extent. Nevertheless, Achilles was not
hesitant to harness his reputation by warning people that he would
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“work differently” if they did not behave properly. Specifically, he
was referring to public displays of loyalty to the Comando Vermelho
(such as playing funk music, congregating in the drug lord's bar,  or
using moto taxis without papers) and criticism of the UPP (for in-
stance, via graffiti or social media).
Achilles was hard on the officers he led, too, performing his au-
thority through an almost martyrial use of force. The low ranks of
the military police are traditionally occupied mostly by Black men
“who are seen as marginal, corrupt, and uneducated” (French, 2013,
171) and considered no better than the bandidos they are supposed
to apprehend. While white police officers were treated more fairly
and with some curiosity, Black cops were regularly reported to
Achilles even for relatively small transgressions (such as a verbal ar-
gument or a standard frisk) with demands for punishment. Achilles
usually followed through, and I encountered several disgruntled
cops sweeping floors under administrative arrest. However, one in-
cident solidified Achilles's legitimacy as a trustworthy protector of
the community. When Flores residents filed a complaint about two
Black soldados (soldiers) using pepper spray on local youth, Achilles
did not hesitate: He locked the accused men and the other local po-
lice officers in a room and released an entire can of pepper spray.
Achilles also stayed in the room, stoic, with tears running down his
face while officers coughed and vomited. The event was secretly
recorded on a phone and the video made its rounds in the commu-
nity. Achilles himself proudly showed me the video. The community
celebrated Achilles, but his officers saw him as a traitor.
The community's approval of Achilles's threats and use of force
left me confused. In 2008, the community suffered the tragic kid-
napping and murder of three teenagers by the Brazilian Army. Earlier,
in the 1990s, residents told me the military police allegedly threw a

CITY & SOCIETY
grenade into the local kindergarten. In Flores, I met countless women
who had lost their sons to state violence. The main explanations I
received, primarily from older women, revolved around Achilles
being considered “honorable and bonito” (pretty). They idealized
the violence he engaged in in the past as acts of justice directed
against bandidos and assumed such violence would not impact
the cidadão do bem (good citizen). People seemed to trust Achilles's
judgment but not that of the police overall. For instance, when an
argument broke out between police officers and a young man in
Flores, who protested being frisked, the man's mother screamed:
“Call Achilles!” Such expression of trust in a police officer (but deadly
fear of beat cops) would not have been possible even a year prior.
Of course, this sentiment was not universal, but it was remarkable.
Achilles fit well into the UPP's reframing of the role of the police
from warrior to guardian. But as Beliso De-­Jesús points out, “What is
often left unstated is that the so-­called warrior-­guardian is actually
an embodied white supremacist social arrangement. Indeed, even
the benevolent guardian is a white male protector—­a good-­soldier,
white-­savior figure.” (Beliso-­De Jesús, 2020, 148). Iris Marion Young
calls attention to the importance of considering the image of mas-
culinity that is associated with ideas of chivalry: “In one relation
the hierarchical power is obvious and in the other is more masked
by virtue and love” (Young, 2003, 6). The role of the courageous,
responsible, and virtuous man—­as Achilles was positioned by the
women I spoke to—­is that of protector (see Figure 5). Female subor-
dination, in this logic, is not based on submission to an authoritarian
and violent man but on the joy and gratitude of feeling protected by
a virile man willing to face the dangers of the world to guarantee the
safety of his family. In this patriarchal logic, a man's role of protector
guarantees him a position of superiority and places the protected
F I G U R E 5  UPP commander "Achilles" overlooking the asfalto from the top of the favela hill. Rio de Janeiro July 2012. Photo by author.
[This figure appears in color in the online issue.]
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      21
(paradigmatically women and children) in a position of subordina-
tion, dependence, and obedience. According to Young, to the degree
that the citizens of a democratic state permit their leaders to adopt
this role, they occupy a subordinated status, similar to that of women
and children in a patriarchal domestic unit.
Achilles's power and the trust residents offered him must also be
understood in a racial context. Race plays a crucial role in differen-
tiating between aggressive masculinity and “the protector,” who is
imagined as white. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak critiques the image
of “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak, 2014,
119), calling attention to the racialization of gender in colonial salva-
tionist practices. In a context where even Black residents had been
conditioned to think of Black people as “savage,” the pale skin of
UPP police officers was interpreted as a marker of safety and oppor-
tunity. The open display of trust became a symbol of allegiance and
submission to the state in the hope of receiving the full benefits of
citizenship in return.
C ITIZE N S H I P I S TO O E X PE N S I V E!
In its early years, the UPP's success was demonstrated in residents'
satisfaction, resulting in a new form of segregation in Rio—­not just
between favela and asfalto but also between pacified and non-­
pacified favelas (Penglase, 2014). Knowing that only a tiny portion of
favelas would get the “privilege,” many residents were eager to be-
come pacified. Standing at the top of the Saudade favela, my friend
Beto observed visible changes at the pacified favela Providência on
an opposite hill. Since Providência's pacification a few months ago, a
funicular was built to bring in tourists. Pretty houses were erected,
 |
22       ENFORCING TRUST: RACE, GENDER, AND THE POLICING OF CITIZENSHIP IN RIO DE JANEIRO
and a playground and a family health unit were constructed. Google
came in and mapped pacified favelas to make these former blank
spots visible for the first time on Google Maps.
“Tá bonito!” –­ it's pretty –­ Beto said approvingly. He and other
residents spent their evenings whispering about the possibility of
getting their own UPP (uma UPP pra gente), careful not to be heard by
local traffickers who were cracking down on any mention of pacifi-
cation. There was speculation at Saudade about whether they would
receive a good-­looking captain like Achilles or maybe even a female
officer like Pricilla. Many were undecided about which option they
would prefer, but the overall feeling was that it would be nice to have
a woman lead the favela for once.
When the day came, just after Carnival in 2011, the drug gang did
not offer any resistance as most had left the area already and sought
refuge in one of the larger favelas, such as Maré. Every favela con-
trolled by a gang would have its leader called dono do morro (owner of
the hill). At Saudade, the dono was soon found and arrested, and his
golden AK-­47, a symbol of his strength, was prominently displayed
by the police in news stories and on social media. Saudade residents
were cautiously and anxiously awaiting what would change and what
these new police officers would look like. In contrast to Santa Marta,
in Saudade cops rarely patrolled the streets. The police had grouped
three communities on adjacent hills into one UPP and provided only
64 officers for each shift, of which a third was stationed at the local
headquarters set up in a shipping container, leaving few to patrol the
large and geographically challenging terrain.
Moreover, the communities around Saudade had been ruled by
rival gangs, so residents were afraid that the police would use infor-
mation against each other. People were bitterly disappointed with
the lack of visible police officers, flourishing drug sales (including
those of crack cocaine), and the absence of a strong charismatic
commander like those they had seen on television. The commander
at the time was a white man, but he displayed the aggressive top-­
down approach of a warrior, not a guardian. He was rarely present in
the favela and did not promote social events. Very quickly, it became
apparent that the drug gang reconfigured their operation under
the leadership of the dono's wife and the tutelage of the UPP com-
mander. Nevertheless, the community saw welcomed infrastructural
changes, such as the construction of a clinic, daycare center, play-
grounds, and closure of baile funk locations.
Being a resident in a UPP-­run favela became virtual proof of mem-
bership in a white-­coded world that remained otherwise elusive for
most favela residents. In various pacified favelas, many residents em-
braced the presence of police officers to claim citizenship and oppor-
tunities. For example, Flavio owned a small bakery behind the UPP
container in Flores. “Everything was much more difficult before the
UPP because my suppliers were too afraid to enter the community,”
Flavio reflected. Nevertheless, he was proud that after pacification,
he finally got an official permit for his business. To Flavio, the permit
was a victory he directly attributed to the UPP and the local com-
mander who had supported him. To Flavio, the permit was his formal
transition from illicit vendor to respectable “businessman” (as he now
referred to himself in English). Flavio was also the president of the
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commerce association in the community, helping others formalize
their businesses, build partnerships, and organize meetings with sup-
pliers. In addition, he used his position to mediate between the police
and residents, introducing officers to neighbors and promoting trust.
In 2012, not long after Flavio gave a newspaper interview prais-
ing the UPP, he was killed by five shots to the head inside his bakery,
which was then burned to the ground. A local drug kingpin claimed
responsibility for the killing. Although weakened by pacification,
drug cartels still had strong links in the community, violently enforc-
ing their control to destabilize the UPP.
Through severe threats and punishments for supporting the
UPP, the program quickly made life too complicated for the aver-
age Morro da Saudade resident. “Ser cidadão é caro demais!” (being
a citizen is too expensive) exclaimed Ivete in 2011 upon receiving
her first electricity bill of BRL 600 (a small fortune) a few months
after Morro da Saudade's pacification. Ivete had a small beauty salon
above her home in which several fans, hairdryers, and straighteners
were continuously in use. Ivete had been excited about the UPP, as
she had seen her nephews join the local gang and hoped her young
sons would have a different future. However, holding the bill in her
hands, she was unsure if she could afford it. Under the gang's rule,
residents received free electricity, water, and protection against
petty crime. There was no property tax or building codes. However,
the UPP presented residents with new challenges.
Residents found the new bureaucratic standards of tax codes,
bills, and regulations challenging to maneuver, mainly because their
survival had always hinged on flexibility. Moreover, the UPP police
were poorly equipped to deal with petty crime, which increased after
pacification. Once, I walked with Ivete and her sister Inalva to the
local civil police precinct to report a burglary. In Brazil, the civil po-
lice are responsible for investigations, so the UPP, as a military unit,
had no investigative power. 2 After having us wait for over an hour
at the empty precinct, a delegado (senior civil police) approached us.
Ivete started telling him about the breakin at her beauty salon, but
he stared at Inalva and finally said: “Aren't you the mother of that
little shit they call Fogete?” Inalva's older son had run with the traf-
fickers in the past. The delagado refused to take her statement and
said the tráfico (drug gang) should take care of it. When we explained
that it was a UPP now, he sarcastically stated they should take care
of such “social issues.” Back in Saudade, we ran into a small patrol of
young UPP officers, visibly scared because they were surprised by
children throwing firecrackers at them from a roof. “How am I going
to ask them for help? They want to be good, so they do everything
wrong,” Ivete exclaimed. A few days later, Ivete's items were returned
by a drug trafficker who used “effective tactics” to catch the thief.
Saudade's pacification also led to the disappearance of local busi-
ness and leisure. The weekly baile funk party had been the highlight of
many residents' week and stimulated the local economy. Beauty sa-
lons filled with clients getting groomed for the event, street vendors
sold food to drunk partygoers, and moto boys (an informal motorcy-
cle taxi service) brought in guests from outside the favela. However,
the criminalization of funk music and moto taxis (taxi services on
motorcycles) took away the few means of leisure, income, and

CITY & SOCIETY
mobility. At the same time, private investors bought people out of
their homes and started capitalizing on favelas as “gritty” places to build
hotels, studios, and bars, displacing local entrepreneurs. Resistance to
such a takeover was quickly silenced. Thus, people were displaced not
only spatially but, as Keisha Khan-­Perry (2013) argues, epistemologi-
cally by stripping Black people of political power. Pacification was pre-
sented as a remedy to structural inequality by giving favela residents
an official address and law enforcement. However, social inclusion
manifested primarily in the form of gringofication of favelas, making the
upscaling appealing to curious foreign investors.
The police were unaware of this gap between their mission and
the experience of the community. They believed that if residents
could only understand their point of view, they would trust their
judgment. At police–­community meetings I attended, officers ex-
plained the decisions involved in stopping and frisking someone, the
fear of facing armed gangsters, and the difficulty of navigating the
favela's complex territory (see Figure 6). Police wanted residents to
empathize with them and take up the anticipatory logic that certain
things, such as funk music, have the potential for criminal activity.
“What do you want me to think if I see a young man hanging
around in the middle of the day, listening to funk, wearing a gold
chain and an expensive shirt? You must help us by denouncing bandi-
dos,” commander Bruno told a group of residents at one such meet-
ing in Morro da Providência. The community had been complaining
about increased frisking and the rough manners of the police. Bruno
listed attributes that make people suspicious and made the case that
the police have no other option than to identify such people as risks.
Many residents, especially the Black and young ones, refused this
ideology that criminalized them, but lighter-­
skinned evangelicals
widely accepted the claims.
The 2014 and 2016 international sports events enabled the re-
turn of drug gangs, for whom the games were a big sales opportu-
nity (cocaine baggies with the Olympic rings printed on them made
international news (Payne 2016)). Many scholars have argued that
F I G U R E 6  UPP event at "Morro das Flores." Rio de Janeiro 2010. Photo by author. [ This figure appears in color in the online issue.]
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      23
the extent to which state control has been imposed on pacified
favelas is grossly exaggerated (Richmond 2019; Wolff 2019).
They argue that pacification was a complex negotiation between
police and drug traffickers. However, such fusion of power was
catastrophic for residents and “good cops” alike (Human Rights
Watch, 2016). Residents had no enhanced social control but rather
faced uncertainty about the rules they were expected to follow
and who was enforcing them (Richmond, 2019). “Good cops” trying
to make a change and combat crime became targets of threats and
assassination, and they lacked support from their ranks (Human
Rights Watch, 2016). Only one year after pacification, Morro da
Saudade made the news because their UPP had been involved
in a major corruption scheme. Two police officers who allegedly
internally reported criminal involvement by their colleagues and
superiors were lured into a trap and killed by a hand grenade
during their patrol in the community. It was widely understood
that while gang members threw the grenade, it had been provided
to them by the UPP commander, along with the coordinates of the
patrol. Eventually, the commander was removed and investigated,
but the deep mistrust within the police unit and the community
lingered on. In the UPP, trust had functioned as a vehicle for both
good policing and good citizenship. But residents quickly realized
that without media publicity or involved commanders, there was
no audience for whom to perform trust.
LE T TI N G G O O F TRU S T
Historically, the government's strategic disinvestment in favelas
maintained a clear distinction between the asfalto and favela. The
police and drug traffickers maintained these contours of exclusion
through spectacular battles accentuating the segregation of favelas
from “real society.” Pacification was a promise of visibility, an at-
tempt to soften these social contours by “rescuing” favela residents
 |
24       ENFORCING TRUST: RACE, GENDER, AND THE POLICING OF CITIZENSHIP IN RIO DE JANEIRO
from the chaos created by “evil” gangsters and including them in a
structured and legible form of citizenship based on trust.
Pacification conveyed specific ideas about the state's respon-
sibilities and citizens' duties. The message was that by removing
drug traffickers from the community, reducing shootouts, and
saturating the favela with “nice,” light-­s kinned and female police
officers, the state took care of favela residents, offering them cit-
izenship. In exchange, the UPP outlined the duty of residents to
behave “properly,” according to the state's imagination of cidadão
do bem  (good citizen). For example, playing funk music, smoking
marijuana, operating a moto taxi without explicit permission, re-
ceiving electricity through a clandestine electricity connection
called a gato,  and certain hairstyles were all interpreted as coisa
de marginal (things thugs do) and not compatible with good
citizenship.
Generally, favelados, and especially Afro-­Brazilians, are regarded
as noncitizens. Hence, most people in poor areas actively fear the
police because the bodies to be protected (white) and the sources of
threat (Black) are widely agreed upon. The promised inclusion into
the formal city meant for many residents the opportunity to become
part of the protections of the asfalto; thus, many chose to trust the
police and become trustworthy to the state.
Trust was courted by employing white and female officers, who,
by virtue of gendered and racialized notions of professionalism and
civility, introduced a different public image of the police. This sent
the message that the state trusted favela residents enough to send
their “best”: professionals who underwent training abroad in coun-
tries like the US and Japan. They differentiated themselves from the
brutal police officers of the past, who were majority Black.
The case studies presented here, of Pricilla and Achilles, serve
as entry points into a conversation about how race and gender in-
tersect with trust in Rio de Janeiro. Although Blackness in Brazil and
the Americas, in general, is represented as ungovernable, in Pricilla's
case, the UPP framed trust around the notion of female care. In
contrast, Achilles engendered trust by assuming the role of guard-
ian, a role based in white supremacy and paternalism. Both may be
perceived as succeeding in promoting trust in favelas. However, my
ethnography shows that residents directed trust strategically at se-
lected cops who offered temporary access to rights and opportuni-
ties. Hence, the placative display of trust by collaborating, smiling,
and participating residents was a disguised form of historical dis-
trust and resistance. People knew that the state had no intention of
awarding universal rights to all but would award such rights only to
those deemed good citizens.
Violence is at the heart of pacification, masked by a human rights
rhetoric. Before pacification, police presence in the favelas was
spectacular but short-­lived. Less spectacular, the introduction of the
UPP force was more traumatic. Pacification extended law enforce-
ment's reach across the public domain and into people's private lives,
policing from within. The UPP project not only tried to distinguish
between marginals and good citizens; the project was, at its core,
an attempt at upgrading slums and either dispersing an undesir-
able population or turning them into good citizens akin to those in
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the asfalto. The resulting racial encoding of citizenship as an achieve-
ment, constructs trust as a performance of whiteness and belonging.
While the attempt to establish rapport and human rights under
pacification was unprecedented, the police's inability to live up to
“democratic” standards resulted in a discourse that appropriated,
transmogrified, and undercut trust. The UPP project reveals how
(dis) trust in Brazil has transformed across dramatic political and
economic change. It urges us not only to arrive at a deeper under-
standing of the harm caused by standardized law enforcement but
also by the assumption that trust is essential for “good” policing.
Instead, this ethnography serves as a tool to repair the idea that
trust is the solution to all our problems with policing. For regions
where policing chronically results in violence instead of public ser-
vice and order-­making, my research shows the devastating conse-
quences of enforcing highlight racialized and gendered versions
of trust.
AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S
Research for this article was funded by the SSRC Drugs, Security,
and Democracy Fellowship. It would not have been possible without
the friendship and facilitation of the residents of Rio's favelas and
members of the Military Police. I thank Julian Brash, Kristin Monroe,
and the reviewers for their sharp and insightful feedback and com-
ments. I am especially thankful to my colleagues who provided inval-
uable guidance, in particular, Alisse Waterston and Edward Snajdr.
ORCID
Marta-­Laura Haynes  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1791-9876
E N D N OT E S
1 Michael Jackson's music video “They Don't Care about Us” (directed
by Spike Lee) was filmed in Santa Marta in 1996 with the permission
of the then-­drug lord. The filming was controversial, as government
officials felt images of the favela wouldn't reflect well on the country
and tried to ban the shoot, unsuccessfully. Despite the imposing pres-
ence of more than 1,000 police officers, residents were thrilled to see
Jackson perform on the streets of their favela.
2 Law enforcement in Brazil is broadly divided into the federal police,
civil police, and military police. The military police are responsible for
field operations, patrols, and general peacekeeping but does not have
any investigative power. That is left to the civil and federal police.
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26       ENFORCING TRUST: RACE, GENDER, AND THE POLICING OF CITIZENSHIP IN RIO DE JANEIRO

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