Researchers at the Center for Justice and Society (CJUS) at Fundação Getulio Vargas’ Rio de Janeiro Law School have just launched a book titled “Public security integration challenges in the state of Rio de Janeiro.” The result of studies and discussions by this group of researchers, the book highlights key issues to be tackled in integrating the work of the Civil Police, Military Police, Public Prosecutors’ Office and prison system in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

The book, organized over the course of 18 months by Thiago Bottino, Daniel Vargas, Fernanda Prates Fraga, Semirames Khattar and Andreia Cidade, presents and discusses public security integration in Rio de Janeiro, analyzing how integration between these different organizations takes place in practice, obstacles to more effective integration policies and possible ways to improve the situation.

Although CJUS’ researchers focused on circumstances in the state of Rio de Janeiro, their suggestions for improvements in the field of security go beyond geographical boundaries and may be adapted and applied in other contexts in Brazil.

In recent times, integration has gained great visibility and centrality in public security debates. Not least because of the spread of organized crime across various regions of the country, the sharing of information between police agencies and criminal justice institutions has been identified as an essential measure to improve public security policies.

Over the past few years, several strategic implementation plans have been drawn up to improve coordination between the bodies responsible for public security in Brazil. Despite advances in legislation, there is still limited coordination between the Civil Police, Military Police, Public Prosecutors’ Office and prison system.

One point that stands out in the experts’ analysis is the model for differentiating between different police organizations. According to them, this causes inefficiency and a potential overlap of functions between the police, greatly limiting integration between institutions.

“We saw that the obstacles to integration mentioned by the interviewees are not few or small. According to many of them, they originate in the historical construction of distance between police forces, which culminated in the construction of separate institutional cultures, which are hard to connect. We also observed that different institutional cultures and possible rivalry can cause friction with regard to the specific roles of each public security institution, making integration difficult due to overlapping scopes of action. This problem seems to be exacerbated by failures and vagueness in the law,” says Professor Thiago Bottino, one of the book’s research coordinators.

The book can be downloaded free of charge here.