The idea of policing: a case study from the PMCE riot (2020)
Social perceptions; Symbolic power; Police; Policing; Police Strike
The symbolic and cultural scope of policing took a long time to establish itself as a
research agenda in the social sciences. The topic remains unexplored in Brazil. Through the analysis of
social perceptions about policing, I seek to contribute to this literature. The goal is to understand the
positions that agents, state and non-state, legal and illegal, public and private, occupy in the social space
according to those who experience their services and impositions. How do people from different
positions and social contexts perceive and evaluate police agents? How do these perceptions assign
certain meanings and roles to institutions and their agents? How do these senses and roles affect their
actions? To answer these questions, the research proposes a case study in the Metropolitan Region of
Fortaleza – CE, epicenter of the last riot by military police officers with a total stoppage of their
services, also allowing the analysis of the social perceptions of those who experienced the absence of
the main state agent of public policing.