Outsiders inside: An accidental ethnography of policing in Brazil

Several obstacles and challenges interfere with the process of conducting research with police agencies, particularly since these agencies are traditionally closed to the public. This chapter draws on the experience and development of a project on police perceptions of legitimacy and authority in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. It introduces the Brazilian context, reflecting on the fieldwork with civil and military police organizations. Such research requires negotiating issues relating to trust and access to deeply hierarchical institutions and navigating questions of secrecy and silence inside state institutions, which can complicate research outputs. Once we gained access, our immersion in the field for conducting a mixed method research project transformed into an accidental ethnography of policing. Our reflection on field notes provides insights into a wider range of practices and perceptions that would otherwise remain obscured through our initially proposed methods, including surveys and interviews. The approach of analysing researchers’ observations in the field indicates that a range of social inequalities and vulnerabilities affecting both researchers and those being researched are revealed through immersion. This analysis sheds light on broader questions pertaining to the social and cultural context within which the police operate in Brazil.