Keepers of law and order x outlaws: Police brutality, torture and execution in Elite Squad

Abstract

The aim of this work is to investigate how Brazilian movies use representations of violence and symbolic oppression to evidence the police abuse of force in actions performed to fight crime in Brazilian slums. A recent Brazilian movie, Elite Squad (2007) shows that police methods of torture are used to obtain confessions, sometimes leading to cold blood executions without previous judgment. Police brutality against slum citizens implicitly induces the assumption – commonly tolerated in Brazil - that “a good criminal is a dead criminal”. The movie analysis depicted here focus on representations that clearly points out to violation of human rights and the mistreatment given by police to poor and marginalized citizens. We argue that those citizens are not perceived as worth human beings but as enemies to be eliminated. Therefore citizenship is not only a restricted matter of human rights but also one of misrecognition. Our analysis is based on a “diagnostic criticism of culture” (Kellner, 2001) which emphasizes: a) the social horizon of the movie and b) its discursive field (analysis of the message and visual resources).