Children’s blood: the utopia of civilian control over State violence

And one morning everything was burning,

and one morning the fires

rose from the earth

devouring beings,

and since then, blood.

Bandits with airplanes and with Moors,

bandits with rings and duchesses,

bandits with black-robed friars blessing,

came through the sky to kill children, 

and through the streets the blood of children

ran simply, like the blood of children.¹

Pablo Neruda, Spain in Our Hearts

Invasores de Cérebros, Children’s Blood.²

Research production and debates on the relationship between public security and human rights in Brazil go back more than fifty years. Their influence on prison reform policies and the bureaucratic organization of the police extends over forty. If we take the Carandiru Massacre, on October 2, 1992, as a landmark for changes and reforms in the criminal justice system, we see that in just over thirty years there has been no shortage of programs, projects, funding, courses, and seminars aimed at the “civilian control of the use of force and violence by state agents,” to use the main expression of this reformist grammar.

Since the mid-1990s, there have been three national human rights plans (PNDH I, II, and III), two national programs for security with citizenship (PRONASCI and PRONASCI II), various legal reforms (such as the 2006 drug law), new criminalizations, multiple protocols for police action, differentiated federal detention regimes (the federal RDDs for prisoners classified as highly dangerous), promises of development with security (PAC da Segurança, which resurfaces today). In addition, the national system for socio-educational services was created to regulate the imprisonment of young people (SINASE), and a large amount of research data was produced on the subject. Lots of paper, saliva, and money were spent in pursuit of an acceptable (as if such existed) and rational level of physical coercion by state agents.

The result was the unprecedented expansion of the prison system (with the creation of federal units and expansion of state units), the extension of the criminal justice system’s tentacles, and the exponential growth of police forces and other armed bureaucrats and security agents, both legal and illegal, private and state-run³. Judges and prosecutors became state secretaries and ministers of Justice and Public Security; anthropologists and experts advised governments (or assumed posts) and created new police forces; police officers were elected to various representative positions in state and federal executive and legislative offices; more and more innovative projects were created; technological monitoring solutions were tested and implemented; countless NGOs, institutes, and foundations were established with national and international funding; lands surrounding the irrigated perimeters of the São Francisco River were plundered; dozens of Indigenous and Quilombola leaders were assassinated. Even so, children’s blood continues to run through the streets, not despite this immense apparatus, but with it – produced by it, and by the forms of action it prescribes.

What is rarely considered is abolition. This is neither nonsense nor utopian projection. To consider abolition, at the very least, can result from a simple logical calculation: if there is much violence in the equation, why imagine addressing it by adding even more violence to the formula? Deactivating the killing dispositif is perfectly reasonable, but we know that this is not what is meant when people talk about controlling the use of force, but rather about its rational distribution. If the issue is violence and the use of weapons, how can one fail to see that their very use already contains abuse? The regulatory idea of political-civilian control of the use of force is a sufficient condition for the continuity of massacres and, as an externality of this pursuit, generates a field of negotiations and businesses that feed precisely on regular massacres, on the quest for their regulation, on the acceptance of the police as something that exists almost naturally, as an inevitable fact, like death itself. Abolition is possible and viable; it should be considered if, in fact, there is interest in containing the massacre. If so, this would also mean curbing the wide range of businesses that the massacre fuels, as well as posing new problems that must be addressed beyond and beneath the river of blood that the criminal justice system creates and sustains.

The persistence of reformist discourse limits the political horizon of the police problem: on the one hand, it tempers ambitions by reducing the issue to demilitarization; on the other, it creates Hobbesian ghosts of total disorder, a return to the state of nature. The obvious is forgotten: the size of the dark figure (the number of non-criminalized offenses) already indicates that most behaviors framed within the penal system are handled by means that circumvent state punitive power.

In this game and business field, the latest fashionable solution is the use of bodycams on military police officers to curb abuses in the use of lethal violence. In April 2025, the report Body Cameras in the Military Police of São Paulo State (2nd Edition): Policy Changes and Impact on Adolescent Deaths was published as the result, in its second edition, of research conducted by the Brazilian Public Security Forum (FBSP) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)⁴. The document records that 77 children and adolescents, between 10 and 19 years old, were killed by police officers in 2024. In 2022, there were 35 police executions in the same age group. In comparison, there was a 120% increase in the executions of children and youth by uniformed, on-duty police officers. The report highlights that the increase coincides with changes in body camera usage protocols, as well as in other procedures aimed at controlling police forces’ operations, especially the military police. This leads to the quite reasonable conclusion that the removal or limitation of bodycams influenced such a significant rise in executions. However, could the use of cameras on police officers be sufficient to contain it?

São Paulo state’s military police rank fifth in killings in Brazil, behind only the police forces of the states of Goiás, Pará, Rio de Janeiro, and Bahia. Despite peaks of lethality at certain times, large-scale killing is a constant feature of police forces in Brazil; and so is the killing of children, which places the military police among the leading causes of death for those who, given their age, should not be dying. According to Adriana Alvarenga, head of UNICEF’s São Paulo office, “police interventions are the second leading cause of violent death among children and adolescents in São Paulo, with 1 in 3 deaths in this age group caused by on-duty military police actions.”⁵. Alvarenga goes on to argue for the “urgent need to invest in public security policies that truly protect the lives of boys and girls and ensure priority in investigating and holding perpetrators accountable.” This path, whether well or poorly trodden, has existed for decades, and yet children’s blood continues to flow.

This is the cycle of lethal state violence: regularly frightening numbers suffer occasional spikes due to various factors, and from these spikes come recommended, created, or announced reforms and punctual changes that do not alter lethal regularity in any way; at most, they contain the spike of the moment or buy time until it subsides on its own. The same occurs with violent prison riots: shock is met with some punctual reforms that fill the space-time until a new riot forms or an immanent force takes over the prison. In the case of prison massacres, even a declaration of a blatant state of unconstitutionality was issued by the Supreme Federal Court, but the dungeons continue to exist and fill with people until a new riot, a new massacre, which will then be explained away with the vague and imprecise diagnosis of factional dispute.

Returning to the bodycam report, the numbers are indeed frightening. If we add the deaths of children and youth to those of adults, in 2024 there were 649 executions carried out by uniformed, on-duty police officers. In 2022, there were 256 executions, and in 2023, 353 lives were taken by the police, representing a 153.5% increase in two years. It is worth noting that, during the period covered by the report, the Escudo and Verão operations took place, initiatives of the São Paulo state government through its Secretariat of Public Security, launched on July 28, 2023 (Operação Escudo), in response to the death of R.O.T.A. officer Patrick Bastos Reis, and renewed in December of the same year as Operação Verão, which terrorized the São Paulo coast⁶.

If one can attribute to the adoption of bodycams by the military police some containment of uniformed police lethality, one must also observe that the exponential rise in child, youth, and adult deaths in 2024 is related to the launching of the Escudo and Verão operations, which, in less than a year, were already forgotten by mainstream media or reappeared, according to the São Paulo’s Secretariat of Public Security data, as the cause of falling crime rates in Baixada Santista.

In the U.S., where the implementation of body-worn cameras on state security agents began earlier – starting in 2014 – under the same justification of accountability and control over the use of force, we can observe some repercussions of this supposed technological solution. To begin with, it is worth noting that the police officers who killed George Floyd had functioning, active bodycams, which did not prevent them from suffocating the black man and later claiming he had resisted arrest. Furthermore, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, a review of 70 empirical studies on bodycams concluded that these devices had no significant or consistent effects on reducing police brutality. One of these studies even pointed out that cameras tend to be used more to defend police officers and reduce litigation costs than to hold them accountable for the violence they commit⁷, since bodycams frame police encounters in a specific way, favoring the police’s interpretation and point of view over other perspectives involved⁸. In addition, the footage remains in police hands, which control the recording, manipulation, analysis, and distribution of the images. If we understand the police as a governmental apparatus for producing knowledge about the population – that is, as a practice of visuality – body cameras not only prove insufficient to contain police violence, contrary to what is naively promoted, but also contribute to the production of images that reinforce and (re)legitimize violent and lethal police actions. By presenting themselves as “neutral” records and bearers of “truth,” these images conceal their own partiality, consolidating a narrative that validates the police perspective and erases other ways of seeing and understanding events – for instance, the historicity of the naturalization of racism inscribed in the very logic of police functioning⁹.

Looking more closely at the numbers, from the history of São Paulo’s military police and recent events, it becomes clear that the debate on the use of bodycams pushes the issue into the limbo of the utopia of civilian control over state force, whose result is the continuity and even expansion of massacres. It is worth recalling as well that the São Paulo’s Secretariat of Public Security already foresees the incorporation of images generated by police bodycams into the database of Muralha Paulista, a generative AI program aimed at creating predictive policing, launched by state decree no. 68.828 on September 4, 2024¹⁰. There is no real opposition to the use of cameras, but rather a dispute over their control and operation. In fact, the UNICEF and FBSP report does not advocate the use of bodycams as a panacea capable of solving the problem on their own, but rather as part of other “public security policies” that allow greater political control of the use of force by citizens and by so-called organized civil society through judicial practices – with everyday practices ranging from organizing solidarity surveillance groups linked to the Metropolitan Civil Guard to granting access to residential camera data for the Smart Sampa database. This is precisely why we call this projection a utopia, regardless of other possible interests it may mobilize, because it is police in form and, in practice, impossible by the very “nature” of police action and the political function of modern policing.

Modern police history tells us that it is not just another bureaucratic state body; because of its function, it enjoys great autonomy and is tasked with producing and gathering information by various means, including physical and psychological torture. Unsurprisingly, it was decisively important for statistical knowledge in modern times and now operates, even with AI support, actuarial knowledge. This provides governing and forecasting capacity. The police inhabit the gray zone of law and its application, which makes them not an instance of judgment, but of action. They carry out missions and, for this reason, have autonomy to employ various means in their execution, including illegal and/or exceptional ones, in the name of what they claim to be a greater good: the defense of society, the maintenance of order. They act and let act according to their own criteria. That is why so-called abuses, in their previously legitimized use of force, are always discussed and presented a posteriori, not a priori to any Law that could contain them. The police are not inscribed in the rule; they are responsible for the norm that guarantees order. Thus, every police action belongs to the order of the act: the police are the permanent coup d’état¹¹.

For their part, death is a fact that humans, at least in our society, live determined to avoid at all costs, continuing their lives as if death did not exist. Yet it is not a fact for the existence of children. As is often said, it is not natural (whatever is meant by nature) for mothers to bury their children, but rather the opposite. As we can see in the UNICEF and FBSP report, São Paulo’s military police have been determined to intervene in this cycle of life, causing hundreds of mothers to bury their children, murdered by violent deaths. Seasonally, the police act like the German airplanes that spilled children’s blood in revolutionary Spain. They promote blitzkriegs that are followed by discussions that merely fill the void until the next massacre. Therefore, it is not a matter of proposing or wishing that this force be controlled and/or restrained; the death of a single child should be intolerable, regardless of post hoc explanations or justifications.

Given this scenario in which armed men make children’s blood flow through the streets, we must remember that there is only one way to reduce to zero the deaths caused by police intervention: to reduce to zero the existence of the police!¹²

¹ This poem by Pablo Neruda refers to the aerial bombardments carried out by the Nazi army at the beginning of the Second European War (1939-1945) against Spain, which was undergoing a revolutionary process led by the anarchists of the FAI and the CNT. These massacres were also portrayed by the painting “Guernica” painted by Pablo Picasso as a reminder of and resistance to the militaristic horror of the states in Europe, and especially in Spain. The poem can be read here: POEM BY PABLO NERUDA .

² An excerpt from this poem by Neruda was set to music in the 1990s by the iconic punk/hardcore band from the north zone of São Paulo, Invasores de Cérebros, to remind the fact that children’s blood still ran through the streets, now in São Paulo, simply as children’s blood. The song can be heard here: Sangue de Crianças - Invasores de Cérebros

³ On the security–democracy–human rights triptych that produced this expansion, see Adalton Marques. Humanizing and Expanding: A Genealogy of Public Security in São Paulo. São Paulo: IBCCRIM, 2018.

⁴ The report can be read in full here: Deaths of children and adolescents due to police intervention increase by 120% in the state of São Paulo between 2022 and 2024

⁵ UNICEF. “Deaths of children and adolescents due to police intervention increase 120% in the state of São Paulo between 2022 and 2024 ”, Brasília, April 3, 2025. Text introducing the report.

⁶ Regarding Operations Shield and Summer, see our March 2024 newsletter: “ LASInTec. “In defense of society: the São Paulo Military Police’s Shield and Summer operations ”. São Paulo: UNIFESP, 2024.

⁷ Lee, J. (2021). “ Will body cameras help end police violence? ”. ACLU Washington, June 7.   

⁸ McKay, C., & Lee, M. (2019). Body-worn images: Point-of-view and the new aesthetics of policing. Crime, Media, Culture, 16(3), 431-450. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659019873774 .

⁹ Beutin, L. P. (2017). Racialization as a way of seeing: The limits of counter-surveillance and police reform. Surveillance & Society, 15 (1), 5-20.

¹⁰ For more information on Muralha Paulista, see our November 2024 newsletter: LASInTec. “An Invisible Wall: Open-Air Controls, Monitoring, and Predictive Policing ” São Paulo: UNIFESP, 2024.

¹¹ FOUCAULT, Michel. Security, Territory, Population. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2008, p.457.

¹² On the abolition of the police, among other references, see our newsletter No. 1, August 2020: LASInTec. “A Possible Proposal Against State Violence”, followed by the translation of “Manifesto for the General Abolition of the National Police.” Translation by Júlia Tibiriçá of text from Lundi Martin magazine No. 248, June 23, 2020. São Paulo: UNIFESP, 2020.

References

BEUTIN, L. P. Racialization as a way of seeing: The limits of counter-surveillance and police reform. Surveillance & Society, v. 15, n. 1, p. 5-20, 2017.

Boletim (Anti)Segurança nº 1. Uma proposição possível contra a violência de Estado. LASInTec, 23 jun. 2020. Disponível em: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Iad6MFKqUMiiqD40pPforRXfivfdmxT7/view.

Boletim (Anti)Segurança nº 33. Em defesa da sociedade: as operações Escudo e Verão da PM de São Paulo. LASInTec, 31 mar. 2024. Disponível em: https://lasintec.unifesp.br/boletins/boletim-antiseguran%C3%A7a/boletim-antiseguran%C3%A7a-33.

Boletim (Anti)Segurança nº 40. Uma muralha invisível: controles a céu aberto, monitoramentos e polícia preditiva. LASInTec, 8 nov. 2024. 

Disponível em: https://lasintec.unifesp.br/boletins/boletim-antiseguran%C3%A7a/boletim-antiseguran%C3%A7a-40.

FOUCAULT, Michel. Segurança, território, população. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2008. p. 457.

GUANDELINE, Leonardo. Para Abrinq, menores de 18 anos são principais vítimas da violência. O Globo, Rio de Janeiro, 10 jun. 2015. Disponível em: https://oglobo.globo.com/politica/para-abrinq-menores-de-18-anos-sao-principais-vitimas-da-violencia-16397076.

INVASORES DE CÉREBROS. Sangue de crianças. YouTube, 5 mai. 2022. Disponível em: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adkl1uwjc5I.

LEE, Jennifer. Will body cameras help end police violence? ACLU of Washington, 7 jun. 2021. Disponível em: https://www.aclu-wa.org/story/will-body-cameras-help-end-police-violence.

MARQUES, Adalton. Humanizar e expandir: uma genealogia da segurança pública em São Paulo. São Paulo: IBCCRIM, 2018.

McKAY, C.; LEE, M. Body-worn images: Point-of-view and the new aesthetics of policing. Crime, Media, Culture, v. 16, n. 3, p. 431-450, 2019. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659019873774.

NERUDA, Pablo. Espanha no coração. Tradução: equipe ID. Revista IdÊ, 24 jan. 2019. Disponível em: https://revistaidrevista.blogspot.com/2019/01/1-poema-de-pablo-neruda.html.

SEGURIDAD 360. Body camera para Policías en Brasil para registrar su conducta. Revista Seguridad 360, 2024. Disponível em: https://revistaseguridad360.com/noticias/body-camara/.

UNICEF. Mortes de crianças e adolescentes por intervenção policial crescem 120% no estado de São Paulo entre 2022 e 2024. Brasília, 3 abr. 2025. Disponível em: https://www.unicef.org/brazil/comunicados-de-imprensa/mortes-de-criancas-e-adolescentes-por-intervencao-policial-crescem-120-no-estado-de-sao-paulo-entre-2022-2024.