The productivity of massacres: electronic monitoring technologies and more massacres in the name of security

Haunted societies produce hysterical policies

of persecution and annihilation.

(…)

Hierarchically rigid societies need

the ceremonial of death as a spectacle of law and order.

— Vera Malaguti Batista, 

“O medo na Cidade do Rio de Janeiro”, 2003 

[The Fear in the City of Rio de Janeiro]

Public security policies in the state of São Paulo are historically defined by a landmark event: the Carandiru Massacre¹. On October 2, 1992, the Military Police’s shock troops invaded Pavilion 9 of the State Penitentiary under the pretext of suppressing a rebellion and officially executed 111 prisoners – people under the custody of the State. Much of what is today conceived and implemented under the banner of Public Security in Brazil, not only in São Paulo but across the country, stems from this event or is formulated as a response to it.

On one side, various studies and accounts indicate that the foundation of the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital) was motivated by the massacre. In 1993, prisoners from the Custody and Treatment House of Taubaté – known as Piranhão and often referred to by inmates as a “concentration camp” – decided to create an organization to resist the oppression of the prison system and prevent another Carandiru.

On the other side, policing and penitentiary policies underwent a series of reforms: changes in police training and recruitment, and heavy investment in the expansion of the state’s prison complexes. Numerous plans of “humanization” and expansion of criminal control mechanisms were implemented with major state funding. At each electoral cycle, a new “solution” was proposed to the so-called problem of criminality – a problem that, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, was characterized by extreme lethality in the urban peripheries, with homicide rates comparable to zones of war or “low-intensity” armed conflict. These rates have declined nationally in recent years, and in some states such as São Paulo, significantly so, yet they remain alarmingly high.

This process reached an apex between 2005 and 2006 – after the demolition of Carandiru in 2005 – when another massacre occurred, this time in the streets: more than 500 executions in a single week around Mother’s Day in May 2006. Soon after came a new Drug Law (Law 11.343/2006) and the restructuring of the São Paulo juvenile detention center from the former State Foundation for the Welfare of Minors (Fundação Estadual para o Bem-Estar do Menor – FEBEM) to Fundação Casa, culminating in the following year with PRONASCI (National Program for Public Security with Citizenship), established by Law 11.530 of October 24, 2007. The Presidential Decree 5.289, which authorized the creation of the National Security Force, had already been in effect since 2004.

Within the dual and complementary logics of twenty-first-century security policies, an entire market of foundations, institutes, and university research groups has emerged around the study of crime, urban violence, and so-called criminal factions or commands – which even gained a specific federal law in August 2013 (Law 12.850/2013). Since then, every new cycle of violence spectacularized by the media has brought new legislative proposals, government action plans, and police operations that repeat themselves endlessly. Security agents, police officers, and managers increasingly appear among researchers and recognized experts on the subject. A circuit linking massacre, spectacle, public commotion, and reform – accompanied by plans, bills, and funding lines – has become a self-perpetuating pattern within security policies and the rational distribution of both violence and economic-political resources.

Under capitalism, crime and criminality constitute a political and economic enterprise that extends far beyond their immediate objects of exchange. Many more people than one might assume make a living from what is termed “organized crime” or from its surrounding circuits – just as today, organized crime no longer profits solely from the sale of substances rendered illicit by law, such as marijuana and cocaine.

More than thirty years after the Carandiru massacre, over 900,000 people in Brazil are currently under penal sanction, about 700,000 of them physically incarcerated. In the state of São Paulo alone, there are nearly 200,000 prisoners. The number of individuals under house arrest now exceeds 120,000 with electronic monitoring (ankle bracelets) and more than 110,000 without such surveillance, according to data from the second half of 2024². This constitutes a reserve army of power – nearly one million people under judicial control, living under the constant gaze of police and the carceral system, negotiating their survival. São Paulo holds both the largest prison population in the federation and, not coincidentally, the headquarters of the country’s most profitable criminal organization, which oversees trans-territorial businesses that extend far beyond the retail trade of prohibited substances³.

After the explosion of incarceration in the 1990s and 2000s, the number of imprisoned people has stabilized at high levels (around 5% annual growth in recent years). What is striking, however, is the expansion of electronically monitored individuals, forming a mass of punished subjects supervised by digital devices or by the proximity of state and para-state security agents. In addition, nearly 20% of the national population lives in areas governed – directly or indirectly – by so-called criminal factions that control urban territories, according to a DataFolha survey commissioned by the Brazilian Forum for Public Security⁴. The demolition of the Carandiru facility increasingly appears not as the end of a prison, but as the expansion of police-governed zones, monitored and ruled through legal and illegal security technologies and new devices of violent governmental rationality⁵.

And yet, some still call this a “parallel state” or “illegal market.” In truth, flows of money, weapons, drugs, people, and blood circulate freely between the legal and the illegal, the state and the private, territorial domination and governmental control – depending on the contingent alignments of interests and negotiations among corporations, politicians, and other leaders⁶.

In these same thirty years, PCC has evolved from a prisoners’ association confronting the abuses of the carceral system – without questioning the continuity of the penal system itself⁷ – into a hub of legal and illegal enterprises that moved more than R$ 140 billion in 2022 from direct operations alone⁸. An immense literature on organized crime, factions, and militias has been produced at industrial scale by specialized journalism, universities, and forums, institutes, and foundations dedicated to the study of violence, security policies, and criminal organization.

Sociological categories have been coined to describe these organizations – company, brotherhood, movement – and more recently, police actions have begun to target what this literature has long indicated: that PCC circulates between legality and illegality, official and unofficial spheres, national and international arenas. It also participates in state governance at multiple levels and, while contributing to a reduction in homicide rates in São Paulo by “pacifying the neighborhoods,” it simultaneously fosters a peripheral way of life, blurring the boundaries between life in poor neighborhoods and life in prison. There are also signs that this domain is being questioned by a new generation involved in illicit activities.

Within this vast field of surveillance-based governance, what is rarely questioned – because it is taken as an objective given – is the criminal justice system itself, which produces and feeds upon its own manageable continuity: from massacre to massacre, from plan to plan, from program to program. The expansion of technological monitoring capacities has intensified the surveillance apparatus, and consequently, the government of policing within securitarian democracies.

Prisons and police – core actors in this field of governance and commerce – remain largely unquestioned, targeted only for reforms and efficiency improvements, with the rare exception of those movements that take them as objects of abolitionist struggle.

Metamorphoses of the Same: The Police of the Future and the Future of the Police

From the initial resistance to naming and acknowledging the existence of the PCC, then described by the media as “a faction operating inside and outside São Paulo’s prisons,” to today’s fascination with the organization, much has changed – both below and above. Rather than enumerating all these transformations, it is worth turning to the other end of the spectrum: the police and contemporary security policies, now animated by a new predictive utopia of total visibility, made possible by political and computational technologies.

The initiative most closely monitored by LASInTec is the Muralha Paulista Program⁹, launched by the government of São Paulo, and its connections with analogous initiatives at the municipal and federal levels: Smart Sampa¹⁰ and the Córtex Monitoring Platform¹¹, respectively.

Regardless of whether they fulfill their promise of total control, programs of this nature open an entirely new field of production, experimentation, and profit surrounding the future of policing and the police of the future. Concretely, they intensify the environmental control of actions classified as criminal – no longer centered on a specific “dangerous subject” to be hunted, but on the continuous and uninterrupted monitoring of flows within the environment. In this configuration, everything and everyone become virtually suspect, and thus potential prey – mediated by non-organic devices capable of capturing and neutralizing targets without projecting vulnerability onto the hunters, who kill without exposing themselves to death¹². As a social technology, this is nothing fundamentally new: it follows the logics of criminal ecology developed since the 1970s by the Chicago School of sociology and criminology. As a political technology, however, it introduces enhanced technical capacities to control bodies and environmental circulations – always exercised with the selectivity inherent to the criminal justice system, now increasingly delegated to the discretionary power of the police officer.

The expansion of the possible field of technical intervention – made feasible by the development and cost reduction of cameras, by the image-processing capacities of generative AI programming, and by the growing means for actuarial data calculations – has intensified the political technologies of control characteristic of neoliberal rationality. The result is an amplification of policing practices. Just as there is no longer a fixed “dangerous subject” produced by the biopolitical anthropological machine, we no longer deal with statistical quantification of bodies for population management as a biological species. Instead, we deal with actuarial risk calculations within environments, designed to project and literally produce the future. The neoliberal motto there is no alternative (TINA) has evolved into a new axiom: there is only one alternative – the police alternative, in its legal, legitimized, and uniformed form, but also as a model of citizen conduct. The “end of the future” proclaimed in the 1990s has become, today, the production of a single future – a police-managed one, endowed with predictive ambitions and technical capacities for total environmental control.

The connection between the Muralha Paulista Program and the political technologies of neoliberal rationality is not merely metaphorical but literal. On its official website, the program’s stated goal is summarized as follows: “With the purpose of serving as the public policy for controlling criminal mobility in the state, it seeks to increase the cost of crime during offenders’ movements across São Paulo’s territory by raising the probability of arrest.” Immediately following this, the program quotes the economist Gary Becker, Nobel laureate in 1992, in a text published in Gazeta Mercantil (São Paulo, January 11, 1999¹³), where he argued that harsher punishments and expanded capacities for environmental control act as rational deterrents (in other words, through the economic calculation of risk) for criminal acts. Such control mechanisms, Becker claimed, do not conflict with the production of civil liberties – instead, they create a certain freedom sweetened by securitarian guarantees, proper to the modern democratic order.

Beyond intensifying control and governance through the police-security apparatus – amplified by digital and informational technologies – this new form of the old police opens an enormous field of economic opportunity. It erases distinctions between Defense and Public Security, and between state and private management of the means of violence, whether lethal or “less-lethal,” such as tasers and rubber bullets. In October 2025, three days before the Rio de Janeiro massacre, São Paulo hosted a security products fair, showcasing countless ways to expand these markets. According to media coverage, “Over three days, from October 23 to 25, the event gathered 18,000 people and more than 80 national and international exhibitors selling technological solutions for public security and defense.”¹⁴ Beyond the technological solutionism that promises an artifact to manage every externality generated by violence, the fair displayed a proliferation of target-producing devices: biometric readers and cameras, lightweight precision rifles, armored vehicles, civilian crowd-control equipment, drones, and even robotic dogs equipped with weapons or tear gas. All presented to an audience composed of police officers, military personnel, politicians, and businesspeople.

As the popular saying goes, money tolerates no insult. Technologies introduced under the promise of greater safety and control for the state, society, corporations, and gated communities – producing an enhanced feeling of security – will inevitably also reach the activities deemed criminal, among and within the enterprises managing the illegal economy. To borrow again from popular imagery: the tracer rifle that sings there, sings here – and everybody bleeds the same.

Unsurprisingly, there is growing speculation about new forms of crime and new forms of policing – both, in fact, are not new at all. The focus now shifts from traditional activities like bank robbery, kidnapping, and localized drug retail (bocas, biqueiras, or lojinhas¹⁵) toward forms synchronized with the new capitalism and its culture, as described by sociologist Richard Sennett. These include electronic fraud through Pix transfers, app-mediated drug deliveries, cellphone and motorcycle thefts, and small neighborhood businesses (car washes, used car lots, liquor stores, or even financial-market assets such as cryptocurrencies).

A concrete example of this shift appeared in a report published on October 4, 2025, where journalist Marcelo Godoy of Estadão asked: “Is Public Security prepared to confront an increasingly organized and digital crime?”¹⁶ The proposed answers revolve around creating a predictive police, equipped with body cameras and the technical capacity to regulate both digital and physical urban movements – via satellite GPS technologies and biometric recognition systems for faces and license plates, all integrated with police and criminal justice databases. These smart policing solutions, focused on monitoring and investigative practices rather than overt repression, are presented as ways to reduce both the brutality and lethality of armed bureaucrats. In the report, such views appear as a consensus among police chiefs, military commanders, public security specialists, civil society organizations, and state managers.

Not coincidentally, one of the justifications given by Rio de Janeiro’s Military and Civil Police for the mass killing that left over one hundred bodies in the Alemão and Penha complexes on October 28, 2025, was that their “enemies” – the faction being hunted – had been using drones to drop bombs on the officers of Operação Contenção [“Operation Containment”]. Beyond the polarized commentary, public debate centered on the efficiency of the operation, the state’s capacity (or incapacity) to deal with an expanded and digitized organized crime, and the possible ways to control the “externalities” of such an operation – that is, the mass execution of people.

Across these discussions and analyses – within a polyphony of expert voices – the operation itself, the means that made it possible, and the underlying security policies are rarely questioned. There is a programmed fatalism surrounding the violence embedded in contemporary security practices and policing forms. The massacre is treated as just another episode calling for old-new solutions: harsher laws, expanded monitoring capacities, and greater technical specialization among security agents and armed bureaucrats.

The production of a batch of corpses is thus approached as a matter of efficiency – inevitable or avoidable only in quantitative terms. At no point is there a genuine inquiry into what produces the conditions for massacre, even though it is evident that the primary, necessary, and sufficient causes of such deaths are the security policies, the securitarian form of democracy, and the modern criminal justice system itself.

The Positivity¹⁷ of Massacres and the Future of Slaughters

As we have long argued, security has colonized politics. More than signaling a mere return to dictatorial or fascist pasts, this colonization configures contemporary state management as securitarian democracies – the effective form of the modern rule-of-law state operating under neoliberal rationality.

In recent years, however, we have witnessed an intensification of technological, legal, and political apparatuses aimed at what is framed as the fight against organized crime. This includes: a proliferation of police operations – some more, some less violent – accompanied by their corresponding media spectacles, which project and legitimize the discourses of police officers, prosecutors, and Supreme Court judges; the creation of state-level public security programs increasingly based on the expansion of police forces (municipal guards, military police, civil police) and the use of monitoring technologies with biometric reading and integrated databases¹⁸; and the multiplication of governmental discourses – both federal and state – on the need for legislation that increases and optimizes the state’s capacity to combat organized crime.

Added to this is the widespread public recognition that criminal factions effectively control certain poor neighborhoods – an acknowledgment that, while reflecting genuine problems for residents¹⁹, also naturalizes the presence of heavily armed organizations managing million-dollar businesses and directly participating in the so-called legal economy, from local commerce to transnational financial markets.

This conjuncture creates the conditions for a growing and self-reinforcing demand for security – a demand presented as urgent, necessary, and unavoidable. Consequently, nearly all proposals revolve around the expansion of security apparatuses and the enlargement of police and judicial powers. It is here that we locate what we call the positivity of massacres: with each new tragic event – especially collective killings such as massacres and slaughters – conditions are created for the advancement of new laws and public security programs. Each massacre generates the political opportunity for a new cycle of penal, police, and securitarian reforms that promise change only to ensure that everything remains the same – or to further expand the state’s capacity to control environments and circulations.

Still under the horror of the Alemão and Penha massacres, with images of executed bodies lying in forested areas and lined up on the ground by residents, we are now witnessing precisely such an expansion. Operação Contenção, launched on October 28, 2025, had barely ended before the cacophony of media opinion converged with the political opportunism of officials eager to advance new security and monitoring plans – both as a “magical response” and as a retroactive justification for the massacre. Whether these will have the same political impact as the post-Carandiru reforms remains to be seen. Yet, within this analytical space, we can already identify how a massacre efficiently creates the conditions for the expansion of securitarian policies.

At first, two opposed positions take shape. On one hand, proposals and opinions call for the democratic control of police activity, emphasizing the need for intelligence agencies capable of conducting operations like Operação Contenção without producing so many corpses, and under proper judicial oversight. On the other hand, fiery speeches celebrate police work, glorify the deaths of alleged criminals, and insist that the only lives to be mourned are those of police officers. These actors push forward new legislative initiatives that create additional criminal types, expand police forces, and strengthen their capacity to carry out massacres – often with broad popular support. Even when the public does not explicitly approve the killings, many perceive them as necessary or inevitable in the face of organized crime’s territorial dominance²⁰.

These two positions, though presented as opposites, merely express the centrality of security in democratic politics and a dispute over who controls the legitimate exercise of state violence. Both converge in the expansion of the security apparatus – whether in its police form or as a technologically amplified monitoring system. As the earlier example of Carandiru shows, the outcome of the current dispute surrounding the Alemão and Penha massacres will likely be: further expansion of police forces; increased judicialization of life and death, with longer sentences and new criminal classifications; and perhaps its most distinctive feature – the operational consolidation of technological apparatuses already under way in programs such as Córtex, Muralha Paulista, and Smart Sampa.

To illustrate how this apparent antagonism actually reinforces securitarian democracy, consider some examples. For the past 18 months, the Ministry of Justice has been drafting a Constitutional Amendment Proposal (PEC da Segurança), under discussion in the Chamber of Deputies since April 2025²¹. The proposal amends Articles 21, 22, 23, 24, and 144 of the 1988 Constitution, promising to increase efficiency in the fight against organized crime through national integration of police and security actions.

Its legislative framework seeks to: 1) Constitutionalize the National Public Security System (Sistema Único de Segurança Pública – SUSP), created under Michel Temer’s government by Law 13.675/2018, thus facilitating the unification of national police databases; 2) Update police competencies, allowing the creation of new police forces, recognizing municipal guards as ostensive police, merging federal highway patrols, and expanding the investigative powers of the Federal Police; 3) Create the National Fund for Public Security and Penitentiary Policy (Fundo Nacional de Segurança Pública e Política Penitenciária), constitutionally guaranteeing dedicated federal budget allocations to the security sector – placing it on the same fiscal level as health and education.

After the Penha and Alemão massacres, this proposal – stagnant for over a year – has suddenly accelerated. Simultaneously, the federal government introduced an “Anti-Faction Bill”, promising harsher penalties for those linked to criminal organizations and opening dangerous precedents for classifying such groups as terrorist organizations, similar to measures in El Salvador under Nayib Bukele and Ecuador under Daniel Noboa.

In addition to these federal advances, several state governors have announced the creation of a so-called “Peace Consortium”²², expressing solidarity with Rio de Janeiro’s government, applauding the police operation, and even offering their own forces – as if reviving the Old Republic’s regional troops – to help combat the Comando Vermelho if necessary. Beyond electoral competition, such gestures reveal, once again, the productive power of the massacre: it channels political energy into the expansion of police forces and the prison system (areas under gubernatorial control), while granting greater legitimacy to ongoing security programs and operations, as well as to the legal reforms and international judicial claims pursued by institutes, foundations, and human rights groups²³.

Meanwhile, amid the disputes that sustain the expansion of security, judicialization, and police citizenship, an entire field of police knowledge is gaining prominence. Police officers – once the informants of anthropological and sociological research on violence – are now recognized as experts in public security, gradually abandoning ‘tough-on-crime’ rhetoric in favor of a discourse articulated through the language of human rights and international law. This shift occurs within the juridical productions of the wars on drugs and terror, but also through the classification of confrontations between police and organized crime as low-intensity conflicts (LICs). Such framing could allow mass police killings, like the 120 deaths in the Alemão and Penha massacre, to be legally justified under the doctrine of justifying circumstances [excludente de ilicitude] – treating them as deaths resulting from armed conflict between opposing forces.

The figure embodying this discursive investment is former BOPE (Special Police Operations Battalion of Rio de Janeiro State Military Police) captain Rodrigo Pimentel, a graduate of UERJ (Rio de Janeiro State University) and co-author, with Luiz Eduardo Soares, of Tropa de Elite [“Elite Squad”], later adapted into a widely known movie. In numerous interviews commenting on Operação Contenção, Pimentel defended the massacre in calm, moderate tones, framing it as an unfortunate necessity. He repeatedly invoked the term CANI (Non-International Armed Conflict), derived from the Geneva Conventions (1977), which replaced expressions such as internal conflict, civil war, or insurrection in modern humanitarian law. This move reinscribes police operations within the framework of counterinsurgency warfare, adapting the lexicon of humanitarian law to justify internal massacres.

These brief examples – soon to be developed in further LASInTec research and upcoming bulletins – demonstrate that the distinction between Defense and Public Security is now thoroughly blurred. In securitarian democracies, mass killing, surveillance technologies, and the rhetoric of human rights are fully intertwined. Above all, this shows that massacres function as springboards for the advancement of security and judicialization policies, generating the conditions for new ones to occur – explaining, in part, why the worst massacre will always be the next one. In this context, any position short of strengthening anti-security struggles and renewed calls for police abolition amounts to complicity with the everyday massacres that, from time to time, strike wholesale. 

¹  MARQUES, Adalton. Humanizar e expandir: uma genealogia da segurança pública em São Paulo. São Paulo: IBCCRIM, 2018.

²  CNN Brasil. “Quase 1 milhão de pessoas cumpriam pena no Brasil em 2024”, April 24, 2025.

³  For an abolitionist reading of the relationship between the growth of the prison population and the expansion of the so-called factions – and of how massacres continually trigger new governmental plans and reform cycles that in turn prepare new massacres, even within prisons – see: Acácio Augusto. “Abolição penal”, PISEAGRAMA, Belo Horizonte, n. 11, p. 64-73, Nov. 2017.

⁴  Tulio Kruse. “Facções e milícias alcançam vizinhança de ao menos 28,5 milhões de brasileiros, aponta Datafolha ” In Folha de São Paulo, Oct., 16, 2025. 

⁵  AUGUSTO, Acácio. Vigiar e punir, 50 anos: um livro eficaz como uma bomba e bonito como fogos de artifício. Boletim Lua Nova, 2025. 

⁶   FOUCAULT, Michel. Segurança, território, população. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2008. p. 457.

⁷  On this absence of questioning, even during its formative years, see: Acácio Augusto. “da urgência em se abolir as punições: pcc, lutas contra as prisões e anarquia” In verve, 10: 262-276, 2006.

⁸  G1. “Crime organizado fatura R$ 146 bilhões em negócios legais no Brasil, diz Fórum de Segurança Pública”. In G1, Dec., 6, 2024.

⁹  See: Uma muralha invisível: controles a céu aberto, monitoramentos e polícia preditiva. Anti-Security Newsletter nº40. LASInTec, Nov., 8, 2024.

¹⁰  See:  Cães de guarda: mais do mesmo da polícia e o acréscimo do policiamento hightech. Anti-Security Newsletter nº42. LASInTec, Mar., 27, 2025.

¹¹  See:  Plataforma de Monitoramento Córtex — Ministério da Justiça e Segurança Pública. 

¹²  On these hunting technologies and the digital and informational forms of neutralization, see: Grégoire Chamayou, Manhunts: A Philosophical History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

¹³  See: programa muralha paulista: política pública de controle da mobilidade criminal. SSP-SP.

¹⁴ André Fleury Moraes. “Feira de segurança em SP traz detector de drones e 'SmartSampa' da PM”, Folha de S. Paulo, 26 out. 2025. 

¹⁵  Local street-level drug-selling spots.

¹⁶  Marcelo Godoy. “A Segurança Pública está preparada para enfrentar um crime cada vez mais organizado e digital?”. Estadão, Oct., 2, 2025.

¹⁷  Here, positivity refers to the productive nature of power relations, as opposed to a repressive or juridico-political conception of classical definitions of power—an understanding that Foucault described as Freudo-Marxist. On this, see: Michel Foucault. História da sexualidade Vol. 1. A vontade de Saber. Rio de Janeiro, Graal, 2001.

¹⁸  These are two among countless examples of the role such technologies play in today’s security policies: news articles from the São Paulo State Government News Agency on the use of drones and on the expansion of the Muralha Paulista program across the state’s interior: “Entenda como os drones viraram peça fundamental nas ações de inteligência da polícia em SP” and “Campinas tem 24 municípios integrados ao Muralha Paulista e reforça combate à criminalidade”.

¹⁹  An example of residents’ behavior who, faced with the profusion of violence, resign themselves to prayer, see: Bruna Fantti and Aléxia Sousa. “'Eu passo rezando', diz morador da Vila Cruzeiro, alvo de operação da polícia do Rio”. Folha de S. Paulo, 28 out. 2025.

²⁰  G1. “Datafolha: 57% dos moradores do Rio veem sucesso em megaoperação contra o CV”, Nov., 1, 2025.

²¹  See: Eduardo Gonçalves. “PEC da Segurança avança na Câmara e passa por mudanças após debate entre governo e Congresso; confira os principais pontos”. O Globo, Oct., 30, 2025.

²²  Jan Niklas. “Governadores de direita criam 'Consórcio da Paz' e atacam Lula após operação letal no RJ”. Folha de S. Paulo, Oct., 30, 2025.

²³  ONU. “Peritos da ONU pedem investigação sobre operação policial no Rio de Janeiro”. ONU News, Oct., 31, 2025.