The "War" and "Peace" in the media discourse on public security in the city of Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This work is an effort to comprehend the mediatic speech. The main theme considered here is public security. More specifically, our purpose is to analyse how different politics of public security are propagated by the media. Using the theory about the different types of policing (Bayley, 2006; Bayley and Skolnick, 2006), there is the tension between the models of confrontational policing and community policing in Brazilian contemporary situation. My hypothesis is that governmental intervention in poor territories was (and is) intimately linked to the «image» that these territories have in the society. Press analysis was undertaken in order to capture some key «pictures» in governmental speech. The analysis of the papers is divided into two blocks. Two cases are considered: The first is dedicated to understand the implementation of the UPP in Santa Marta, localizing the related news and the way how they were presented during the analyzed period. Furthermore, there is an analysis of the newspapers during the period when Complexo was the centre of several police actions analyzed, considering the number of reports, their location and contents.