Privatizing urban security: control, hospitality and suspicion in the Brazilian shopping

Abstract

In this article we argue that hospitality security – a modality that confuses control and care – operates through the actions of security guards in the creation of what we call pre-cases. From a dense ethnography accompanying these workers in a shopping mall in São Paulo, we intend to demonstrate how socio-economic inequalities and structural racism are produced in discrete daily interactions. In their work, guards focus on three types of suspicion: intuitive, universal and directed at child beggars. We argue that inequalities and discrimination are not only located in the spectacular, energetic and violent police actions often reserved for peripheral spaces in cities; they occur through welfare infrastructures, private security operations, and the careful micro-actions of private protection in spaces mostly frequented by the middle classes. Finally, we show how security workers are both subjects and objects in this network of everyday actions.