Untrusting: In Pursuit of Democratic Policing in Brazil

The Anthropology Department, with co-sponsorship from the Department of Art & Music Histories, welcomes Marta-Laura Haynes, assistant professor of anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, to deliver her lecture, “Untrusting: In Pursuit of Democratic Policing in Brazil.”

Untrusting begins in a homicide precinct in Recife, where suspects, victims and police unexpectedly break bread--a fleeting moment of intimacy in a world structured by violence. From this paradox, Marta-Laura Haynes unfolds an ethnography of Brazil's democratic policing experiments in Rio de Janeiro and Recife, revealing how trust became both a moral idea and a bureaucratic demand.

Programs like the Pacifying Police Units (UPP) and Pact for Life promised to "build public trust," yet in practice they extended it selectively. Trust was racialized and gendered: it accrued to those who embodied the white, orderly ideal of the cidadão de bem ("good citizen") and was withheld from Black, poor, or unruly bodies. To be trusted by the state required performing trust in its agents--a circular logic that reinforced inequality under the guise of reform.

Against this backdrop, Haynes theorizes untrusting as a mode of ethical and affective engagement: practices of vigilance, care and refusal that emerge where trust has been weaponized. Rather than a deficit or breakdown of democracy, mistrust is framed here as care and agency--a political resource that can clear the path toward a more just society.