Guns, Fatigues, and Fitness: Elite Squad Instagramming in Rio de Janeiro’s Everyday War on Crime

• In Event: Data-led and Digital Policing: A Global Perspective

Abstract

In Brazil as elsewhere, policing is currently being reshaped by the emergence of social media as a multifaceted tool for horizontal communication within police institutions, gathering of intelligence and surveillance, public visibility, and the crafting of institutional identities. In this paper, co-authored with Erika Robb Larkins, the social media use of Rio de Janeiro’s Special Forces (Batalhão de Operações Especiais, BOPE) is analyzed as a militarization of the everyday. As an elite combat squad, BOPE officers regularly engage in highly militarized forms of policing in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. At the same time, their on-the-ground actions are complemented by a social media presence which offers documentation of the squad’s activities while also cultivating an aesthetics of identity and self. Showing how militarized policing is visually and textually constructed as moral work, the paper examines the intersecting tropes of war, religion, health, and family which appear as a central symbolic element in BOPE’s instagram account. Their social media presence is analyzed as a form of digital police work that penetrates the intimate and militarizes the everyday and mundane. Understanding how police use of social media contributes to the production of an everywhere and everyday war on crime, or cosmology of war, is of paramount importance for any political project that seeks to challenge the weaponization of security discourses and re-emergence of the far right.

Author

• Tomas Salem, University of Bergen