What “remains” of police

Abstract

This article intends to produce a reflection on the production of the police mandate in the Rio de Janeiro city, taking as inspiration the work "What remains of Auschwitz" (2008), by Giorgio Agamben, in which the author analyzes the literary production of survivors of the Nazi concentration camp. One of the possible interpretations for the rest in Agamben is that the term means a hiatus, a gap, something that could not be witnessed by survivors in the camps. In this sense, the rest is among the dead, survivors, saved and among the witnesses who were present in the camps of bodies subject to death. I take as a theoretical reference part of Agamben's work to think of the police, in this case PMERJ, and their relations with the policed society, also using experiences with military police in field research. The rest here acquires some possible meanings: 1) a gap, that which is silenced, badly solved; 2) what remains of the police that we have and 3) what is missing from a police that is expected. What are the remains of PMERJ? And what remains of police for us? From this problematization, the text opens space for the discussion about the idea of modern police and how it materialized in Rio de Janeiro, seeking to understand the dilemmas that are experienced by military police officers for the execution of their mandate. From the theoretical-methodological point of view, I seek inspiration from Arendt (1999) to consider the "other" perspective. The reflection indicates that the massacres of the past have not ended. They are still present every day. Therefore, the remains must be explained and discussed, even at the price of discovering that we also have our remains, we are part of them, and we produce and reproduce inequalities and massacres.