Chapter 6 elucidates why structural reform has remained off the table in São Paulo since Brazil’s transition to democracy. It focuses on three specific events since the 1980s, instances when reform seemed imminent but ultimately fell short. Two instances were selected due to being repeatedly identified in interviews as especially salient cases of egregious police violence that led to calls for reform; the third instance, meanwhile, was an ultimately failed effort by a sitting governor to enact police reform. Chapter 6 presents a comparative sequential analysis of these sets of events to demonstrate how the state’s Military Police exerted pressure to limit policy options and how fragmented preferences and the absence of political competition led political leaders to conclude that structural police reforms would not be electorally advantageous. Considering the cases as sequences of events that fail to bring about comprehensive structural reforms helps to elucidate the police’s remarkable continuity in São Paulo State. This comparative sequential analysis demonstrates how long-term institutional persistence has been driven by the absence of an electoral counterweight to the structural power of the police due to enduring fragmentation of societal preferences and weak political competition in the state.

Chapter 1 develops a theoretical framework for understanding the persistence of police forces as authoritarian enclaves in democracies, distinguishing between authoritarian and democratic coercion. Under authoritarian rule, the primary purpose of coercion is to keep the leader in power, and it is deployed with few constraints. In democracies, where governments must place checks on their own power, coercion ought to be deployed primarily to provide security for the citizenry rather than to serve the interests of the leader, constrained by the rule of law, and subject to external accountability. I disaggregate coercion along three dimensions: the extent to which coercion is governed by law or is applied arbitrarily; the strength of external accountability mechanisms; and whether coercion primarily serves leaders’ interests or to protect citizens. I demonstrate that police reform to promote democratic coercion has been relatively rare in democratic Latin America, even as rising crime and violence made security a salient electoral issue. I assess the problem posed by the endurance of authoritarian coercion for democracies and situate this institutional persistence within the structural power of the police, which leads politicians to engage in accommodation with the police, an exchange relationship that creates entrenched interests that favor institutional persistence.

Chapter 3 probes why São Paulo State’s police have yet to undergo comprehensive structural reform in the decades since Brazil’s democratic transition. Brazil’s transition entailed considerable military reforms in accordance with democratic principles but no comparable effort to reform the country’s police forces. I illustrate how the state’s Military Police leveraged its control over coercion to cultivate structural power vis-à-vis civilian political leaders, through both the selective provision of security in politically beneficial ways and the strategic withdrawal of service. The chapter describes how the Military Police succeeded in constraining policy options available to politicians, and how politicians benefited from accommodating the police. These conditions raised the threshold for police reform in São Paulo over the last three decades, favoring institutional persistence despite the prevalence of widespread extrajudicial killings. I show how the fragmentation of societal preferences over policing and security - rooted in differences in citizens’ experiences with police along lines of race, class, and geography - has yielded little electoral incentive for politicians to enact reform. Instead, a large segment of São Paulo’s citizens demanding weakened legal restrictions on the police’s use of coercion with little external accountability have provided a constituency for politicians favoring authoritarian coercion.

Chapter 2 introduces a two-stage theory of institutional continuity and reform, laying out how societal preferences over the distribution of protection and repression shape politicians’ decisions between the status quo of authoritarian coercion and reform to promote democratic coercion. Far from constituting a failure of democratic processes, politicians’ decisions to either maintain the status quo of authoritarian coercion or undertake police reform both result from ordinary democratic politics. I argue that, even under the constraints posed by the structural power of police, shifts in the convergence of societal preferences over policing and security and a robust political opposition can serve as key drivers of reform by raising the costs to the incumbent of not reforming the police. The theory yields two key predictions. When societal preferences over policing and security are fragmented, politicians have incentives to pursue accommodation with the police, wherein they grant police greater autonomy in exchange for cooperation in the selective distribution of coercion. This favors the persistence of institutional weakness and authoritarian patterns of coercion. On the other hand, incumbents are likely to pursue democratic police reform when societal preferences converge and when they face an electoral threat from a robust political opposition.