Do controle de distúrbios civis ao gerenciamento de multidões festivas: uma análise da evolução dos padrões de policiamento ostensivo no carnaval de Salvador

Abstract

This paper aims at analyzing the evolution of the patterns for policing festive crowds during Carnival in Salvador, bearing in mind the management and control of crowds under the light of the various theories that try to explain the dynamics of human crowds operation. Its objective is to work out an intervention project based on the identification of the vulnerabilities of the model. Based on the Weberian viewpoint of the State that strives diligently for the “legitimate monopoly of violence”, through the analysis of the evolution of the ostensive policing and carnival policing in Salvador, it discusses the nexuses between mercantilization and security governance and the link between the general and specific pattern of policing that led the Military Police of Bahia to develop its own model of policing crowds, inspired in the classical models. The study also shows that essential changes took place in Bahia in the security production model during Carnival in Salvador, especially from the 90s on, through public and private institutional arrangements that were developed around it to give support to a mega event that encompasses crowds with more than one million participants, gathered together along 25 kilometers of streets, potentializing the risks related to the increase of population density and delinquency. Being adapted to the media and market demands related to the festivity, the Military Police enhances strategies and tactics of policing crowds that are typical of a multidimensional conception of the maintenance of the public order, involving many actors and institutions and often without the consent of the state control. Since the state has no powers to regulate the festivity, it watches, as an observer, the consolidation of the decentralized network of public, private and mixed actors who authorize or perform the security of Carnival in Salvador.