"Os gatunos agem à vontade": polícia, ciência e identificação criminal em Salvador (1911 - 1922)

Abstract

The object of this dissertation is the construction of gatunage as a crime and social problem from the perspectives of the press, police and science. The objective of this research is to address the mechanisms of production of criminal identification in Salvador in the first decades of the 20th century. The main sources are newspaper reports about the subjects who were accused of being "gatunos". Through the pages of the newspapers, photographs and interviews with suspects, news about theft, and the criminological debates of the Society of Forensic Medicine and Criminology circulated in a context in which crimes and criminals became objects of public theme. As well as the reports of the first years of operation produced by the Bureau of Identification and Statistics, founded in 1911 as a department of the structure of the Secretariat of Security. The function of the Bureau of Identification and Statistics was to provide civil, criminal, and passport identification documents and to produce crime statistics, in addition to assisting police investigations. The creation of the Identification and Statistics Office was part of a broad police reform adopted by the Bahian government, which intended to give a scientific and technical character to police institutions, culminating also in the creation of the Civil Guard in 1912 and the Police School in 1916.