This book describes the work of homicide detectives in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. In the midst of violence, detectives investigate two types of crimes—homicide and the routine killings of citizens by police known as resisting arrests followed by death. These two types of violence relay two different logics of killing, one on the part of an organized crime group known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital or PCC, and the other of a state broadly supportive of highly lethal police. This book tracks the ways that these two logics of killing and their subjects of violence align in moral and pract ... More

This book describes the work of homicide detectives in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. In the midst of violence, detectives investigate two types of crimes—homicide and the routine killings of citizens by police known as resisting arrests followed by death. These two types of violence relay two different logics of killing, one on the part of an organized crime group known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital or PCC, and the other of a state broadly supportive of highly lethal police. This book tracks the ways that these two logics of killing and their subjects of violence align in moral and practical terms. This alignment reveals a system of governance in which who can live and who can die is largely defined by a de facto and mutually observed consensus between the state and the PCC, most intensely felt in the informally urbanized parts of the city. And yet that consensus can itself be killed, breaking apart into moments of acute and violent crisis in the city in which police and supposed PCC affiliates are killed by each other with near abandon. São Paulo's cyclical pattern of violence, which has long periods of relative peace punctuated by violent crisis, is rooted in the empirical practice of sovereignty by consensus that is deeply connected to the two prominent pressures of the contemporary moment, namely, security and democracy.