Funded by Peace and Recovery and in collaboration with Ceará authorities, researchers will conduct a pilot evaluation to measure the impact of highly militarized motorcycle patrols on crime rates and community attitudes and interactions with the patrols and the police.

Governments across the developing world have deployed militarized police units to respond to high levels of violent crime and homicide. Despite the prevalence of militarized policing strategies in Latin America, little is understood about the effectiveness of such approaches. In Fortaleza, the capital of Ceará state in Brazil and one of the world’s most violent cities,¹ authorities have deployed highly militarized motorcycle patrols, known as the Rondas e Ações Intensivas e Ostensivas (RAIOs), to high crime areas. 

Funded by Peace and Recovery and in collaboration with Ceará authorities, researchers will conduct a pilot evaluation of RAIOs to measure the strategy’s impact on crime rates along with community attitudes and interactions with the RAIO patrols and the police.

Study in progress; results forthcoming.

Sources

^1. de Oliveira, Victor Hugo, Cleyber Nascimento de Medeiros, and José Raimundo Carvalho. "Violence and local development in Fortaleza, Brazil: a spatial regression analysis." Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy 12, no. 1 (2019): 147-166.