Police: Professional identity and social representations

Police: professional identity and social representations

Maria-Stela GROSSI-PORTO (University of Brasilia, Brazil)

In contemporary Brazilian society, police brutality and his involvement in violent forms of conflict resolution are topics relevant to understand the public security dilemmas.

This paper aims to analyze the relationships between professional identity and police violence: how police practices are represented by police officers and the effects for the law and order.

Such practices are largely a cognitive and symbolic universe from which the police officers conceives it´s work in terms of brands, belongs and in social identity categories.

The survey was structured using the theory of social representations. The empirical goal was to obtain the social representations of patrol and judiciary police about their practices, professional performance and relationships with society.

The design of the survey was a sample structured by spatial divisions, hierarchies, roles and sex, comparing both polices:  the sample is compounded by 399 questionnaires for the judiciary police, and more 1,182 answered by patrol police officers, both male and female. Also, we have done interviews and focus groups.

The analysis focuses on: motivations for the choice of profession; the pride of the profession; representations of fear, stress, uncertainty and risk arising from police work; and how all this symbols affects its performance and its social construction of professional identity.