Displays of crime victimization in criminal justice organizational settings

This paper analyses how individuals present themselves as crime victims and interact with criminal justice agents in organizational settings. The study relies on observations done through the daily life in a number of settings in the Greater Brasilia metropolitan region: a) civil police stations; b) law-court forums, and c) one Public Safety Council (CONSEG) meeting. Based on such records, the analysis aims to understand the obstacles that arise in the observed encounters. Preliminarily, it is possible to conclude that such obstacles refer to alienation of participants from interaction – a deviance of participants' attention from the process of communication towards: a) formal aspects of encounter, referring to standards shared within criminal justice bureaucratic network; b) the victims, in connection to aphasic emotional states they display; c) the victims, due to demographic profiling by officers, who resource specially to gender, economic class and age categories.