Between dissimulations and recognition of inescapable evidence, in the hurricane of the public security crisis in , the governor dealt with a delicate topic with surprising ease: the presence of the First Command of the Capital in the state and its effects on statistics relating to violent deaths.
“Organized crime, in the end, is behind a large part of crime in Brazil. This explains, sometimes, even the statistics here in São Paulo, which is a favorable statistic, but it is favorable even depending on the predominance or hegemony of a faction”, said the president during an event held at the Brazilian Education Institute, last week.
The tradition among São Paulo rulers has always been to minimize, if not just deny, the size of the faction and its consequences on social and institutional life — now on a scale never seen before. In 2012, Antônio Ferreira Pinto, Geraldo Alckmin’s Secretary of Security, declared that it would not reach “30 or 40 individuals”…
The group, in official discourse, was treated as a kind of dark matter, which remains invisible, but it is known, as in cosmology, that, without its presence, the system could not function as it does. An important part of the media even refused to name the organization.
There have always been many political difficulties in recognizing the role played by the PCC, including the option to sell programs that have, in fact, improved the performance of the police and helped reduce the homicide rate over the years. An aspect that the opposition, naturally, tended not to consider, attributing only to the monopolist faction the drop in violent deaths in the state.
Investments were indeed made in the police, but the absence of bloody disputes over control of drug trafficking, as is the case in Rio, cannot be left aside in an analysis of drug rates.
Tarcísio made an empirical observation, which helps to prove what he said:
“If we take the map of São Paulo, we will see that where most people die is precisely in the Paraíba Valley. And then there is an action, an attempt to enter the territory of São Paulo by criminal organizations from Rio de Janeiro and the containment of the First Command of the Capital.”
According to the director of the Brazilian Public Security Forum, Renato Sérgio de Lima, there is no current detail on how much of the drop in homicides could be attributed to the faction’s hegemony in São Paulo. In 2018, he published, with colleagues, an academic study entitled “Pax Monopolista”. The data is from 2005 to 2009, already far removed from the reality of our days, but the conclusion remains suggestive: the presence of the PCC was associated with an 11% reduction in violent crime in the favelas where it had penetrated.
Today it is no longer possible to ignore the undeniable presence of the PCC and its effects on statistics. Dark matter is now in the true dimension of the group’s and similar penetration in the institutions of the Republic, in political life and in the police. Prisons, as we know, have long been dominated.
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