Brazil’s pacifying police units revisited: A failed democratic policing project and lessons for institutional reforms

Brazil’s Pacifying Police Units (UPPs) were an incremental police reform project implemented in Rio de Janeiro in 2008. Though initially celebrated as an innovate approach for reducing police violence, the project did not produce substantive changes in the structure of local police forces, their violent practices, or the state’s historically poor public security outcomes. It has since been characterized as a failed reform, suggesting that some scholars’ early skepticism was warranted. This paper revisits the initial enthusiasm in light of these disappointing results and draws on recent empirical research to assess what specific lessons can be taken from the UPP experience. We argue that the initiative’s failure can be traced back to three main factors: temporality (how fast the project expanded), governance (how independent the project was from the existing police institutions), and scope of the reform (how structural were the changes proposed). These shortcomings hindered the UPPs ability to innovate and overcome internal resistance to change. We suggest these dynamics may offer insights applicable to other institutional reforms.