Urban Crime in Brazil

Name: Urban Crime in Brazil
Start: 2009-11-24T12:45:00+00:00
End: 2009-11-24T14:45:00+00:00

November 24, 2009 - 12:45 pm

Claudio Beato, Minas Gerais Federal University and the David Rockefeller Center, Harvard University

Moderator:
Desmond Arias, John Jay College and The Graduate Center, CUNY

This talk will explore violence in urban metropolitan areas in Brazil. Dr. Claudio Beato will analyze the degree of differentiation, in terms of homicide among the 5,507 municipalities in Brazil, keeping in focus the relative aspects of spatial location, and the rising rates in metropolitan areas. He will explore some environmental dimensions in the spatial distribution of crime in the Brazilian cities. Dr. Beato will discuss two kinds of themes: the first one will be about how community characteristics can explain differences in crime rates in urban contexts. The other will be to discuss the control mechanism in these communities, and the connections with gang activities. Finally he will discuss some institutional aspects, more specifically regarding the role of the police. There are some specific characteristics like strategies and management in the Brazilian context that could explain some of the variability in crime rates in urban contexts.

About the Speaker:
Claudio Beato is a Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Minas Gerais Federal University (UFMG) and now he is the Lemann Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center at Harvard. He received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Rio de Janeiro Institute for Graduate Studies. He has been a visiting professor at the Center for Brazilian Studies, Oxford University, England and is currently the coordinator of the Center for Studies in Criminality and Public Security at the UFMG and a Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, Brazil. He has authored numerous works on the subject of criminality, violence and public policy on security. He has been a consultant to many international entities including the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank and Colombian Government. He has created important projects in the area of homicide control and integrated management of public safety that now guide public policies and are being implemented in different cities in Brazil.