O (não) uso de câmeras corporais na investigação policial - humanos e não-humanos na construção do fato jurídico

Abstract

The objective of this work is to understand whether a police investigation unveils a preexisting naturalistic fact or, alternatively, if the fact is 'manufactured' within the case files. To answer this question, the research begins with the collection of quantitative data but deepens using ethnographic, qualitative methodology. It reports the impact of the use of body cameras on the editing of police truth. In an interdisciplinary effort, it goes beyond the limits of legal sciences, drawing on concepts forged in sociology, anthropology, psychology, and ergology. By accompanying the presentation of prisoners caught in the act to the duty police station and witnessing the testimonies and interrogations, the relationship between actors, human and non-human, in the construction of procedural 'truth' becomes clear. The use (or non-use) of body camera images, the quantity of drugs, the existence of prior police records, and especially the narrative constructed by the military guide the 'fabrication' of the penal legal fact. Under the planned and symmetrical ontological framework of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), whose main representative is the French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour, the fraternal interaction between the military police officers and the duty police chief, who construct, within the case files and through personal experiences, the penal fact supposedly occurring outside the files, is revealed. In this ecology of fact construction, the suspect's version is rarely credited. In a counter-majoritarian epistemological field, a result of Latourian ontogenesis, attention shifts from the 'being' to the 'association' between beings. Structures are abandoned, and the interactions between actors are delved into. This phenomenological study method brings with it an apparent generalizing limitation, stemming from the small number of cases followed. However, the requirement for a broad sample space (N) is tied to quantitative, not qualitative, studies, like the present one. It concludes that penal 'truth' is constructed, not uncovered.