Social conflicts mediation, communitarian policy and public security

Abstract

Among the efforts that are being thought to reduce violence and to increase public security, the communitarian policy proposal is being distinguished as a model of preventive policy that objectives to approach the police to the population and to fortify the confidence of the society in State police institutions. This model aims to assure greater policesocial legitimacy and to estimulate the perception of population as partner to delicts prevention. The communitarian policing is a project that was developed between the decades 1970 and 1980, when police organizations, in different countries of North America and Occidental Europe, started to promote innovations on its structure and functioning and on its ways to deal with the problem of crime. Ally to the proposal to approach the public security agents to population, the mediation centers were created destined to assist the social conflict resolution. Those conflicts, when badly managed, can generate acts of violence and crime. In Fortaleza, the data of CIOPS (Security Information Center) discloses that, on average, half of the occurrences about interpersonal conflicts involves people with continued relations. The idea about mediation being done by agents of the public security is innovative because, beyond contributing to approach them of the population, it contributes for the activities of the communitarian policing and the conflicts resolution. The communitarian policy is also inserted in the proposal of the National Secretariat of Public Security, of the Ministry of Justice as a way to integrated the policy and the community and to prevent violence.