Dossiê Roubo, violência e Cidade
Dilemas – Revista de estudos de conflito e controle social – Dossiê Roubo, violência e Cidade. v.13, no.3, 2020.
For some decades, in Brazil, an extensive literature has discussed criminal practices or the “world of crime”. This literature has focused, mainly, on the description of the retail sale of illegal drugs, as well as on the modes of ordering and territorial regulation imposed by drug traffickers. More recently, however, it is possible to see that a group of researchers has been dedicated to reflecting on another structuring dimension of the universe of crime, hitherto little explored: thefts, heists and robberies, that is, crimes against property, responsible for a large part of properly violent actions in urban centers and for more than half of the incarceration rate in Brazil. It is in the wake of this second agenda that this dossier intends to follow. Our objective is twofold: on the one hand, we seek to reflect on criminal practices against heritage based on their specificities, apprehended in qualitative research of an ethnographic character centered on interactions and empirical situations, but without losing sight of their wider sociological implications. On the other hand, more than a criminological approach, we are interested in the relationship between the phenomenon of theft and the urban issue. In order to explore theft and heist from its connections with the city and the territory, this dossier seeks to emphasize the socio-spatial dimension of these practices. Thus, the articles that compose it describe thefts and robberies practiced in different states of Brazil, explaining different dynamics that reveal the contextual specificities of these behaviors.