The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime, and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil

We hold many assumptions about police work—that it is the responsibility of the state, or that police officers are given the right to kill in the name of public safety or self—defense. But in The Killing Consensus, Graham Denyer Willis shows how in São Paulo, Brazil, killing and the arbitration of “normal” killing in the name of social order are actually conducted by two groups—the police and organized crime—both operating according to parallel logics of murder. Based on three years of ethn...