Percepções dos Promotores e Procuradores de Justiça da capital baiana a respeito

Abstract

This work analyzes the perceptions of the members of the Attorney Office of the State of Bahia about police discretion, especially of those who work at Salvador. In order to achieve certain depth in this analysis, first it was contextualized the object of study – discretion - in the ambit of the evolution of the concept of bureaucracy, starting from Weber’s design going to Lipsky’s idea of street-level bureaucracy, and also the debate about the implementation of public policies in the logic of the top-down and bottom-up models of analysis. This work also spoke about the historical evolution of the Attorney Office, with the display of its current constitutional framework and highlighting its horizontal accountability profile at Brazilian democracy. It emphasized, among the Office's missions, to promote the exercise of external control of police activity, analyzing it in a detailed way and under the terms of its modalities, scope and normative support. This work assumed the mission to develop the understanding of discretionary power, underlining the distinctions still evident nowadays between the discretion in its technical and legal sense and the notion usually employed at the specialized literature in police field. Then, it examined the models identified by Klockars to adress this subjectivity correlated to the application of rules and theirs specificities in the light of a full enforcement statute. In addition, focused on the discretion of the members of the public Attorneys Office and how it is, in some measure, able to establish the boundaries of legality of the police officer's discretionary performance. At the end, using a quantitative approach set up in a survey conducted with 112 members of the Attorney Office of the State of Bahia, it was found that although the respondents revealed themselves unamenable to any selective enforcement police, especially in the arrest decision field, by recognizing, yet in an exceptional way, the possibility of the selective application of the law by the police bureaucracy, they do not fit in any of the models described by Klockars (1985). It was also inferred that the prosecutors surveyed tended to recognize that they have emphasized discretion in forming a judgment of (i)legality of the police officer’s discretionary decisions, at least for the purpose of filing the rightfull actions (criminal and administrative misconduct). It was noted, meanwhile, that although the interviewed recognized their prerogative to – mainly through administrative recommendations – best structure and/or regulate the discretionary actions of police corporations, they consider unusual to adopt such measures.