On August 5, Ramón Chaves, Leme’s Executive Manager, taught a class on the role of municipalities in public security to officers participating in the second training course of the Rio de Janeiro Municipal Force. The activity discussed how municipal governments can contribute to preventing and reducing crime and presented initiatives developed by the Rio City Government in recent years.

One of the central points of the class was the expanded role of municipalities in public security. Although much of the responsibility for policing and criminal investigations remains with state and federal governments, municipalities have important tools at their disposal to address security problems. These include the Municipal Guard, urban space management, the provision of public services, the use of data and technology, and the ability to coordinate different agencies around concrete problems.

The presentation reviewed part of this institutional trajectory, covering the role of municipal guards under the 1988 Constitution, the General Statute of Municipal Guards, enacted in 2014, and the creation of the Unified Public Security System (SUSP) in 2018. This process strengthened the recognition of municipal guards as institutions responsible for preventive municipal protection and as operational members of the public security system.

Against this backdrop, the class discussed different strategies for preventing crime and violence and the importance of tailoring interventions to the problem being addressed. One of the topics presented was the spatial concentration of crime: criminal incidents are not evenly distributed across a city, but tend to be concentrated in specific places. This characteristic makes it possible to target preventive actions at specific areas and situations, combining different public policy tools.

Ramón emphasized that expanding the participation of municipalities in public security does not mean reproducing the functions performed by state police forces. The challenge is to develop their own capacities, identify the problems in which municipal governments can produce results, and combine preventive patrols, territorial management, technology, public services, and institutional coordination based on diagnoses and evidence.

At the end of the class, the discussion addressed how these principles have been incorporated into Rio’s municipal public security policy. The initiatives presented included the Municipal Force, focused on data-driven preventive patrols in priority areas; CompStat Rio, a management model that organizes the monitoring of security problems and the coordination of responses by municipal agencies; and CIVITAS Rio, which expands the City Government’s capacity to integrate data, produce intelligence, and use surveillance technologies to support security operations.

The presentation also addressed the Municipal Public Security Plan, which will be launched soon and is expected to organize the City Government’s priorities, strategies, and coordination mechanisms in this area. The discussion sought to demonstrate how these different initiatives are interconnected in the development of a problem-oriented, evidence-based municipal policy subject to mechanisms for planning, monitoring, and evaluating results.