Who Are the Pi-lícias?

Every 12th of October Brazilian, Catholics celebrate Our Lady of Aparecida, Brazil's patron saint. This holy day is also a national holiday from work. In 2019, a research interlocutor called Kayque¹ enjoyed the celebration by playing football with his friends. He invited me to take part, saying it would be a ‘police pick-up football game’. His invitation intrigued me. ‘Police pick-up football game? What do you mean?’ He said the reason for the naming was that some players were police who lived close to the pitch or worked in the local police battalion. The field, the battalion, and the footballers’ residences were all located in Rio de Janeiro's northern suburbs, far away from the wealthy southern neighbourhoods where the city's tourist sites are. Hearing my reticence, Kayque insisted: ‘Come on man, I can introduce you to some “cop friends”. It can help in your “book” about the police!’ I was not in the habit of playing football with friends or next-door amateurs. But afterwards it was impossible not to consider the occasion a signal moment in my fieldwork.

When I met Kayque on the Saturday morning agreed, he pointed out that only three of the sixteen players present were actually PMs. He told me they worked in the same battalion, being known to him as his routines unfolded mostly in the area they patrolled. He was a white man, twenty-one years in age, single with no children, who wanted to follow in the career steps of his godfather, a high-ranked PMERJ officer. Though he and most other players were not formally police, stories of ‘cop life’ animated the talk between and after the matches. Players interacted intimately with the narratives of chases, arrests, killings, and sexual adventures described by police, sharing similar categories and worldviews.² What struck me was their adoption of common usages in police jargon, clothing, accessories, and military haircuts. At the bar where we headed later, anyone outside the group could have easily taken it as comprising off-duty officers drinking and chatting.

Observing them more closely there, I better understood remarks made earlier by two players Kayque introduced. I commented on the presence of police among the players, saying my interlocutor had described the morning meeting as a ‘police pick-up football game’. A black sergeant in his mid-forties called Bezerra smiled disagreement: ‘Here they even play some policemen, but it isn't like our game. On Wednesday nights, only the “battalion” can play. I mean, real cops, you know? These guys here are just pi-lícias’. His civilian brother-in-law concurred: ‘There are some people here thinking they're cops’. ‘In fact’, he continued, ‘they ain't shit’. Calling them pi-lícias was how Bezerra expressed his low opinion about the would-be police on the field. ‘They're impure’, he emphasised, suggesting that civilian residues still polluted the hybrid identities of pi-lícias. All these men had played football and drank together as good friends, but the sergeant felt discomforted by my comments as a civilian unable to notice that most were not police. For him, as for other PMs, clearly separating ‘them’ and ‘us’ was mandatory, even during a Saturday morning football match.

In the jargon of Rio policing, PMs use the category pi-lícia for civilians who mimic police by wearing police-like uniforms, carrying badges and guns, and using accessories that present them as off-duty officers. The term combines two particles. The -lícia comes from polícia, naming both the military police force and its personnel. But pi- indexes Pé Inchado (Swollen Foot): a civilian, lacking discipline and self-control, whose feet swell up from heavy drinking. In a nutshell, a pi-lícia is a civilian who struggles to perform as a ‘real cop’ in everyday life. But the category is not just liminal between police and civilian worlds. Its main characteristic is the pursuit of social leverage through proximity to legitimate police agents. The category also entails a variety of postures. PMERJ allows the presence of pi-lícias up to a point, but every pi-lícia is also a possible ‘energy drainer’ who tries to convert proximity to policing into personal extraction. Pi-lícias themselves seldom use the term, or even admit their knowledge of it. They consider themselves auxiliaries who assume important roles in fighting crime. Around legitimate agents in private security schemes, they define themselves as ‘guards’, ‘crime watchers’, ‘police helpers’, or ‘good friends of the police’, to mention just a few blurry definitions. They only dare to impersonate police officers more explicitly when interacting with civilians or in show-off situations such as posing for crafted photographs on their social media platforms.

I often encountered a melancholia in pi-lícias, since most had tried and failed to join the force. The minimum requirements for admission to PMERJ at the lowest rank of soldier are: (a) passing academic exams; (b) passing fitness exams; (c) passing physical exams; (d) being between eighteen and thirty-two years in age; (e) having a secondary education diploma; (f) having a valid car driver's licence; and (g) having no criminal record. The pi-lícias I met were often men over thirty who could no longer join the force. They were marked by an aura of frustration around their unfulfilled dreams. Yet they were still a recurring presence through my fifteen months of fieldwork in 2019 to 2020, because my primary interlocutors were civilians who wanted to become PMs.

I initially developed my research with hundreds of mostly-male police career candidates at a preparatory course for PMERJ's academic testing. As months passed and our relations deepened, some candidates trusted my presence beyond the classroom routine, in their work, home, and leisure places across impoverished areas of the city. Some of these men were pi-lícias or introduced me to others called such. Fake or not, these men gained my attention because one focus of my fieldwork was the relationships that candidates had maintained with PMs before seeking to join the force. PMs share essential aspects of their routines with prospective colleagues, because they also share civilian contexts with them as family members, friends, neighbours, employers, and acquaintances. Over time it became clear that being a pi-lícia was much more than being a security guard, let alone a maverick police impersonator. Physical and symbolic proximity to PMs opened new pathways for fulfilling (sometimes unreachable) dreams of becoming legitimate agents.

Within Rio's policing landscapes,³ pi-lícias are primarily found as informants in parallel police investigations and in informal private security schemes managed by police officers. Though exact numbers are unavailable, Brazil surpassed one million private agents working on security in 2022—at least 40 per cent more than the number of public officials—and with almost half of private guards working outside formal state regulation, illegal security services are widespread (FBSP 2022). They are often provided by police officers alongside their official policing duties. Alleging low wages, PMs seek complementary jobs to improve their incomes, using their professional expertise to offer a specialised (and more valued) service. According to Daniel Brito, Jaime Souza and Roseane Lima (2011: 168), the Brazilian private security market is entangled with police networks in its recruitment, organisation, and operation. Rio is no exception. Businesses are run on trusted networks among police who share the same military environments in patrols and battalions (Cortes 2015: 93). Although police therefore have fingers all over the market, agents also regularly employ trusted civilians in secondary security functions. These informal police-civilian relations in the private security sector create fertile ground for pi-lícias to emerge.

Distancing through Fake-Talk

There are contrasting senses to the story of the football game that opened the previous section. So far it has helped us understand who pi-lícias are, and where they are found in the policing landscapes of Rio. But Sergeant Bezerra's negative comments about pi-lícias can also be taken now as a new starting point, to explore the ambiguity of relations between PMs and fake agents. This is especially so if one attends to the description of pi-lícias as ‘polluted’ subjects with strong civilian residues in their policing identifications.

After talking with many officers during my fieldwork, I realised that the category of pi-lícia synthesised fake-talk engaged in by PMs to distance themselves from these would-be agents. This puzzled me, because the negative associations of the category did not prevent those same PMs from establishing close connections with pi-lícias. Besides playing football, I observed them enjoying themselves together in bars, clubs, brothels, and other places of leisure. It was also common to hear career candidates talk of their feared and respected ‘police neighbours’ and how certain neighbours acted like ‘police flatterers’ in their presence. Legitimate agents also regularly employed pi-lícias in local policing activities in those neighbourhoods. In sum, their relationship adapted situationally. Sometimes they seemed closer, sometimes farther.

In this play between proximity and distance, legitimate agents engage in fake-talk to achieve optimal identity balancing with pi-lícias. If proximity is sometimes a necessary evil PMs accept in exploiting pi-lícias, agents must otherwise avoid identity overlaps to reinforce their position in the relationship. Julia Hornberger and Sarah Hodges (2023: 26) remark that the concept of fake-talk does not reveal the truth or fake values suggested in claims about fakeness, but rather how those claims express ‘otherwise inexpressible predicaments and anxieties’. The category of pi-lícia does not refer to the (il)legitimacy of police impersonators who help PMs. Instead, as used by PMs, it underlines the asymmetrical power relations that allow them to control or move away from the potential hazards of dealing with pi-lícias. Legitimate agents do not call pi-lícias fake because they think they have no use in countering crime. Fakeness for PMs refers instead to how they understand pollution or how remnants of civilian identity condemn pi-lícias to second-class status in a moral and political ranking of policing identities.

In this sense, talk about the fakeness of pi-lícias produces social distance by asserting symbolic barriers that segregate the status of PMs from that of unofficial agents. In Rio's impoverished northern suburbs, joining PMERJ creates better living conditions and social leverage in local reputational hierarchies. Getting ‘too close’ to pi-lícias is dangerous because PMs are concerned not to share the benefits they achieved by joining the force. In a volatile job market, these include relatively competitive salaries, career stability, public pensions, and other gains only a public servant can acquire in Brazil (Maia 2019). Police agencies have always been attractive, therefore, to poor and black civilians nationwide (Bretas 1997; Holloway 1993; Sansone 2002). Likewise, in Rio, a police career is a gateway to social mobility for black residents (Nobre 2010: 24). As a long-term black sergeant, Bezerra discouraged Kayque's plans to become a PM, saying the candidate had a ‘good education’ and could access more prestigious professions like most white middle-class Brazilians. No wonder PMERJ's personnel comprises primarily young non-white men with lower educational qualifications (Minayo et al. 2008: 67–71). In the last PMERJ entrance test in 2014, 105,438 candidates (83,882 male and 21,556 female) sat the exams, with an average of over seventeen applicants for each eventual hire. Most candidates were non-white civilians from Rio's impoverished areas.

But interests in becoming an officer—and reasons for PMs to guard their professional status—include not just formal benefits but also less calculable privileges. Wellington, one of my pi-lícia interlocutors, was a black man of thirty-two years, married with two children. He had always had an affinity with police through an interplay of kinship, neighbourhood, and work relations. Apart from considering policing a ‘good job’, his interest in PMERJ was also related to experiences. Wellington entered the Brazilian Air Force at eighteen, remaining in arms till twenty-four, when he was discharged as still an airman. With his military training, he was soon invited to work gigs as a security guard at bars, brothels, and small live music concerts. Friends and acquaintances who were PMs or people close to PMs referred him to those jobs. They trusted his skills in shooting and martial arts, as well as his imposing more-than-six-foot presence, to handle any conflicts arising.

When Wellington was explaining to me the extra ‘job opportunities’ the police profession permitted in the security market, I asked if he wanted to join PMERJ ‘just for the money’. Without too much thought he answered: ‘You see … money is important but actually everyone wants to be a friend to the police too, right? At the end of the day, they decide if you're in trouble or not. If you know how to use just right your gun, your badge, and your uniform, being a cop may open many doors’. This explanation went a step further than ‘job opportunities’ when it alluded to the importance of good relations with the police.

Julia Hornberger (2004: 213) describes how camaraderie with police is a strategy for the South African urban poor to negotiate difficult situations. Poor Brazilian urban areas are no different in this regard. In a context of restricted accountability, police often informally control and influence local social relations (Albernaz 2018; Ferreira 2021; Nogueira 2013; Rodrigues 2023). In Brazilian favelas and urban peripheries, PMs, paramilitaries, and drug dealers can decide if one is in trouble or not. In extreme situations, they might determine who lives or dies (Feltrán 2020; Silva 2019; Willis 2015). Struggling for better living conditions in places like Rio's northern suburbs, Wellington and other candidates considered the police among the most important centres of power for the local social order (see Geertz 1983: 121–146). They knew well how agents used PMERJ to move up in local reputational ranks by ‘getting respect’ from their neighbours, friends, and acquaintances.

As a former soldier working for PMs, Wellington showed deep respect for militaristic values of hierarchy, order, and discipline. He also admired the military paraphernalia and equipment—often used by him in the past—that PMs used in the present when raiding favelas. Talking about guns, badges, and military uniforms always made Wellington's eyes shine because those items also allegedly boosted the sex appeal of pi-lícias. When younger and still single, he said, carrying his revolver and wearing police-style clothing accessories, such as aviator sunglasses, large watch models, and heavy chain necklaces,⁴ had helped him many times in situations from ‘picking up girls’ to access to nightclubs and ‘free drinks’. As a long-term security guard in brothels and swing clubs owned by PMs, Wellington told me of a red-light circuit frequented with police friends, where orgies affirmed vows of trust and secrecy. Echoing the usage of legitimate PMs, my interlocutor called PMERJ's ID card carteira pode tudo (the free-pass card to do anything), given all the possibilities that PMs might enjoy by using it properly’.

It is unsurprising then that poor residents of suburbs and favelas consider joining the military police for these benefits and privileges. In contexts of precarity, some civilians seek proximity to local centres of power such as drug gangs, militia groups, and the police, for the material and symbolic gains this affords. Nor is it surprising that police develop strategies to keep those same prerogatives exclusively to themselves, by distancing their state-sanctioned identities from pi-lícias who might seek to take advantage.

Fake Agents, Real Policing

Talk about the fakeness of pi-lícias resolves PMs’ worries about sustaining the exclusivity of their status and its privileges. Yet that same talk may also be used to control pi-lícias when proximity to them is necessary and desired. Pi-lícias enjoy their proximity to police, even considering the possible risks and harms. The hierarchy of PMs and pi-lícias produces distance to protect police privileges from usurpers, but then why do PMs allow fake police to come close? In this regard, the desire to ‘become a cop’ leads us to a second point of ambiguity: PMs’ instrumentalisation of the pi-lícias’ desire to emulate them.

In this third section, I explore how the hierarchical proximity between real and fake agents can be used to control pi-lícias in a manner productive for PMs. I argue that the social ties between pi-lícias and PMs affirm the argument of this special issue that fakes and policing mutually nurture each other. But pi-lícias call our attention to an addition to that argument, since the fake in this instance creates policing not only by calling for its necessity but also by enforcing order directly. Pi-lícias both target and are targeted by police practices in their relations with PMs and civilians.⁵ Though asymmetrical, the interaction between officials and impersonators shapes the social production of policing.

Let me go back again to the football game described earlier. Kayque told me then that Bezerra was a known face in his neighbourhood, which lay in the heart of the sergeant's patrolled perimeter. After working for almost fifteen years in this area, the PM had long been watching its north-side suburban streets. Bezerra was not considered just any policeman here. The sergeant connected local networks in his face-to-face relations with residents and businesspeople, from shop owners to hawkers. If they needed any assistance with security, they would not ‘call the cops’ like anyone else. Instead, they would call or text Bezerra on his private phone. Having lived here for a long time, Kayque pointed out that his neighbours trusted the sergeant because he knew exactly how to do ‘real policing’. By this he meant the agent ‘gets shit done’ by dealing pragmatically with criminals, no matter what it takes. Bezerra's beat was a personal space where he exercised growing influence over time, especially by managing an informal private security scheme. For the community, Bezerra, not the PMERJ, was the primary reference for local policing.

Bezerra's informal security scheme is an instance of what Ian Loader (2000: 326–329) describes as networks of police working ‘through, above, below and beyond’ the state. Besides being an officer in his own right, the sergeant employed trusted civilians as well as (mostly rank-and-file) PMs for patrolling functions. This created a radically contingent local policing, with the help of police impersonators as well. Numbers are imprecise, but Kayque speculated that around six men took turns in twelve-hour shifts to watch the area. Under Bezerra's supervision, they were responsible for the daily patrol of streets, residences, and shops whose owners paid regularly to benefit from the service. Because of its efficiency his business flourished over time. As a sergeant, he could access privileged information and mobilise legal resources to deal with the local crime scene, as Brazilian police often do when they work in the private security sector (Brito et al. 2011; Cortes 2015). Occasionally, thieves, drug users, and rapists simply disappeared from the neighbourhood. Everyone knew that Bezerra was responsible for ‘solving’ most such crimes, either directly or indirectly. Kayque told me that everyone in the area was satisfied, as the community was ‘safer at the hands of Bezerra and his men’.

This neighbourhood was close to militia territories, but residents under Bezerra's protection did not consider him a miliciano (militia man). Unlike paramilitaries, Kayque argued, the sergeant and his men did not extort from local ‘good citizens’. No one was forced to pay the suggested monthly protection fee, equivalent to ten to fifteen pounds. Even so, out of a mixture of fear and gratitude, most people contributed to ‘keep the streets clean’. As Leonardo Brama (2019) remarks, semantic dilemmas around the category of miliciano reside on the slippery surface of that category in Rio de Janeiro, given the diversity of actions linked to militias over the time those groups have expanded. Thais Duarte (2019) also underlines that differences between milicianos and drug traffickers have narrowed in recent years. Both groups increasingly use violence to territorialise favelas and peripheral areas as spaces for both legal and illegal markets. Not being thought a miliciano did not prevent Bezerra from keeping relations with those groups and committing crimes to pacify his beat.

Among ‘Bezerra's men’, a pi-lícia named Péricles was one of his most trusted. He was not present at the football game I have described, but all civilians and PMs who played the matches there seemed to know him. Kayque told me that Péricles was known in the neighbourhood as ‘a friend of Bezerra and other cops’, even though they sometimes showed little regard for him. Locals made fun of Péricles’ own ‘lust for the police’, ridiculing his efforts to pose as a ‘real agent’ in Instagram posts with uniforms, handcuffs, walkie-talkies, or other such gear. Those items are some of the most potent symbols shaping ‘policeness’ and the social production of policing in Rio. Péricles uses all those objects to enhance his authority when dealing with crime. He also comprehends his police paraphernalia in the form of personal ‘adornments’ and valuable ‘items of display’ (Leach 1970: 142), considering their positive recognition in Rio's impoverished areas.⁶ But those same artefacts were more tolerated when he watched the streets, usually carrying a revolver provided by Bezerra. Kayque affirmed that Péricles’ long proximity to his master was a partially opened gateway to the military policing world, emphasising: ‘It's funny ‘cause he usually shows off like a ‘real cop’ only in front of civilians or on the internet’. Péricles’ success in performing policing seemed dependent on Bezerra and others’ interests, permissions, or overlookings.

Neighbourhood rumours also framed the working relations between Bezerra and his men. Suspicious questions arose about whether Péricles and others had either licences or training. Locals were also unsure of who were ‘real police’ and not, as no one wore official uniforms when patrolling. A simple black vest with the word Apoio (Security Helper) on the back identified every Bezerra employee, civilian or military. Only those close to the sergeant knew more. But his clients seemed not to care whether the patrollers were official police or not, as long as the community felt safe. Bezerra engaged in fake-talk about pi-lícias only in cases where his authority had been challenged, or a pi-lícia crossed his interests. Kayque told me of an episode when the sergeant was enraged at an employee who had dared to offer armed escort services without the PM's consent:

Marquinhos [the pi-lícia] really pissed Bezerra off that time. You know people, people love to talk. A lot of gossip about somebody offering ‘armed escort’ came around in the neighbourhood. Everyone tensed up! Bezerra got pissed, asking around who was offering the service. Eventually, some afraid dude said the name of Marquinhos. He really had to explain himself! But what could the PM do? Accept a competitor? No way! In the end, Marquinhos was lucky just to be fired. Bezerra made his message crystal clear to us when he said: ‘The fucking police here is me! Anyone understood that Marquinhos was just a police wannabe policing the streets, a pi-lícia like the cops say, you know?’

In a context where he had to create proximity with pi-lícias to offer security services, Bezerra's talk of their fakeness worked to enforce his authority over them. Kayque's third-person view also lets us follow effects of Bezerra's fake-talk in the community, as he had long been patrolled by both fake and real police. Marquinhos’ banishing from the security scheme showed other patrollers what could happen if they challenged Bezerra's authority. After much gossip in the neighbourhood, the remaining men were grateful for keeping their jobs and they affirmed their vows of trust in the sergeant's leadership. As a political effect, this punishment restored unity among Bezerra and his fellow PMs and pi-lícias in front of civilian residents. Economically, calling Marquinhos an imposter allowed Bezerra to assert his monopolistic interests in the community. No competition in private security would be allowed in the sergeant's beat. Otherwise, as Kayque stressed when saying the pi-lícia was lucky just to be fired, anyone acting like Marquinhos could suffer more severely in the future.

Varying between these tight and slack ties, PMs and pi-lícias position their own identities situationally depending on the interests in play. PMs are not simply vampirised by pi-lícias, since these connections also benefit the former. Let us move from Kayque's perspective to Bezerra's. A story told by the sergeant might help us understand why PMs need pi-lícias around them. At the bar after the game, Bezerra spoke of an elderly businessman, Zé Carlos, who needed help with crimes against his corner shop. To ‘clean up’ the area, Bezerra dispatched Péricles to guard the shop under his supervision.

The pi-lícia was in his mid-thirties, and like many of his comrades he had never achieved his goal of being a legitimate PM, failing the PMERJ's entrance exams three times. What he had left was working in gig jobs like Bezerra's small security scheme. Working security shifts in a corner shop is exemplary of the boring routine that police despise in their work (Bayley 1994; Bouza 1990; Reiner 1992). Sitting for long hours on an uncomfortable wooden chair, Péricles watched customers coming in and out of the shop. While a few ‘suspects’ were discretely followed on foot or by his eyes through the CCTV, much of his time was spent on such tasks as answering questions about banana prices or helping old ladies with shopping bags. Once a week he also helped unload supplies from Zé Carlos's truck into an old warehouse behind the shop. Just as real cops do, pi-lícias face ‘police boredom’ (Fassin 2017b). The everyday reality of patrolling is monotonous, with little time directly devoted to crime (Manning 1997). Yet this tedious routine is also sometimes interrupted by flurries of excitement, when pi-lícias chase, arrest, and kill in the name of policing.

After a few weeks at the shop, Bezerra told us, Péricles had arrested two boys inside. He had observed suspicious activity on the cameras, suggesting a theft underway. Confronting the suspects on their way out, he found stolen liquor and cigarettes in a backpack. He escorted them to the warehouse behind the store, far from customer eyes and cameras, and immediately called Bezerra and Zé Carlos on the radio. The sergeant told us that the two shoplifters appeared ‘no more than fifteen years old’. The older was already well known in the area for theft and for drug use.

Bezerra got to the crime scene almost an hour after Zé Carlos. The two young delinquents sat on the floor in Péricles’ handcuffs. They had already been slapped around, but only the younger was whimpering. Bezerra said he was ‘fed up dealing with those little pieces of shit’. Arresting young thieves and drug addicts was like ‘carrying water to the sea’. Pointing out that the local police station would not resolve things, the sergeant asked Zé Carlos if he might ‘teach those kids a lesson’ himself then escort them to the incapable local commissioner. ‘As long as it solves my problem’, the old man said, leaving the warehouse and washing his hands of what was coming.

Bezerra was already tipsy when we asked what had happened next. He slowly detailed how the teenagers were undressed, gagged with dirty rags, and tortured by him and Péricles. Verbal attacks and threats were followed by kicks, slaps, punches, and cigarette burns, especially on their genitals. All footballers at the table concurred it would have been pointless just to escort them to the station, given that they would quickly be rereleased onto the streets. Instead, they believed the teenagers could be taught to behave like ‘good boys’ at the hands of the real and fake police involved.

Forty minutes later, the torture session ceased. It was almost 6:00 p.m. when Bezerra left the warehouse, telling Péricles to wait for further instructions. Zé Carlos was waiting for him at the counter. The shop closed and no customers present, Bezerra assured him that the boys ‘would never steal anything from there again’. Added to the beating, he said, they would now be sent to a juvenile prison given the older boy's prior record. To ensure this, the sergeant said, he would personally escort them to the police station for a ‘face-to-face’ talk with the commissioner, who ‘owed him some favours’. As Kayque told me later, however, Bezerra escorted no one to the station that night. Instead, he ordered Péricles to put them in the trunk of his car then assume the risks of driving to a nearby area where the boys were handed over to a militia group close to Bezerra and other PMs in the local battalion. Péricles told the milicianos they were two ‘little crackheads’ from a nearby favela controlled by a rival drug gang. They were summarily executed.⁷

Despite the risks and consequences, the footballers hearing this story praised the torture session described and how the PM and the pi-lícia ‘solved’ the shoplifting problem permanently. The next day no one dared to ask after the boys, and life continued as usual. Later I asked Kayque if Zé Carlos knew of the teenagers’ actual fate. He said that he ‘probably did’, considering how ruthless Bezerra's men were in dealing with criminals. Like legitimate police in the area, Péricles capitalised on episodes like this by emulating a critical component of the identity of street police in Rio. Developing a ‘bad reputation’ through fear is how PMs build up their characters as ‘respected cops’ in everyday life (Ramos 2017: 20–21). On the other hand, pi-lícias pay the price for their symbolic and material capitalisation on proximity to police. They are subordinated to PMs, not only to avoid the contagion of their ‘polluted’ hybrid identities but also to amplify police powers through the manner of brutal policing seen in poor areas of the city.

Conclusion

Academic research on police impersonation is rare (Rennison and Dodge 2012). In most studies already published, police impersonators are linked to illegal activities that undermine police authority. Here I have challenged that approach by exploring the category of pi-lícia. Stuck in a never-completely-achieved policing identity, pi-lícias are the emulators or ‘fake police’ named as such by PMs in Rio de Janeiro. In the city's policing landscapes, they are mostly found in auxiliary positions in informal private security schemes, or as informants in official investigations. Occasionally they may also appear in police-like uniforms alongside PMs in more murky dimensions of policing, such as illegal raids on favelas. Liminality is their strength and their weakness. They occupy a special seat for transiting between the domains of civilians and police but eternally travel and never arrive in their relationships with PMs. Despite their special seats, pi-lícias always ride in second-class wagons in the policing world.

Moving beyond the current policing scholarship, I have argued that the existence of pi-lícias does not threaten the police. Instead, PMs actively exploit the desires of pi-licias to emulate police for personal gain. Depending on the situation, PMs might let their servants get ‘a piece of the hunt’ to satisfy their aspirations and their excitement at fighting crime. To feel like real cops, fake cops are easily led to assume the riskiest positions in the place of legitimate agents, experiencing for a while the most vivid dimensions of what they consider a ‘cop life’ to be. PMs manipulate the ‘gap between imagination and reality’ (Fassin 2017b: 270) in policing, using pi-lícias in more risky illegal activities while they keep their own businesses running in the shadows. Pi-lícias know they could quickly become the scapegoats for the real police if anything were to go wrong in their incursions into policing. PMERJ standard practices also include inventing incident narratives to avoid criminalisation. For pi-lícias like Péricles, though, arresting, judging, and executing the sentence of two juvenile thieves, by driving them to their deaths, is an adrenaline-inducing experience lived only with ‘real cops’.

Thinking with the concept of fake-talk allows us to see police impersonation as an element of policing, not just as its negation. In most existing scholarship, the idea of fakeness tells us that fake cops have no legitimacy and do not counter crime because they are criminals. But if we seriously consider PMs’ talk about the fakeness of pi-lícias, the evidence underpinning this claim disappears. When it comes to ‘real policing’ in the streets of Rio's impoverished northern suburbs, the absence of evidence regarding ‘the real police’ unlocks new analytical pathways. Fakeness shifts from being a legal-normative category, defined by the lack of efficacy and legitimacy, to being the site for an array of very unstable but productive social relations. Are pi-lícias energy drainers trying to vampirise legitimate police, or are they an auxiliary force assuming important tasks? Thinking with fake-talk lets us examine these two narratives not as contradictory but as co-existing within the same political spaces shared by PMs, pi-lícias, and civilians.

To echo Didier Fassin (2017a: 3–5) on the importance of the recent ethnographic turn in studies of policing, fieldwork allows ethnographers to confront ‘discursive propositions with actual facts, what is said and what is done, what is presumed to be and what really is’. Anthropology comes to policing from a long tradition critical of the state, posing crucial questions about the self-evidence of what policing is (Martin 2018: 135). From a bottom-up perspective, the fake-talk of police in Rio allows us to frame policing less as what police formally do than as a set of social practices lacking a firm ontological basis. It also allows us to see the state less as the ‘reality which stands behind the mask’ (Abrams 1988: 82) than as a set of on-the-ground political relations that may cross the boundaries between legality and illegality as their authority is built. According to both civilians and officers in the city's northern suburbs, fake agents create ‘real policing’. Policing is a cultural fact that always depends on social context.