ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the militarisation of the São Paulo police force between 1868 and 1924. It analyses the intersecting dynamics and the means by which the new bases of militaristic rhetoric were assimilated across several institutional spheres. The militarisation of police patrolling is usually perceived as an unbroken continuum in the process of implementing the country's police forces from the time of Brazil's political emancipation, or more precisely since the consolidation of the legal police institutions in the 1830s. The military model that the police force has assumed in Brazil was thought to have been reinforced at the emergence of the Republican regime, and especially after the military coup in 1964. The chapter considers some fundamental characteristics which encompass the training and organisation of the Brazilian police forces in a military typology: the first is their relationship with the armed forces. São Paulo's militarised police, subordinate to the legal government, actively participated in repressing these movements.
