Democratic shielding of the Federal Police or defensive police shielding?

With the departure of the Minister of Justice, the question about the protection of the Federal Police returns to public debate. This is a cyclical issue that always reappears in the face of the same known fact: governments come and go, and what we observe are political and institutional accommodations that revive the question, revealing that the problem intentionally remains unresolved.

In Brazil, we have neither learned nor institutionalized the main lesson of constitutional democracies: guaranteeing stability, predictability, regularity, transparency, accountability, and alternation in the exercise of legally and legitimately elected power. This lesson—which prevents coups from becoming a recurring threat and a political-institutional bargaining chip—corresponds to shielding both the combative forces (Armed Forces) and the restrained forces (police) from partisan political use and privatization by power groups or corporatist arrangements.

Brazilian logic, however, has followed a different path: maintaining police mandates as veritable blank powers of attorney, previously signed, to be filled in through backroom deals, opening the way for the establishment of autonomous police governments.

The fear of the Federal Police being politicized is legitimate. The problem is that, in practice, it has not been addressed through an institutionalized democratic response—not even within the scope of the Public Security Amendment, whose central objective should be precisely this: the federal and constitutional renegotiation of police mandates, defining exclusive, shared, and redundant competencies, in order to eliminate the infighting, the conflicts of competence, the disempowerment, and the recurring abuses of power that turn the police into political commodities.

It is in this context that the question returns to the Brazilian public debate, almost always formulated in an abstract way. The answer is not in the name of the President of the Republic, nor in the Minister of Justice of the moment, nor in the illusion of a police force that was once "shielded." What recent institutional history reveals is something more unsettling: the Federal Police is in charge of the police force itself, whether it agrees or disagrees with the Presidency of the Republic, the Minister of Justice, or even the Director-General appointed by them.

This does not mean democratic autonomy, nor republican independence in a strong sense. Rather, it means that the governance of the Federal Police has been organized as an autonomous agency without effective oversight, sustained by open-ended police mandates with undefined and ambiguous missions—long enough to weather political crises, but too short and unstable to be subject to clear mechanisms of governance, command, control, and accountability. In other words, it is less about increasing institutional autonomy and more about the absence of clear and stable mechanisms of democratic governance of police power that would support this autonomy.

In this arrangement, Ministers of Justice come and go due to wear and tear, crisis, or political realignment. Directors-General of the Federal Police remain, managing the timing of their own politics and the institutional survival of the Federal Police. The empirical data is unequivocal: the person who lasts the longest in office in Brazil is not the Minister of Justice—it's the Director-General of the Federal Police. And, as far as can be observed, the minister definitely doesn't control the Federal Police: he suggests, supports, or adheres, more or less explicitly, because there are no consistent instruments of governance available. In a power struggle, the probability of being ousted is greater for the minister than for the Director-General.

Since the return to democracy, in almost forty years, 34 Ministers of Justice have succeeded one another, while only 22 formal heads have occupied command of the Federal Police. Political instability has not weakened the institution as is often imagined; on the contrary, it has reinforced its capacity for self-governance. This arrangement, however, can become a critical democratic problem, as occurred in the FBI under the management of J. Edgar Hoover, who remained in command for about 48 years, accumulating enough power to constrain Parliament, intimidate the Judiciary and, in practice, govern police power outside—and often above—the regular mechanisms of democratic control.

The selection of the Director-General of the Federal Police has never been outsourced: formally, it is an act of the President of the Republic. What has been outsourced over time is something far more significant: the day-to-day governance of police power, entrusted to the institution itself. There has been no shielding against partisan political use, nor protection against particularistic or corporatist appropriation. What has occurred is a pragmatic and fragile solution: governing through instability and/or governing through self-delegation, which leads to the production of a defensive corporate self-shield.

On one hand, there's the game of musical chairs—frequent ministerial changes to avoid "warming up the seat," producing a provisional system managed as a governing technique. On the other, there's the surrender of governability to the police themselves, sustained by personal relationships of loyalty to the president, and not by robust institutional mechanisms of command, coordination, and control. Here, instability turns inward within the Federal Police itself, allowing each superintendency to become a Vatican within Rome, mitigating opportunities for the allocation of positions. Once again, one is left dependent on the "political goodwill" of a virtuous "ruler of good." Both approaches produce vulnerability. Both open loopholes for political, clientelist, and corporatist logics, guided by the political strategy of changing the pieces to maintain the cliques.

This historical scenario of open police mandates, which give rise to autonomous entities without oversight, coincided—not by chance—with critical moments in Brazilian democracy. During the Collor and Dilma governments, we observe the entrenchment of power within the Federal Police, with a self-serving and inviolable administration, at the same time as impeachment processes were underway. This is a revealing institutional coincidence: the absence of effective mechanisms for governing police power favors the predatory emancipation of the police from democratic state control. Public policy ceases to be implemented by the State, and instead, police policy is pursued—or, more precisely, the policy of the group that ascends to power.

In practice, governing through personalistic mechanisms, relying on individual loyalties rather than institutional architecture, has allowed the creation of an emancipated police power that operates against representative democracy and the federal system. Not because it is too powerful, but because it is poorly governed.

This is what I discuss in the article "Who has been governing the Federal Police? Themselves," published on July 27, 2019, link [link would be inserted here]. https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2019/07/27/artigo-or-quem-tem-governado-a-policia-federal-ela-mesma/In this text, I examine why Ministers of Justice do not control the Federal Police, how political turnover coexists with institutional continuity, why the rhetoric of "shielding" is only apparent, and how the precariousness of effective mechanisms for governing police power corrodes democracy from within, without needing to formally break it. The text does not offer institutional comfort: it offers a diagnostic direction that points to the need to avoid resurrecting, with each crisis, the same fear of political manipulation, confronting distrust in the State and in governments through the construction of effective tools for democratic shielding, as other Western democracies have done.