Untrusting - by Marta-Laura Haynes (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book investigates the fraught pursuit of democratic policing in Brazil, where trust is both a necessity and a precarious gamble.

Book Synopsis

What does it mean to trust in a world shaped by violence and inequality? This book investigates the fraught pursuit of democratic policing in Brazil, where trust is both a necessity and a precarious gamble. Marta-Laura Haynes follows police officers and favela residents through patrols, crime scenes, fishing trips, drumming circles, and neighborhood gatherings to reveal how trust is not simply given or earned--but actively performed, negotiated, and also refused. These stories show how trust intersects with local ideas of citizenship, legitimacy, race, and power while also exposing the pervasive and often generative role of mistrust.

Far from being a stable foundation for democracy, trust in this context is a high-stakes wager, shaped by local hierarchies of race, gender, and class. In response, communities develop what Haynes calls "untrusting" a mode of engagement that refuses blind faith in the state and instead turns mistrust into a form of care, resistance, and survival. By illuminating the contradictions and complexities of trust in Brazil, Untrusting challenges reductive narratives of policing and offers a nuanced perspective on how democratic ideals are contested and reimagined by people on the ground. Challenging the idea that distrust is merely a barrier to progress, Haynes shows how it can be a resource for agency, dignity, and alternative visions of justice.

Review Quotes

Amid efforts to make Brazilian police trustworthy that have spectacularly imploded, this vivid book speaks to a vital recognition: that even in the most troubled conditions, sociality, life, and mutual survival exist even among the most apparently disparate parties. And perhaps a modicum of trust must exist if violent inequality is the history, the status quo, and the trajectory.--Graham Denyer Willis, author of Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil

Marta-Laura Haynes's Untrusting is a powerful and well-substantiated critique of democratic policing experiments and the challenges of building public trust in societies structured by gendered and class-based racism. Haynes provides a necessary corrective to common narratives about why Black/Brown people living in the poorest neighborhoods distrust the police. She argues that this mistrust developed among the everyday witnesses and survivors of police terror and assassinations, unveiling a key political strategy of collective refusal, self-preservation, and care.--Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, author of Black Women Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil

Marta-Laura Haynes's fabulous ethnography presents a nuanced view of life in the favelas. All groups involved are portrayed with depth and care, showing not just their actions but also the deeper unsettling challenges of policing and public trust. Untrusting is a significant contribution to understanding policing, gender, violence, and sexuality.--Jeremy Slack, author of Deported to Death: How Drug Violence Is Changing Migration on the US-Mexico Border

A joy to read, this engaging, thought-provoking, and well-written book investigates democratic policing and efforts by law enforcement agencies to build trust with residents of favela communities in Recife and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Marta-Laura Haynes's intersectional conceptualization of the dynamics of trust and mistrust links race, gender, citizenship, and class, with broad applications beyond policing to other domains of study concerning security and insecurity around the world.--Marcos Mendoza, author of The Patagonian Sublime: The Green Economy and Post-Neoliberal Politics

About the Author

Marta-Laura Haynes is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.