Untrusting: Policing the Amphibious City, Lecture by Marta Laura Haynes
From Marta Laura Haynes -
My forthcoming book, Untrusting: In Pursuit of Democratic Policing in Brazil (Columbia University Press), draws on over a decade of ethnographic research in Rio de Janeiro and Recife. It examines how democratic policing reforms—promoted as human rights–based interventions to curb police abuse and restore trust—ended up reproducing inequality and violence. I define untrusting as a deliberate, embodied skepticism toward institutions, rooted in intergenerational experience rather than abstract critique. While mistrust is often framed as an obstacle to democracy and civic engagement, I argue that it can also serve as a foundation for agency and a mode of care, especially among marginalized populations.
To capture this dynamic, I shadowed homicide task forces and military police patrols, observed community policing initiatives, and lived in favelas where residents navigate violence, poverty, and state neglect. The book demonstrates how untrusting is not simply the absence of trust, but a political practice that reshapes democratic life from the ground up.
This talk highlights Chapter 3, Policing the Amphibious City, which situates Recife’s urban mangroves as a site where policing, development, and environmental racism intersect. In a city divided into wet and dry, contaminated and pure, Black and white, the mangroves stand as a stigmatized landscape racialized as an extension of the Black body. By positioning the mangroves as a space of mistrust and radical possibility, I explore how cultural narratives of trust shape people’s relations with the state and how untrusting redefines risk, care, and safety beyond hegemonic frameworks.