In 30 years, specialized police stations and prisons have not solved Cracolândia

A police station specializing in the fight against crack was one of the São Paulo government's first responses to the emergence of Cracolândia, in the central region of the capital of São Paulo. In July 1995, then governor Mário Covas signed the decree which created the police district, linked to the Department of Narcotics Investigations (Denarc). It was in that year that the term Cracolândia began to be used by major newspapers in São Paulo to designate the gathering of people that formed in the neighborhoods of Santa Ifigênia and Campos Elíseos to smoke the drug.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the consumption and sale of stone cocaine, prepared to be smoked, was already reported in the region. However, it was only some time later that the occupation of people, most of them homeless, began to be called Cracolândia by the newspapers, a term, according to the media, created by the users themselves and ended up stigmatizing them. .

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The police station inaugurated repression policies against drug trade and consumption in the central region of São Paulo. In 2012, it was extinguished by decree by then governor Geraldo Alckmin.

Almost 30 years later, Cracolândia is still the target of police actions that seem to have little effect in reducing the use or sale of drugs.

More than 5 thousand police reports

In 12 years, until the end of 2023, the 3rd Police District, Campos Elíseos, one of those that serves the Cracolândia region, recorded 3,113 cases of trafficking, an average of 259 per year. In the 77th Police Station, in Santa Cecília, also responsible for part of the streets where the crowds of people circulate, there were just over 2 thousand records of trafficking over these years, according to data from the São Paulo State Department of Public Security .

“I see [a Cracolândia] as a very caricatured example of the issue of the war on drugs, a very specific example, people were confined there in a certain way to a region due to the criminalization of drugs. And criminalization prevents any other type of policy that sees drugs from a non-police perspective from being implemented”, analyzes researcher Almir Felitte, author of the book The history of the police in Brazil: Permanent state of exception?.

Pain and suffering

After major police operations, several mayors stated that Cracolândia had been abolished. In 2008, Gilberto Kassab, who was in charge of the municipal Executive, announced the end of the streets taken over by crack users. In January 2012, during Kassab's administration, Operation Pain and Suffering was carried out, when people were forced to circulate continuously, unable to concentrate in the streets, being prevented by the police, who threw tear gas bombs and batons. The State Public Ministry obtained a injunction that prohibited the Military Police of promoting “vexatious, degrading or disrespectful” actions against socially unprotected people.

At the time, the then coordinator of Drug Policies for the state government, Luiz Alberto Chaves de Oliveira, said that the constant repression of people on the streets was intended to generate “pain and suffering” so that they would seek care in public services.

Human rights activist and harm reduction activist in the region since 2011, Roberta Costa followed the operation closely. “You see, the Public Power declares, without mincing its tongue, that it is going to carry out an operation to cause pain and suffering to these people who already have so much structural and personal suffering, to see if causing pain and suffering, they leave there, because it is disturbing the public roads and the aesthetics of the city”, he said.

“It seems absurd, but from then on, more or less the same thing continues to be done”, says the activist.

Another end of Cracolândia

“An important and relevant fact is that we broke the link between the criminal area, which distributed drugs here openly and sold drugs in a real open-air drug shopping center. That ended and that's why I declared that it was the end of Cracolândia”, said then-mayor João Doria, in May 2017. A meeting had just been held major police operation which involved more than 900 agents, especially from the Civil Police.

“There was that whole war scene, with hundreds of police officers arriving and destroying people’s things, with them losing their belongings”, recalls Roberta Costa. A few days later, the crowd, concentrated on Rua Helvetia and Alameda Dino Bueno, settled in Praça Princesa Isabel, 900 meters from the initial location.

The violence was added to a process that, according to the activist, had been occurring since the beginning of the year, disarticulation of social and health care services aimed at the population without social protection. “Doria arrived and fired all the workers who had known those people for years. They were people who had more ties, who were able to build care, policies and mediations”, explains the activist, who also published a master's thesis at the University of São Paulo (USP) on the relationship between drug users and the place of consumption.

Housing and income

It was the end of the only experience that, in researcher Almir Felitte's analysis, distanced itself from an essentially repressive approach. “The city hall tried to impose a vision more of public health, of an employment policy issue”, he highlights. In 2014, the city of São Paulo created the De Braços Abertos Program, which served around 400 people. A initiative It was based on the provision of housing in social hotels, with income from city hall work fronts. Support from psychologists and social workers was available.

Even with the municipal management's efforts to change the direction of policies in the region, Felitte believes that police violence harmed the program's results. “The City Hall of [Fernando] Haddad came with a policy of bringing a public health vision to the drug issue, while the state government continued with its unique and exclusively police vision”, he compares. “On more than one occasion, we saw the state Military Police take actions that boycotted these policies, violent actions that ended up affecting even social workers and municipal assistants”, he adds.

Repression has become the focus of actions since then. In 2021, the Public Ministry of São Paulo and the state Public Defender's Office moved an action against the actions of the Metropolitan Civil Guard (GCM) in Cracolândia. The request was based on material collected over four years, in addition to a series of videos taken with a hidden camera by the A Craco Resiste movement, which show guards carrying out attacks with tear gas bombs and surprise pepper spray, against people who are distracted or even sitting. .

“That’s what this is about, a lot of violence and unprecedented spending, a disregard for public money. They have been implementing a very onerous policy for 10 years, which everyone knows does not work”, emphasizes Roberta. A survey of the movement showed that the GCM spent up to R$14,000 in a single day on gas bombs and rubber bullets.

Operation Charon

In 2022, the Civil Police launched the so-called Operation Caronte, presented as an “intelligence” action to combat “drug trafficking” in the Cracolândia region. However, a report released by the Public Defender's Office of São Paulo shows that the majority of those detained were homeless peoplewith some not even carrying drugs.

The work analyzed 641 records of arrests made between September and November 2022. Of these, 638 were covered only by Article 28 of the Drug Law (11,343 of 2006), which concerns the possession of substances for personal consumption. Despite the legal requirement for an exam to prove the existence of the illicit drug, in 74 cases, a toxicological report was not presented. In 556 cases, pipes with “remnants and dirt” of cocaine or marijuana were seized and, in only eight, drugs were seized in some quantity.

The beginning of the operation was marked by the dispersion of the flow from Praça Princesa Isabel. A survey by the Public Space and Right to the City Laboratory (LabCidade), at the University of São Paulo, showed people spread across 16 points in the neighborhoods of República, Santa Ifigênia, Santa Cecília and Campos Elíseos.

“We only see the reproduction of this war, which as we can see, the most it can do is spread this region to more other places, spread these people to more other places”, emphasizes Felitte.

The war on drugs, explains Felitte, is a concept created in the United States in the 1970s to combat drug consumption and trade, based on an essentially repressive logic, like military combat against an enemy. “We see that it is a policy that, in the best of cases, since the leaders of these public policies have good intentions, it does not work. In the worst case scenario, which is the view I have, it works and works very well as a way of keeping certain sectors of society, especially poor people, black people, in a situation of constant marginalization”, highlights the expert.

In 2023, the State Secretariat for Public Security of São Paulo made an assessment in which it stated that “it has concentrated efforts on the fight against crime and the revitalization of the center”. According to the ministry, almost 5,900 offenders were arrested from January to November, 26.8% more than in the same period in 2022. “Theft rates registered a drop of 7.2%, while robberies decreased by 16.4%”, adds the secretariat’s note.

Actions without repression

Last year, 40 civil society organizations held the Cracolândia em Emergency seminar in which actions for the region that do not involve repression were discussed. The structuring of a program that promotes housing as a central action and the creation of a space for safe use, following the example of other countries that have dealt with similar situations, were among the measures discussed.

A few days before the meeting, the Municipal Council for Drug and Alcohol Policies of São Paulo released a report evaluating the possibility of creating insurance for drug consumption in the capital of São Paulo. The document contextualizes that the measure would be within the ethics of harm reduction.