Why Trust? Rethinking the Measure of Good Policing
A book talk with Marta-Laura Haynes (Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice), including Amy Chazkel (Professor, Department of History, Columbia University) as discussant.
Summary: Why did we ever decide that "trust" was the right measure of good policing? In Untrusting: In Pursuit of Democratic Policing in Brazil (Columbia University Press 2026), Marta-Laura Haynes takes up that question from the streets of Rio de Janeiro and Recife — following homicide detectives, military police, and favela residents through the daily work of law enforcement in cities defined by chronic violence. Rather than treating distrust as a deficit to be corrected in Brazil's most policed communities, she develops the idea of untrusting: an active practice of withholding trust. The result is an intimate, unsettling portrait of security from the inside, and a challenge to the paradigms that have long framed police reform.
Speaker: Marta-Laura Haynes is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), where she coordinates the Deviance, Crime, and Culture major. Her research brings ethnographic attention to policing, urban space, and the politics of trust in Brazil. Between 2009 and 2015 she conducted fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro and Recife alongside homicide detectives, domestic violence units, and military police - work that grounds her first book, Untrusting: In Pursuit of Democratic Policing in Brazil (Columbia University Press, 2026). She also published on the topics of gender, motherhood, and race. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an MPhil in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford.
This event is co-sponsored by the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies, the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS), & and Columbia University Press.
Registration is required for all individuals not affiliated with Columbia University.
