Source: Jornal do Brasil, 23/06/2009

The legal bureaucracy stiffens the investigations and reflects on the low rate of convictions when the occurrences are judged within the Judiciary. What common sense had already realized, has now been corroborated by academic research to be released next month, in Brasília. The study calls into question the current investigation system, supported by the figure of the police investigation, and sheds light on the tortuous deviations that make Brazil one of the countries that are symbols of impunity.

Commissioned by the National Federation of Federal Police (Fenapef) and carried out by security experts recruited from public and private universities, the survey was carried out for more than a year in five units of the Federation: Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerias, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do South and Federal District. The unprecedented results, to which Jornal do Brasil had access, show the inefficiency of the judicial machine - supported by outdated laws and police corporations, most of the time, in the formality of the legal system.

The survey on homicides in Brasília - the place in the country where this type of crime is best investigated - reveals that the rate of solutions in the police reaches around 70%, but drops to 18% in the issuance of the criminal's sentence. Impunity is even more frightening in Pernambuco, where the police solve only 3% of cases. In Rio, the rate is below 10% - which explains the enormous volume of inquiries and processes huddled in the insoluble case files. In the rest of the country, the average fluctuates around 10% (very far from the level required by society).

One of the merits of the research was the monitoring of the entire trajectory of the investigation and the comparison of the performance of the Brazilian judicial machine with that of countries such as Argentina, Spain and France. To this end, the researchers investigated the course of 13 criminal modalities, from the registration of the police report (BO) to the final decision in the Judiciary (the final decision of a criminal case), in order to assess the performance of investigators, police police, prosecutors and, in the final stage, the sentence of the singular judgment and its confirmation by superior instances. Hundreds of interviews were conducted with police, prosecutors and judges to demonstrate that there is also a serious conflict between justice operators. The main one is a kind of "cold war" separating police delegates (federal and civil) and agents who act on the front lines of investigations.

In fact, the figure of the police inquiry, which is no longer used in countries that have improved the judicial system, is of more use in giving disproportionate power to delegates than in combating impunity. In the words of agent Marcos Wink, president of Fenapef, sponsor of the research, "the police lose years doing an investigation and when the investigation reaches the Judiciary, it starts all over again". The agent suggests adopting a full investigation report, which would be sufficient for the complaint and the sentence. The inquiry, he says, generates a whole notarial bureaucracy, dispensable for the mission of doing justice.

With the data compiled by the survey, which will be released at an event that will have the presence of authorities in the area of ​​public security, lawmakers will have at hand raw material for a deep and necessary reform in the judicial model in force. The Brazilian citizen is waiting.