A Geografia da Criminalidade no Campus: a multiterritorialidade do crime na cidade universitária Professor José da Silveira Netto (UFPA)

Abstract

The objective of the research is to analyze and understand the multiple territories and territorialities of crime, observing the following illegal activities: trade in ilegal substances (drug trafficking and consumption); theft; and robbery. Such crimes served as a basis to answer how crime is spatialized and related to the daily life of the university city José da Silveira Netto. In this sense, the research is based on the collection of information from the security system applied in the study area, as well as its history of occurrences, considering the university space itself as an “empirical object”, based on the method of geographic historical-dialectical materialism that considers a whole historical-material conjuncture of space production, which makes it possible to identify characteristics of the geographical context where crime is inserted on the campus, highlighting the viability of the structuring hypothesis of the “analytical object”, of the multiple territories of crime. Thus, the crimes that occur within the campus are mostly related to property crimes - theft and robbery - among them, theft that represent 84%, robbery and drug trafficking that are diluted in the remaining 16%, 13% and 3%, respectively. Finally, albeit in a timid way, it is worth raising some measures that could help in the problem of crime, not only in the university city of UFPA, but within the scenario of campuses throughout Brazil that suffer from the same difficulties. Thus, effective security policies should be spearheaded by: i) approaching and attracting neighboring communities in order to encourage coexistence at the university level, enabling the occupation of the common spaces of higher education institutions with social actions that absorb more widely all those who are frequently in these places, whether developing their academic activities or seeking to perform other space practices; ii) create alternatives for community security so that the authorities can dialogue with civil society; iii) and, finally, the development of collaborative citizenship projects between universities and the security and social defense agencies to act in the neighboring communities as mediators of conflicts, since improving the rates of violence and crime in the surroundings, automatically these results will be reflected into the campuses.