Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Based on my ethnography Untrusting (CUP 2026) in Rio and Recife, I show that trust in policing is often built through racialized and gendered violence, while mistrust sustains social life. I argue untrusting is democracy’s ethical maintenance and a necessary recalibration of authority.

Paper long abstract

Based on my ethnography Untrusting (Columbia University Press 2026), grounded in long-term fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro and Recife, I reconsider the place of trust and mistrust in democratic policing. Scholars and policymakers often imagine trust as something institutions can engineer, measure, and restore. Yet in contexts of exceptionally high police violence, my research shows that trust in policing is often produced through racialized and gendered harm, punitive expectations, and managerial metrics that reward coercive interventions. In a seeming paradox, many residents expressed trust not when police acted lawfully, but when they punished “known” offenders, defended local honor, or performed recognizable hierarchies.

By contrast, mistrust proved essential to sustaining everyday life where the state arrives through suspicion rather than care. Practices of untrusting—reading police intentions, interpreting danger, anticipating harm, and protecting kin—formed a crucial repertoire through which residents navigated the uncertainty and lethal potential of police encounters. Rather than signalling democratic decline, mistrust reveals the ethical and political labor people undertake to survive systems not designed with them in mind.

I theorize untrusting as democracy’s ethical maintenance: a stance that refuses the demand to perform compliant trustworthiness and instead foregrounds vigilance, critique, and selective relationality. Ethnographically, mistrust generates forms of care and solidarity the state cannot provide; analytically, it shows how authority is recognized, contested, and recalibrated. Taking mistrust seriously exposes the limits of trust as the dominant metric of democratic reform.