If you want a road map for beating crime, talk to Elias Gomes. He cut the murder rate in his city’s most dangerous neighborhood from six homicides per month to zero—in just six months.

Gomes is mayor of Cabo de Santo Agostinho, a seaside agricultural and industrial community in the Northeast Brazilian state of Pernambuco.

Mayor Elias Gomes (left) credits citizen participation for helping to dramatically reduce homicides

Though it has little in common with the prosperous cities in southern Brazil that pioneered citizen participation in municipal affairs, Cabo de Santo Agostinho nevertheless decided to adopt this approach in areas including taxation, budgeting and public works. All are showing encouraging results, but it is the city’s efforts in crime prevention that have produced the most dramatic gains.

Gomes said his town’s crime prevention program, known as segurança amiga or friendly security, is based on the following measures:

• Pinpoint a crime-plagued neighborhood for a pilot program. In the case of Cabo de Santo Agostinho, the area selected was the Cohab district, the city’s most violent. Other areas will be added in the future.

• Create a consultative council composed of representatives of the municipal, military and civil police, neighborhood leaders, priests and pastors, school officials, etc.

• Conduct seminars on crime prevention techniques for police officers and community leaders.

• Exclude from the program police officers who are not willing to work closely with community leaders.

• Draft a “crime map” showing where crimes occur, with what frequency, for what reasons, and at what time of day or night.

• Establish a police command post in the targeted neighborhood in which municipal and state police will work jointly.

• Treat police well, which in the torrid Northeast of Brazil means providing refreshments for the officers on patrol and air conditioning at the station.

The program’s command center is the “interactive” police station in the Cohab district. From there, four unarmed municipal police officers, assisted by an armed member of the Pernambuco state civil police, take turns patrolling the community in an official vehicle.

Tips from citizens. At the police station, municipal guard Reginaldo Francisco Albuquerque said the key to the project’s success lies in getting reports from residents of suspicious activity or threats of violence, and then quickly taking action.

A municipal policeman in Cabo de Santo Agostinho collects crime tips and complaints left in a “suggestion box” by local residents

“People phone in complaints or tips, walk into the station, or leave messages, often unsigned, in suggestion boxes placed around the neighborhood, in schools, shops, and health clinics,” he explained. Police gather up the notes and use them as part of their intelligence network in preventing crime.

The security pilot project is just one aspect of Cabo de Santo Agostinho’s broader citizen participation program, known as Parceiro Cidadão or citizen partner.

As part of this three-year-old initiative, residents attend neighborhood assemblies at which they elect delegates who are charged with telling city officials what local people want included in the municipal budget. According to Gomes, these priorities typically involve improvements that immediately affect residents’ daily lives, such as public safety, construction of walls to prevent landslides, roads, recreation centers, concrete steps up steep hillsides and drainage ditches. “A person who lives surrounded by mud wants his street paved,” he said.

Tax tool. Gomes has also found that citizen participation in the budget process is a useful tool for raising more tax revenue. For example, he conducted a house-by-house campaign to urge homeowners to pay property taxes, declaring that public works in a given neighborhood would be completed only if a minimum of 70 percent of its residents paid their taxes.

“The population understands that if they want more investments, they have to pay more taxes,” Gomes said. In addition, scarce tax dollars are stretched by organizing residents to donate labor while the city provides building materials.
As a result of the collection drive, which also included discounts for early payment of taxes, tax revenue doubled, and receipts from the property tax tripled, according to Gomes. The municipality did its part, too: the portion of the overall budget spent on investments increased in two years from 3 percent to 15 percent, and the number of municipal political appointees dropped dramatically— from 1,000 to 279.

According to Gomes, citizen participation in the budgeting process is a counterweight to entrenched municipal bureaucracy, which constantly pressures the administration to spend budget resources on salaries. But he does not see participatory government as a constant tug of war between citizens and bureaucrats.

On the contrary, Gomes believes that participatory budgeting implies rights and obligations for both sides. City officials must undergo technical training, improve efficiency, and do a better job at project preparation and execution. Citizens must improve their ability to monitor projects. By combining democracy with greater efficiency, Brazilian municipalities are “opening windows for a better future,” Gomes said.

—Daniel Drosdoff

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