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The Fernand Braudel Institute has been dedicating growing efforts on the search for politic and civil society actions to bring better public security since 1996. The worries about such question was aggregated with the other research works of research and public debates made by the Institute since its founding in 1987. The decision to incorporate the public security and urban violence theme came from an evaluation on the epidemic carachteristic of the violent crimes in a society which rapidly transitioned to be mainly urban and youth on the main Brazilian urban centers.

On this book we joined works by historians, policemans, sociologists, journalists and other professionals also specialized on criminality and its control, published in our webpage (www.braudel.org.br), in our research and thoughts journal, Braudel Papers, or discussed on tecnic seminars and conferences with members, researchers, and others related to the Institute. However, as other works currently being worked in the Institute complement the various approachs on the subject, we also choose to use some of these as articles, specially the research being conducted by the journalist Bruno Paes Manso about the acceptance of the homicide as mean to solve conflicts and about how the logic and beliefs of a homicide, responsible for more than 20 killings in the suburbs of São Paulo, works.

Other pioneer works are also outstanding as relevant researches to compreehend the growth of violence and the politic options to reduce it were also incorporated there. One of them is the wide work of ths scholar Luke Dowdney about the childs and adolescents involved with the drug traffic in Rio de Janeiro. Alba Zaluar also throws light over this theme and the problem on social esclusion. Louis Anemone, former chief of the New York Police Department also brings simple and applicable samples of actions which reduced the number of firearms (legal and illegal) and, consequently, of criminality. In this question, Ignacio Cano presents the value to improve the security of the programs to reduce firearms in circulation. Julita Lemgruber denounces myths deepening key questions in the criminality theme. The sociologist, teacher and former coordinator of security on the State of Rio de Janeiro, Luiz Eduardo Soares, with his known sensibility and analitic skills also explains the organizational and management adjustments which helped New York to fight the crime.

It wouldn't be possible to embrace on this book all practices and politic and strategic sucessful solutions that policemans and governments are adopting which brought violence reduction. The community policing, the anonimous call systems, the unarming campaigns, the security community councils, the investiment in resources and capacitation of policemans and a full set of social and human rights program are part of the advances in favour of the society. We have choosen to highlight a sucessful mobilizing experience between the Fernand Braudel Institute of World Economics, police authorities and civil leaders of the Diadema municipality, city of the Great São Paulo, with the first place on homicides of the country in the last decade of 1990, a sucessful project sponsored by the World Bank.

However, we believe that a set, even if limited, of thoughts is always welcome to reflect over the violence which worries the Brazilian society, in a moment of important inflection point.

The intense and continued violence tends to disseminate a feeling of inprotection and fragility, with growing uneasiness on the State capacity to control criminalty, which in turn makes the invocation of rights sound ingenuos and inoportune to the populace - particularly the ones of the "bandits" - and to claim for coercitive measures, such as bigger imprisionaments, reduction of criminal maiority age and simplification of seaerch warranties. Such instruments and repressive actions usually got entusiastic reactions in influent areas of the police hierarchies which sees the repression as the main preventive weapon. In such conditions, when we declar a "war against crime" the State can end up being another provider of violence instead of control it.

The violence, whose cause are complex psycologic, social and economicfactors, can't be treated based on extreme convictions: or the problem can't be solved or there's so much confidence in solving it. Social reforms on the long run or institutional emergence measures to solve the excessive violence?

The moment asks for taking knowledge on the sitation, to open the mind to deal with such questions and for disposition to fight its complexity, believing that solutions are possible.

José Vicente da Silva Filho
Nilson Vieira Oliveira