Understanding the Fica Vivo programme: two-tiered community policing in Belo Horizonte, Brazil Ma ´rcia C. Alves a * and Enrique Desmond Arias b a Municipal Government, City of Belo Horizonte, Brazil; b Department of Political Science, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, USA (Received 5 December 2010; final version received 1 March 2011) This paper analyzes the efficacy of the Fica Vivo homicide control programme in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Our data shows that the programme encountered significant success in reducing homicides, as a result of its innovative two-tiered structure in which community-oriented policing units operated in conjunction with state-administered social programmes led by civil servants at each of the programme sites. These efforts helped to build local capacity to respond to violence and work with state officials, helped the police engage with residents in efforts to control violence, and enabled residents to hold police to account for local crime control efforts. Keywords: community; police; crime; mobilising The Fica Vivo 1 Project  a Homicide Control Programme administered by the Secretaria de Defesa Social (Social Defense Department; SDS) of the State of Minas Gerais that began at a single pilot site in 2002  seeks to reduce homicide rates by impeding youth from favelas (shantytowns) and peripheral neighbourhoods from becoming involved in criminal activity. To this end, the programme creates leisure and work training opportunities for the predominantly non-white youth who live in these areas to reduce unscheduled time in which they might find themselves on the streets, seeks to create local capacity to engage with the police and other state institutions to improve policy implementation and, at the same time, builds localised integrated criminal justice responses to target the organisations that promote criminal activities in highly violent urban areas. The programme today works with approximately 13,500 youths in 19 communities in the capital city and around the state and has resulted in reductions of up to 47% of homicides involving youths in the first five programme sites, all of which are in Belo Horizonte. The programme operates as a two-tiered community policing programme that includes both social programmes and police responses. Local Nucleos de Referencia (Reference Nucleus) provides social programmes and helps build capacity building in each target community where Fica Vivo is present providing a non-police channel to involve area residents in building public safety. While the state employs a small number of social workers to direct the programme at the neighbourhood level, most of the classes are run by local residents providing opportunities for other young *Corresponding author. Email: mcabhz@gmail.com Policing & Society Vol. 22, No. 1, March 2012, 101113 ISSN 1043-9463 print/ISSN 1477-2728 online # 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2011.597857 http://www.tandfonline.com