TargeTing Violence reducTion in Brazil: Policy i mPlicaTions from a sPaTial analysis of Homicide laTin america i niTiaTiVe, foreign Policy aT Brookings 1 V iolence in Latin America generates heavy economic, social and political costs for indi- viduals, communities and societies. A par- ticularly pernicious efect of violence is that it undermines citizen confdence in democracy and in their own government. Responding to public fear, politicians across the region have hastily ad- opted a wide range of policy responses to violence, ranging from militarizing public security, to ‘mano dura’ crack downs, to negotiating truces with or- ganized crime, to decriminalizing illicit economic activity. Although many of these policies are polit- ically expedient, few are based on evidence of how public policy actually afects rates of violence. By contrast, this paper examines how violence clusters within a country—Brazil—to study how public policies afect homicide rates and how these policies might be further tailored geographically to have greater impact. Brazil provides a partic- ularly useful case for examining the efectiveness of violence-reduction strategies because of the availability of comparable data collected systemat- ically across 5562 municipal units. Tis allows for an explicitly spatial approach to examining geo- graphic patterns of violence—how violence in one municipality is related to violence in neighboring municipalities, and how predictors of violence are also conditioned by geography. 2 Te key added value of the spatial perspective is that it address- es the dependent structure of the data, accounting for the fact that units of analysis (here, municipal- ities) are connected to each other geographically. In this way, the spatial perspective accounts for the fact that what happens in nearby units may have a meaningful impact on the outcome of interest in a home, focal unit. Tus, the spatial approach is bet- ter able to examine compelling phenomena like the spread of violence across units. We visualize data on six types of homicide—ag- gregate homicides, homicides of men, homicides of women (i.e., “femicides”), frearm-related ho- micides, youth homicides (ages 15-29) and homi- cides of victims identifed by race as either black or brown (mulatto), i.e., non-white victims—all for 2011, presenting these data in maps. We adopt a municipal level of analysis, and include homicide data from 2011 for the entire country, i.e., on all 5562 municipalities across 27 states (including the Federal District). Tis allows us to develop maps that identify specifc municipalities that constitute cores of statistically signifcant clusters of violence for each type of homicide. Tese clusters ofer a useful tool for targeting policies aimed at reducing violence. We then develop an analysis based on a TargeTing Violence reducTion in Brazil: Policy Implications from a Spatial Analysis of Homicide MATTHEW C. INGRAM AND MARCELO MARCHESINI DA COSTA 1 Latin America Initiative Foreign Policy at BROOKINGS POLICY BRIEF, OCTOBER 2014 1 Matthew C. Ingram is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Rockefeller College of Public Afairs and Policy, and a Research Associate at the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis (CSDA), University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). Marcelo Marchesini da Costa is a doctoral student in the Department of Public Administration, University at Albany. Please direct all correspondence to: mingram@albany.edu. Any errors and omissions are the responsibilities of the authors alone. 2 To our knowledge, only two studies examine violence across all Brazilian municipalities, and of these, only Carvalho et al. (2005) do so from a spa- tial perspective. Tus, our fndings update and build on Carvalho et al. and also provide a spatial complement to the non-spatial fndings in Lance (2014). Alexandre Carvalho, Daniel Ricardo De Castro Cerqueira, and Waldir Lobão, “Socioeconomic Structure, Self-Fulfllment, Homicides and Spatial Dependence in Brazil,” Texto Para Discussão n.1105, no. IPEA (2005); Justin Earl Lance, “Conditional Cash Transfers and the Efect on Recent Murder Rates in Brazil and Mexico,” Latin American Politics and Society 56, no. 1 (2014): 55–72.