1. The Initiative

The Pact for Life program (Programa Pacto pela Vida)^[1] was Pernambuco's state policy for police repression and social prevention of crime and violence. The initiative based the preventive and repressive actions on reducing impunity of violent crime through the integration of the public security system, readjustment and modernization of processes, protocols and routines directly related to the police operational capacity the Criminal Justice system, consolidation and integration of information, dissemination and democratization of data, and strategic training new police officers. Focusing on reducing homicides prior to any other criminal occurrence, the Pact for Life program was one of the most successful state-level projects in their first years of execution. ^{[2] [3]}

2. Two kinds of Police

There are two kinds of Police: the Military Police working on the streets to guarantee public safety, and the Civil Police that investigates the crimes. The assessment provided in the next section refers to the Civil Police production only, without depreciation on the effort of both police to develop integrated actions to reach the objectives. The focus of the Pact for Life program and the past administrations is on the reduction of homicides prior to any other criminal occurrence. This objective has been taken into consideration to provide a ranking of Pernambuco’s municipalities based on the effectiveness of the output. Many important cities in the state were removed from this assessment because of the impossibility to work on missing data. Nevertheless, the proposed methodology can be easily extended to consider the aggregate scenario and prospects for the public safety policy. ^[4]

3. Goal 

The program's goal is to reduce homicides by 12%. Pernambuco's municipalities are considered effective when they reach this coefficient. Because crime is a stochastic concept which depends on many objective and subjective determinants which are out of the police department field of action, the interesting perspective in this program is trying to integrate the many sectors and public institutions (police courts, justice courts, the prison system, the community) which are part of the solution.

The entry is from 10.3390/su13084251