“There is the body extended on the floor”: an analysis of the context of homicides processed in the court of the jury of Campina Grande/PB

Abstract

Violence has occupied a central place in the contemporary political and scientific debate. In
this article, the violent phenomenon is examined from a specific form of violence: homicide
crimes. This cut is necessary because not all forms of violence are subject to registration, and
because, even in the cases where these settlements exist, the accounted data represents only
a minimal portion of the violence actually perpetrated. The present study proposes to trace
the context of homicide occurrence, based on the analysis of the information collected in
the judicial processes of the Jury Court of Campina Grande / PB, with crimes that occurred
between the years 2000 to 2010. The sample was composed of 116 cases, 289 subjects were analyzed, being 173 defendants and 136 victims. Analyzing the data, it was found that homicide
is a violent manifestation involving people whose places of residence are concentrated in
some neighborhoods, especially in the West Zone of the city. In addition, the finding that the
neighborhoods where most defendants and victims live are also those where homicides occur
most indicates the relevance of this spatial distribution of murders. On the other hand, crimes
derive from wide access to firearms and, on some occasions, are related to contexts of alcohol
use and to the dynamics of drug trafficking and use.