This intends to be a comparative approach between Portuguese and Brazilian contexts, specifically considering peripheral territories of Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro. It aims to integrate topics such as violence, racialization, public security, and human rights. The goal is to demonstrate that in both realities, people with lower incomes and qualifications, migrants or black, who live in “unwanted” places, suffer from negligence, discrimination, and extreme and intentional violence, by the State. Those places are commonly associated with disproportionate and arbitrary police abuse and torture of its residents. Whether through a “war on drugs” speech or public safety maintenance, most of these violations of human rights remain unpunished. Therefore, I present some examples from both contexts where the civil society and judicial sphere have contributed to counterpower this kind of practices. In Portugal, I’ll describe the work of Associação Moinho da Juventude, in Alto da Cova da Moura, in the defence of residents’ rights and against acquittal of police officers in situations of generalized abuse in the neighbourhood and in police stations, with data obtained from an exploratory and qualitative study about the neighbourhood. Moreover, I want to raise a debate about a recent judicial prosecution in which the Public Prosecution Service indicted 18 police officers for serious crimes against residents of this neighbourhood, by analyzing written press. In Brazilian context, I introduce the DefeZap project, which is a platform to report and react to situations of state violence, illustrating with the case of Complexo do Alemão, a territory well-known in the media due to continued conflict and violence, by collecting and analysing news and interviews with project’s intervening parties.

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Police violence,Periphery,Human Rights.