How an AI research tool helped challenge support for police violence in Brazil

Global Voices reports that two research organizations turned to an AI chatbot interviewer to study why many Brazilians support deadly police raids in favelas. Instituto Fogo Cruzado, a Brazilian civil society monitor of armed violence, and the UK-based Future Narratives Lab used the tool to run twenty-eight in-depth remote interviews with people identified as likely to back tougher policing, then tested the resulting messages on more than five hundred respondents. The work was sharpened by a Rio de Janeiro raid on October twenty-eighth in which police killed one hundred twenty-two people, the deadliest policing operation in the country's history, and which polls afterward showed still drew broad public support. The message that tested best was not built on empathy or structural injustice, but on a pragmatic critique of police competence: that officers are insufficiently trained, so raids in crowded favelas only produce more shootouts and more innocent victims.

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