The Constitution and Justice Committee (CCJ) of Brazil's Senate approved on Wednesday (2) the base text of the public security amendment, known as the PEC da Segurança, six months after the bill stalled in the chamber. The vote was symbolic, with no recorded roll call.
The committee did not finish its work. Senators closed the session without examining three destaques, sections of the text submitted for separate votes, so the bill could not reach the Senate floor on Wednesday. It now moves to the plenary, with no date set for debate to begin.
The text and the betting money
The report by the rapporteur, Senator Rogério Carvalho of the Workers' Party (PT-SE), kept the text passed by the Chamber of Deputies. According to Folha de S.Paulo, Carvalho accepted four of the 66 amendments filed to the PEC. All of them strip from the Constitution a rule, added by the Chamber, that earmarked 30% of fixed-odds betting revenue for the Public Security and Penitentiary funds.
"It is worth noting that this provision was not part of the original text of the amendment, nor of the substitute bill presented to the special committee set up by the Chamber of Deputies. It was only on the floor that this wording favoring the betting companies appeared, without a single amendment to that effect," Carvalho wrote in his report.
What the amendment would do
The PEC writes into the Constitution a Unified Public Security System (SUSP) that integrates federal, state and Federal District forces against organized crime, with intergovernmental task forces and shared rules for police forces and municipal guards. "The federative entities and the public security forces must collaborate with each other, not compete," the rapporteur wrote.
Against violent crime and gangs, the text requires imprisonment in maximum-security or special penal facilities, restricts sentence progression, provisional release and temporary exits, and allows the expropriation of assets tied to criminal organizations, paramilitary groups and private militias. It also authorizes municipal police forces for visible and community policing and lets the Federal Highway Police patrol waterways and railways and back other security forces when a governor requests it.
The bill is a priority for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers' Party). He has conditioned the creation of a Ministry of Public Security, a pledge from his 2022 campaign, on the approval of the amendment, and according to G1 he arranged the committee vote with Senate President Davi Alcolumbre, who had held the bill since March.
Before the floor vote, the CCJ must still decide the three pending destaques. The amendment then needs approval in two rounds in the Senate, since the Chamber has already passed the text, according to Folha. No date is set. Senators are in a week of concentrated legislative effort focused on the bill ending the 6x1 work schedule (six days on, one day off), and they return to their campaigns next week, a month before elections that will renew 54 of the Senate's 81 seats, according to BBC News Brasil.