Questões Militares de Inglês

   The landscape where the São Francisco River enters the Atlantic Ocean seems so out of place it makes one wonder if this is still coastal Brazil. White sand dunes stretch as far as the eye can see; clusters of cashew trees throw flickering shadows like ocean waves on the sand.

   Here among these shifting dunes formerly enslaved men and women founded the Pixaim Quilombo near the mouth of the river. They developed a reliable sustainable lifestyle and community well attuned to the dynamic, always changing estuary.

   But it is a lifestyle utterly dependent on the São Francisco River; reliant on the planting of rice in marshes downstream and on catching plentiful freshwater fish upstream.

Now, varied and growing water demands by upstream dams and other users are threatening the long-established quilombo lifestyle — demands that experts predict will worsen severely in Brazil’s Northeast.

   “We used to catch fish that were meters long, but now you have to go much farther up the river to find them,” remembers 84-year-old Aladim, who lives in Pixaim. “The fish left, so the people left,” he remarks.

   The body of officers representing the civil authority of government is known as police. Police typically are responsible for maintaining public order and safety, enforcing the law, and preventing, detecting, and investigating criminal activities. These functions are known as policing. Police are often also entrusted with various licensing and regulatory activities. However, police scholars have criticized this popular understanding of the word “police” — that it refers to members of a public organization having the legal competence to maintain order and enforce the law — for two reasons. First, it defines police by their ends rather than by the specific means that they use to achieve their goals. Second, the variety of situations in which police are asked to intervene is much greater than law enforcement and order maintenance.

   There is now a consensus among researchers that the common feature among all the different agencies engaged in policing is the legal competence to enforce coercive, nonnegotiable measures to resolve problematic situations. Such situations are characterized by their potential for harm and the need to solve them urgently before they develop that potential. Hence, the actual use of coercion or the threat of using it allows police to put a quick, nonnegotiated, and conclusive end to problematic situations.

Internet: <www.britannica.com> (adapted).