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Most dramatic and visible, and most often praised by Jardim Angela residents, was the change in security. Before, the police had literally been heavily armed military platoons traveling in armored vehicles invading from fortresslike bases outside, treating the entire neighborhood as “enemy territory” and the whole population as potential combatants. They would raid at night, arrest, kill, then leave. Drug crime was their only priority. The police were feared as much as the gangs—often more so, since at least the gang’s killers were neighbors and relatives. There were good reasons to distrust them: In the early 1990s, hundreds of military police were implicated in thousands of revenge slayings and contract killings in the favelas.

As the violence peaked, some of the favela-born members of the police began to feel that they were partly responsible for the poverty and isolation. By treating the arrival city as a quarantined zone subject to periodic invasions, they were pushing the neighborhood inward, against itself. In 1998, after years of pressure from the Forum for the Defence of Life, the police embarked on a truly bold experiment. They built a station inside Jardim Angela, with big windows and an open door, reduced their vehicle count to two cars for 200 officers, and devoted themselves to foot patrols, going door to door in the style of beat cops—something Brazil had never seen before. They developed a philosophy of “community-based policing,” a worn catchphrase in the wealthy world but a very new idea in Brazil.

“For my first 15 years as a cop, I approached crime in an aggressive manner, because that’s all I knew,” says Davi Monteiro da Conceição, known to everyone here as Sergeant Davi, a former military police strongman who began attending the Forum for the Defence of Life meetings in the 1990s, became captivated by the ideas circulating, and now commands the Jardim Angela community force. “There were many confrontations—I took part in the exchange of gunfire … But I changed the way I acted. Now I have more involvement with the people around me. They still don’t completely trust us, so we have to keep things at the personal level. We need to go into their houses and explain to them that the police aren’t just for beating up and being violent, which is all we’d done before, but that there are other uses for police—it’s slow going.”

It was too late for most members of Pedro’s generation, but his children’s neighbors and classmates have entered a very different world, one in which Jardim Angela is an integral part of São Paulo. The years of political organizing within the favela changed things, as did the realization by more enlightened city and state governments that these neighborhoods were an important investment. It helped that São Paulo passed a comprehensive gun-control law in 2003, which the Jardim Angela community police enforce aggressively. It helped that a farsighted mayor the same year recognized the social and economic value of giving the outlying favelas comprehensive bus and commuter-train service and an affordable transit pass for poor workers. It helped that medical clinics and street lighting were installed. It helped that micro-credit agencies established themselves here and offered loan guarantees and that small-business laws were liberalized, making it easier for favela-dwellers to use the value in their real estate to start a company. And it helped that entrepreneurs and agencies built venues to popularize and profit from the music and dance that had been an underground part of the favela’s culture. For the arrival city’s third generation, there were suddenly reasons to stick around and improve the place.

“The second generation grew up without a past—they didn’t have their parents’ rural backgrounds, and they didn’t have futures, either,” says Bruno Paes Manso, a São Paulo scholar and writer who has analyzed the economics behind favela violence.4 What he discovered in his investigations was that São Paulo’s dramatic reduction in crime