Consists of a study of the activities of the military police in slums, specifically in Maré, a set of sixteen slums located in Leopoldina, Rio de Janeiro. The main goal of the research was to analyse the representations and practices of public security professionals focusing on the differentiated ways they perform within the same city. Its assumption is that the construction of new paradigms in the field of public policies requires a full understanding of the representations and experiences present in these spaces. This work presents a specific gaze at State action in the field of public security. I have analysed, in particular, police action in popular territories, as opposed to so-called formal spaces. I have tried to show such intervention as an element obeying to the rationale that guides the establishment and maintenance of the current social order, in which differentiated practices affirm identity characteristics conditioned by social assumptions based on distinctive social hierarchies and by the reproduction of a privatization process of autonomy in slums by Criminal Armed Groups, in general. In such a context, the State, which should guarantee public security to the whole polis, acts in slum areas without considering the contingencies and needs of their dwellers. This attitude naturalizes the use of violence as the guideline of police strategies to contain criminal groups associated to drug dealing, turned into the State’s main target of crime combat in Brazilian urban areas. Hence, putting an end to differentiated forms of autonomy in the city and, as a result, to distinct modes of action of security forces is the necessary path to the construction of a democratic city, in which there is one only type of citizen.