Based on interviews with police officers in Rio de Janeiro, this research aims to investigate the uneasy relationship between Police and violence. With the interviews, it is noted that police officers avoid and resist discussions about violence and the word violence itself. Instead, they use war as a rhetorical device to claim authorization and leniency for the exercise of violence in police duty. Positioning violence as part of the police s discretionary power, itself the result of an inescapable tension between law, which they should follow, and order, which they should impose, the research shows that the same structure of criticism of violence as excess supports and reiterates the possibilities of employment of extrajudicial violence by police officers. The police officers, in turn, present this violence with concealment and duplicity, in addition to the use of euphemisms, denials and silences, in contrast and tension with the use of war rhetoric. Finally, the research presents the police function as an impossible job. Acting on the tensions and paradoxes between law and order, and between the authorization for the use of violence and the rejection of violence, police officers respond to contradictory demands using the rhetoric of war, but recognize that this war will never cease, that they are drying ice.