Rio de Janeiro's favelas have become the front line of an undeclared war between police and drug traffickers, one that kills a policeman every two days and contributes to roughly 60,000 homicides a year nationwide. The film follows people on both sides: officers who patrol streets where any encounter can turn lethal, and gang members who grew up inside the trade, including one who describes being slapped as a ten-year-old and now carrying a rifle so it never happens again. Judges, journalists, slum residents, and historians fill in the context, tracing three decades of public safety policy, entrenched social inequality, and the long shadow of slavery on who gets policed and how. Sociologist Luiz Eduardo Soares argues that police brutality persists only because society tacitly permits it, a claim the footage keeps testing scene by scene. Shot on the ground in the communities themselves, the film resists picking a side, showing instead how a cycle of violence keeps producing both its enforcers and its casualties, with no resolution in sight.