Quote:
Originally Posted by RogerBW
Do those other agencies meet monsters?
Say the Polícia Civil (or indeed the Polícia Militar, since from a quick Wikipedia they both seem to have some investigative function) do Estado do Rio de Janeiro find a body with no blood in it. All right, they'll treat it as a somewhat weird murder. Then they find a few more, and at the very least they've got an odd serial killer on their hands.
There are two ways this can go. Either they have a number to ring in case of weirdness, in which case the existence of the monster-hunting department is eventually going to become generally known, because police talk; or they don't, in which case after a bit they will grow their own monster-hunting department because clearly this kind of incident needs something other than normal policing tactics.
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Yes, the local police will be the most likely to come across evidence (not proof, which remains elusive for anyone) of monsters. For example, the official position of the US government is the same as in the real world, i.e. magic and monsters are not real things in our modern world. However, in the generation since weird stuff started to happen, slowly and subtly at first in the 1980s and 1990s, more often in the 2000s and 2010s, street cops and homicide detectives have come across all kinds of things they can't explain.
By now, every police department will have someone, most likely several someones, prepared to believe in supernatural explanations. They won't have evidence sufficient to convince anyone not out there with them, but given the sheer number of otherwise inexplicable things, anomalous eyewitness testimony and possibly even something they've personally experienced, most of those whose lives put them in daily contact with the underbelly of society eventually become aware that things are not as they were.
I imagine that in Brazil, the response to the supernatural started with local police. As the Vile Vortex lies in the ocean just outside Rio de Janeiro, the Policia Civil and Policia Militar of Rio and Espirito Santo would have come across the greatest numbers of inexplicabe things and would have faced supernatural threats that were influenced gy the energies around the Vile Vortex and, later, entities that arrived through rifts in reality there.
In GURPS terms, Rio and environs are about one Mana level higher than is average throughout the world, i.e. when most of the world was functionally No Mana in the 1980-1995, Rio would have been Very Low Mana (-10) and as the Mana levels have risen so that the world averages -8 to -10, Rio and environs are maybe -5 to -3, with spikes that go higher.
So, the first Monster Hunters in Brazil would probably have belonged to unauthorized
Brazilian police militias in Rio and Espirito Santo. Gradually, more investigators and Policia Militar would have become aware of the threat and eventually, supernaturally-aware members would have subverted official special units like
BOPE of the
PMERJ and the Batalhão de Missões Especiais of the
PMES, as well as both
CORE and special intelligence and investigative units of the Policia Civil.
Only later would the military and Policia Federal become aware of the threat and then only through gradual subversion of the agencies by believers. In fact, until the 2018 election, the monster hunters inside the Brazilian intelligence, military and security services were not only secret from the public, they were secret from the democratically elected government.
Officially, they still are, but President
Jair Bolsonaro and to a much greater extent, his Vice President,
Hamilton Mourão, are aware that secret factions within the police, military and intelligence community are fighting other forces than crime, drugs and terrorism. And unlike previous Brazilian administrations, which often fought bureaucratic battles with entrenched militant factions of the intelligence and security community, the new one wholeheartedly approves of the extrajudicial Monster Hunters.
The secret and extralegal status of anti-paranormal policing has in the past created some odd situations. For example, many of the Policia Militar who served in the
Força Nacional de Segurança Pública and its BEPE quick-reaction force were aware of the supernatural, but they were commanded and overseen by political appointees who not only were unaware, but also actively hostile to the kind of unacccountable policing methods that allowed monster hunting to flourish without official notice. As a result, the BEPE was seldom deployed for supernatural threats. With the current administration, it is expected that the BEPE leadership will now be selected for counter-supernatural credentials and BEPE will finally become an effective monster hunting unit.