Deaths in Police Operations Rise in Brazil Despite Quarantine

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Demonstrations against police brutality in the United States are having repercussions in Brazil, one of the countries where security forces cause the most deaths. Activists and protesters draw attention to this phenomenon that has the state of Rio de Janeiro as its epicenter and has worsened in these times of pandemic.

In March and April alone, 290 people died in the state of Rio de Janeiro in police operations, although part of the population was confined to their homes following the authorities’ recommendation, and crimes, in general, have dropped. This number of victims is equivalent to a third of those killed by the US police in the whole of 2019.

The statistics do not yet include the case that has had the greatest impact in recent times, because it occurred in May. João Pedro Pinto, 14, was the most remembered victim in a rally on Sunday outside the Rio de Janeiro State Government building and in the social media campaign under the slogan #VidasNegrasImportam (#BlackLivesMatter).

The teenager was at home in Rio with a group of children when the police started firing during an operation at Complexo do Salgueiro favela, in São Gonçalo, to arrest a drug dealer. One of the almost 70 rounds fired at the house hit him in the back. Officers rushed him by helicopter to a police base.

He was dead by the time he landed, but his family went for hours unaware of his whereabouts. In the absence of information, a cousin of João Pedro asked for help on Twitter while his family searched for him in the city hospitals. They found the body at the Forensic Medical Institute (IML). João Pedro, like most victims of Brazilian police violence, was black.

The 290 deaths from police intervention in Rio – in a two-month period marked by confinement to contain the spread of coronavirus – represent an increase of 13 percent compared to 2019, when deaths were already a record. In April alone, the number of deaths rose 43 percent compared to the same month last year. In the four-month period, Rio totaled 606 deaths from state action – eight percent more than in the same period in 2019, according to data from the Institute of Public Safety.

According to experts, the rise of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro to power, with his hardline rhetoric against criminals and his plans to exempt from responsibility police officers who out of fear kill suspects, has increased the impunity they enjoy. It is rare for them to end up in the dock or be convicted. The newspaper Folha de S.Paulo stated on Monday in an editorial that the increase in deaths “in a scenario of empty streets can only be explained by the combination of lack of control and impunity”.

The phenomenon is not limited to the city of Rio de Janeiro, which has been Brazil’s postcard for decades, although it hides an underworld of crimes in its environment. It also occurs in São Paulo, where the 255 deaths in alleged clashes with police between January and March represent an increase of 23 percent compared to a year ago, according to data from the state’s Public Safety Secretariat.

Brazilian antiracist movements are trying to seize the protests that rock the US over the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man asphyxiated by a white police officer – a scene that was recorded and viralized, sparking outrage – to draw attention to the very same situation of blacks in Brazil in the face of little interest aroused by the increased violence in the favelas, many of which are under the control of drug traffickers or organized crime.

Only when those killed by stray bullets or police operations are children does the issue make the news. The deaths of 13 people, including a drug trafficker and one of his bodyguards, in a police operation in May went unnoticed as Brazil digested the departure of its second Minister of Health in a month.

A tenth of the 57,000 violent deaths recorded in Brazil last year were caused by law enforcement officers. A recent wide-ranging investigation by The New York Times uncovers several alarming data. Its reporters analyzed in detail the 48 deaths at the hands of police in a district of the city of Rio de Janeiro last year.

Half of the suspects were shot in the back, in 25 percent of the cases at least one police officer was involved in a murder, yet only two uniformed officers were injured in these operations. One was shot, and the other was shot for tripping.

Source: El País