Rio de Janeiro’s police killed a record number of people in three months
latinamericareports.com
latinamericareports.com
I lived there for 27 years in favelas like Rocinha and Santa Marta (when I didn't have money), and in apartments in Botafogo and Flamengo (after making money). I walked on the streets midnight and later. Nothing has ever happened to me. I've never even witnessed anything.
Of course, it's my own experience and I have some privileges.
The only time I was robbed in my life I was in the US. My computer has been stolen in the Houston International Airport (thankfully, it was recovered by a super professional Mexican police officer).
[1] https://thebrazilbusiness.com/article/the-10-safest-state-ca...
Rio police are also globally considered fascist butchers... with frequent news stories of indiscriminately killing favela residents, kids, etc.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/08/16/police-killings-are-out-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/14/brazil-13-dead...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/30/brazil-rio-pol...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/07/brazil-police...
https://www.humanium.org/en/children-victims-violence-brazil...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/world/americas/police-kil...
Although I never suffered anything from the police either (maybe because I'm not black and didn't look poor when I was poor), I've seen a bunch of racist approaches from them in many situations.
Of course, it's based on my own experience (27 years living there) and statistics I find on the internet (which may not count the violence that happens deeper in the favelas).
I had a friend have his $2500 Macbook stolen from his bag by baggage handlers while in a Thai airport. You're lucky you got it back.
The woman that passed before me took my laptop. I thought it was by mistake, but the cameras proved otherwise.
Surprisingly or not, nobody cared. I was already hopeless in the airplane (which was late because of it) when this police officer came with my computer. I don't know what happened to the woman.
The police officer was American. I said he was Mexican because he was speaking Spanish with us (which helped, because my wife's Spanish is better than my English, and I was too anxious to speak).
This article seems to be not only old, but very far from the actual numbers.
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_unidades_federativas_...
That said, The crime and violence situation is still pretty bad, specially if you compare to first world standards. In certain parts of the city, residents live at the mercy of drug trafickers or paramilitary groups of currupt police officers (milicias). Even in the relatively safe Zona Sul, where the well-off people live, most have been directly or indirectly affected by violence.
For example, here is a non-exhaustive list of personal anecdotes:
- My grandmother's sister was murdered back in the 90s, when her house was robbed.
- One time my parents were stuck in a traffic jam for hours, They later found that the source of the problem was a shootout between drug trafickers and the police, which blocked a major traffic artery of the city. People had to get out of their cars and lie down to avoid getting shot.
- A friend of mine works at the federal university. One they they came to work and there was a bullet hole in one of the walls.
How about "people openly flaunting assault weapons"? As someone who lived in Rio most of their life, I think that's a good line to draw. Opinions filled with "human rights" concerns from people far removed are probably ethically and morally correct, which is... cute.
We're fighting an Urban War over here. This is a Concrete Jungle. This is a crazy post-apocalyptic situation to which most people in Rio grew accustomed to while most people outside Rio can barely picture.
As a police officer once told my wife as she was leaving her house in Rocinha and stopped to be patted down and inquired why was she being selected:
– Mam, do you know where you are? You are not in in Los Angeles. You are not in Paris.
My moral qualms went out the window around the same time my grandmother was murdered by being thrown off a bridge in Aterro do Flamengo.
I can understand that. In despair, a lot of people in my Brazilian family think like you. But the problem is that this mentality opens a wide space for a whole different class of criminals. And that's what is going on in Rio : small business owners decided to bribe police officers in exchange of security. These corrupt policemen wiped away ordinary criminals but then they just replaced those, became organized crime by themselves, practicing drug traffic, extortion, monopolies in natural gas distribution and all sorts of illegal activities. In Rio they're called militias.
In the end, there's no alternative to the rule of the law. In the long run, a lynch mob mentality will only create bigger problems on the long run.
As soon as you start unpacking why and how you got into an urban war, you'll approach the fussy philosophical questions raised by the human rights crowd.
Just to give you an idea, an acquaintance of mine never knew his grandfather was in a federal prison, he was told it was a secure retirement home. The grandfather's crime was a dirty cop that had literal death squads killing people in cold blood for years and making money off dead dealers. He used the chaos in the streets to line his pockets with money and silence the people who tried to snitch on him.
War is always a good excuse to ignore ethical concerns.
On Both sides
The weapons and the drugs that finance the traffic do not come from the poor communities, the crime in rio is deep within the society killing the poor that is already marginalized it’s not a soluction.
I agree with you on the other side, people with weapons should be treated as the threat that they are, but the public policy should not be just “kill theses guys and we are good”.
However on HN the discourse has the exact opposite bias. People have this idea of morality that's based on their conceptions and not directly on what's happening around them.
The government was complicit and allowed the case to be tried in a military court so most likely nothing will come out of it.
Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (2010) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1555149/
Conversely homicides in Brazil registered the sharpest decline in its history.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/22/brazils-murder-rate-fin...
> One of the world’s most homicidal countries just registered the sharpest overall decline of lethal violence in its history. Brazil’s murder rate dropped by a whopping 13 percent between 2017 and 2018, from more than 59,000 people killed to just over 51,000. And homicides fell by 25 percent in the first two months of 2019 compared with the same period last year.
The drop in death rates is associated with 'peace treaties' between large criminal factions in peripheral states such as Rio Grande do Sul and, most importantly, Ceará. These factions have recently spread across Brazil (last decade and a half or so) and most recently, concurrently with the economical crisis of 2014~onwards, have been waging open war.
The article you linked even says:
> The drop in lethal violence started well before the election of the self-styled crime-fighter-in-chief, President Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected in October 2018.
Rio's governor (who enacted the sniping) was elected along with Bolsonaro.
All of them were innocents? Why do some journalists insist to call criminals as victims, citizens, and etc?
Illinois, which has twice the population of Rio and contains the notorious crime-ridden hellhole known as Chicago, has had 5 police shootings in 2019.
Assuming a similar trend over the full course of a year (that number is for 3 months), that gives Rio a murder rate by the police of 27.5 per 100k; that is higher than the murder rate by criminals in Newark, NJ.
In short, that is just an insane number of people being summarily executed on the street without charges or trial by the police.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police...
There are courts and procedures for that.
When police just open fire, even when they're not in danger, or kill people by supervisor's suggestion, it's still murder.
It's a matter of solving the issues it's the most important thing.
I was thinking about the other day since the police is so involved why not start investigating the police and what they own so you can understand where there are the bribes.
Who said that? They are wrong in many cases, whether the country.
>Mistakes happen it's part of this duty of being the police.
Killing urban poor indiscriminately whenever crime is suspected (or even widely overusing open fire even when crime is actually committed), are not mistakes, are policies. Fascist policies.
Brazil is as bad as the Philippines in this regard (and US trigger-happy cops and SWATing overuse are bad too, yes).
In the way that most other places have less butcher cops and less blood-thirsty supporters of them...
And the more police-civilized places (e.g. most of Nordic and Western Europe, Japan, New Zealand, etc) have almost zero.