It happens, on average, more than five times a day in Rio de Janeiro: Police open fire and someone dies.
Brazilian human rights and victims’ groups are raising alarms about the record levels of deaths at police hands in the state of 17.2 million people, with 1,075 slain in the first seven months of the year, according to official figures. And far-right Rio state Gov. Wilson Witzel and President Jair Bolsonaro are pushing to give police a still-freer hand.
Witzel said in July that police should lose their “fear of killing.” Bolsonaro said this month that with a new law he backs, criminals “are going to die in the street like cockroaches.”
That echoes the radical anti-crime stance that helped Bolsonaro win the presidency last year – ending a four-election string of leftist victories – and many Brazilians see the police-caused deaths as a regrettable but acceptable price for cracking down on rampant crime.
“Unfortunately, the police today need to be very hard,” said Isaque Samora, an Uber driver who lives in Duque de Caxias, a municipality in the state with high rates of crime.
He said he drives only during the day, to lessen chances of falling victim to criminals. Even so, two months ago, he drove a passenger into a Rio slum and only a few yards into the shantytown he was intercepted by robbers armed with pistols and rifles.
“Security would only improve quickly if all citizens were policeman,” added Samora, who said he voted for Bolsonaro because of his promise to be inflexible with criminals.
So far, crime is down amid the rising quantity of blood shed by official forces.
Police-involved shootings in Rio have jumped 25%, with 1,144 in the first six months, according to the non-government violence monitor Crossfire. The 194 such deaths reported by officials for July was the most killings involving police in a single month since at least 1998. It’s not clear how many were involved in firefights with police, how many were unarmed suspects and how many were bystanders hit by stray shots.
Meanwhile, official reports show a 23% drop in homicides, a 22% fall in auto thefts and a 9% jump in drug seizures.
Brazil as a whole saw 65,602 homicides in 2017, while preliminary calculations for 2018 showed more than 51,500 killings last year, according to the independent Brazilian Forum on Public Security. Battles between criminal gangs have become common.
“People are fed up with the advance of criminality,” said Ricardo Ismael, a political scientist at the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro. “The harshest repressive measures meet the wishes of a population that can’t stand living with such high indices of criminality.”
In a sort of state-of-the-city speech after six months in office, Witzel boasted that “the police have recovered their respect.”
The number of police killings has reached the highest levels since records began being kept in 2003.