In some countries, killer cops are celebrated

POLICE in the United States kill roughly 1,000 people a year. No other rich country comes close. Finnish police fired only six bullets in 2013, fewer than half the number that one Chicago cop put into Laquan McDonald, a black teenager, in 2014 as he was walking away.

Next to police in some poorer countries, though, America’s cops look almost Nordic. Police in El Salvador are 22 times deadlier. Cops in Rio de Janeiro, a Brazilian state with just 17m inhabitants, killed more people in 2017 than all of America’s police. (In February Brazil’s president ordered the army to take over policing Rio.) In countries such as Kenya, Nigeria and the Philippines it is impossible to say even roughly how many people the police kill, but it is a lot. “Police brutality is as common as water,” says Justus Ijeoma, a human-rights activist in Nigeria’s Anambra state.

Why are some cops so likely to kill? Partly because they fear for their own lives, or for those of bystanders. In general, the more murderous the country, the more deadly are its police (see chart). American cops shoot more people than police in other rich countries largely because more people shoot at them. They are 36 times deadlier than German police officers, but also 35 times likelier to be killed on the job.

The other big difference is incentives. In America, as in Europe, a cop who kills unlawfully can expect to be punished. (The officer who shot McDonald was suspended and has been charged with murder; he has pleaded not guilty.) In many developing countries, by contrast, the authorities encourage extrajudicial executions, either to get rid of dissidents or to suppress crime. Voters often applaud them for it.

In the Philippines, for example, President Rodrigo Duterte openly urges the police to kill suspected drug dealers and even drug users, to fulfil a campaign promise to dump their corpses in Manila Bay and “fatten all the fish there”. Since he became president in May 2016 more than 12,000 people have died in extrajudicial killings, according to human-rights groups. The police give a smaller but still staggering number. They say that 3,850 died in anti-drug operations between July 2016 and September 2017. Another 2,290 drug-related murders are “under investigation”.

Imelda Hidalgo, who lives in a slum of Quezon City, in Manila, says the police gunned down her brother last year, probably because they heard that he took shabu (methamphetamine). Trigger-happy cops sometimes shoot bystanders. “We are scared,” says Ms Hidalgo, “What if a user comes to our local store and then there’s a drug operation right here?”

Elizabeth Mago, a food-seller in Quezon City, says her son “just had a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time”. One evening last year, he asked for 10 pesos ($0.20) to pay for a video-gaming session and headed for the local computer shop. While there he was shot. His mother suspects the police were involved, but cannot be sure. Such confusion is normal. “On operations the first thing the police do is take out the CCTV cameras and the lights,” says a church volunteer who helps those bereaved by violence.

The government insists that killing criminals cuts crime. This is impossible to verify. What is certain, however, is that many of the killings are murder, pure and simple, and that having a licence to kill makes it easier for corrupt police to intimidate civilians. “Extortion now is more rampant somehow, because the police can choose who to kill and who to put in jail,” says a local official.

Still, more than three-quarters of Filipinos approve of the government’s approach. Even those harmed by the brutal campaign sometimes favour it. Both Ms Hidalgo and Ms Mago want it to continue.

A similar drug war in Thailand, which began in 2003, was a fiasco. A public report four years later found that in its initial months about half of the 2,819 extrajudicial killings involved victims who had nothing to do with drugs. Villagers sometimes grumble that addiction is as bad as ever. Yet many long for a return to violence. “If you kill a dog, do you have to apologise to his family?” asks a rice farmer. “No. And it’s the same with drug dealers.”

In 2015 the vice-president of El Salvador told police that they could shoot gang members “without any fear of suffering consequences”. Such “implicit impunity” spurs police over-zealousness, observes Agnès Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions. After the government announced a mano dura (iron-fist) policy, the number of alleged gang members shot by police and soldiers rose 15-fold, from 39 in 2013 to 603 in 2016. Over the same period, the murder rate doubled. Police are supposed to shoot to wound, but the ratio of suspects killed to wounded jumped from 3.1 in 2015 to 6.3 in the first six months of 2017. The ratio of dead suspects to dead police rose almost eight times, from 15 to one in 2014 to 113 to one in June 2017.

Last year more than 600 Salvadorean officers were arrested for allegedly belonging to death squads, participating in shoot-outs or committing other crimes. Hardly any were prosecuted or even sacked. At one point journalists got access to an elite unit’s WhatsApp chat group where officers shared videos of suspects being tortured, celebrated the “elimination” of gangster “rats” and traded tips on how to plant evidence. The officers in the WhatsApp chat were arrested, but freed three days later.

One-directional shoot-outs

Advocates of mano dura policing in Latin America say it is the only way to deal with drug gangs. In other countries the excuse is terrorism. Consider the case of Naqeebullah Mehsud, a 27-year-old aspiring male model in Pakistan. Before his death he posted a video online in which he and a friend dance in a woodland clearing. He smiles, claps and sways. His long hair flicks in the breeze. He does not look like a member of the Taliban, an Islamist movement that abhors music and hairstyles. Yet on January 13th a police team killed Mehsud in what they termed an “encounter” with four terrorists.

“Encounter killings” are common in Pakistan and India. Between 1997 and 2016 some 8,800 cases were tallied in Pakistan. The term implies that suspects perish in shoot-outs. Police seldom die during these battles, however. In the house where Mehsud died, blood colours the floor but bullet-holes pock only one wall.

Mehsud had gone missing ten days before his death. Some people told local media that police had picked him up in an attempt at extortion. A police investigation found no links between him and the Taliban. The encounter, it found, was probably “staged”. Mehsud’s fellow Pushtuns, who say the police have been harrying them for years, held protest marches.

The unit that killed Mehsud has reportedly carried out 262 encounter killings since 2009. Its leader, Rao Anwar, has become a celebrity. Journalists with cameras routinely arrive at the scene of a shoot-out minutes before it begins, says Afzal Nadeem Dogar, of Geo News, a local channel. “It’s like Anwar’s a movie hero,” scoffs Jibran Nasir, a lawyer and campaigner. “Bombs go off all around but he emerges scratchless every time.”

Mr Anwar’s career may now be over. He has gone into hiding to escape an arrest warrant for murder. Yet attempts to root out extrajudicial killing run up against a phalanx of incentives supporting it. Pakistan’s courts are drowning under a backlog of 1.9m cases. Judges fear to try terrorism cases, lest they be murdered by jihadists. Witnesses seldom come forward. Police are tempted to take shortcuts. Worst, officers who rack up “encounters” can expect professional advancement. “I worked hard all my life,” sighs a senior officer, “but I was not part of any encounters, so I was unable to get a promotion.”

One globally popular idea to curb killings is for police to wear cameras. Yet a study in Washington, DC, in which roughly half the cops were given body cameras and half were not, showed no difference in the use of force between the two groups. This might not mean that body cameras are useless. It may be that American police generally follow the rules, and so did not need to change their behaviour when being filmed. Other police forces might be different; and body cameras might make civilians behave better, too.

Technology can restrain cops only if the authorities want to restrain them—someone has to watch the body-camera footage and punish misconduct. Building a culture of accountability takes time and political will, but is not impossible. In the early 2000s Colombia purged 12,000 corrupt officers and taught new ones to be better detectives. In Guatemala a UN-backed team of independent prosecutors secured convictions in 2013 against four cops responsible for systematic killings of prisoners. Such high-profile cases drove down police killings and homicides in general.

In the short term, police need better training in the use of non-lethal means of incapacitating suspects, such as tasers. Franklin Zimring of the University of California, Berkeley, argues that many American lives could be saved if the police reassessed tactics such as emptying a 15-bullet magazine into a knife-wielding civilian standing 20 feet away “just to make sure”.

In the long run, cops in many poor countries need better pay (so they are not tempted to moonlight as assassins), tougher consequences for abusing their powers and a functioning legal system to work with, so they do not face a choice between killing a suspect and seeing him bribe his way out of prison. Most of all, such countries need leaders who think that civilian lives matter, and that punishments are for courts, not cops, to decide.