Americas view | Police violence in Brazil

Serial killing

By H.J.

EVERY year Brazil’s police are responsible for at least 2,000 deaths. The victims are generally recorded as having been “killed while resisting arrest” (the exact phrase used varies from state to state). Usually, few apart from the victims’ families take much notice—even when the circumstances are highly suspicious, for example where the fatal wounds suggest the victim was running away when shot, or even kneeling. It is rare that a police officer is suspended for a killing; rarer still for one to be charged or tried (although on March 19th ten were found guilty of a sickening prison massacre in 1992). But a recent case has horrified even this violence-hardened nation.

On March 16th Cláudia da Silva Ferreira, a 38-year-old mother of four, was struck by gunfire during a shoot-out between police and suspected criminals close to her home in a favela on the periphery of Rio de Janeiro. The police bundled her into the boot of their car—ostensibly to take her to the hospital—but without closing it properly. During the trip it sprang open and her body fell out. An item of clothing snagged on the car and she was dragged for several hundred metres behind the car before one of the officers got out and put her body back in.

What made this case stand out was that the horrible scene was captured on video by a passer-by, and later published online. That has pushed the case onto the national agenda. On March 18th the president, Dilma Rousseff, offered her condolences to Ms da Silva Ferreira’s family; Rio state’s governor, Sérgio Cabral, apologised to the family in a meeting the following day. Two of the three policemen in the car have been charged with murder.

Just how rare this outcome is can be seen from an extraordinary fact that has since emerged in local papers: between them, the three officers were responsible for at least 69 on-duty killings since 2000. One of them is recorded as having been involved in 57 separate incidents leading to 62 deaths that were registered as autos de resistência (resisting arrest), the phrase used in Rio for homicide by police in the line of duty.

Rio’s police are notoriously trigger-happy. But police are horrifyingly violent all over Brazil. Late in 2012 São Paulo, one of Brazil’s safest cities (though with a still-high murder rate of around 10 per 100,000 people per year), experienced a worrying increase in violence. The upsurge was thought to have been driven by an undeclared war between police and the Primeiro Comando da Capital (“First Capital Command”), a powerful gang that controls many of the state’s prisons and favelas. Several drive-by shootings with multiple victims were thought to have been carried out by police as indiscriminate revenge for killings of their own comrades.

The state security secretary, seemingly unable to bring a halt to the violence, was replaced. His successor quietly brought in a new, and at first sight surprising, policy: he forbade police from providing first aid at the scene of shootings. Though he did not come out and say it, the reasoning was simple—and depressing. Such “first aid” is often in reality interference with the scene of a murder by police in order to cover up a crime—or indeed an opportunity to commit that murder on the way to the hospital, where the police can hand over a dead body and lie about the circumstances in which they found it. In the following months the rate at which the state’s police killed in the line of duty fell by two-fifths. As the latest horrible killing in Rio shows, that policy needs to be taken nationwide.

Discover more

Business backlash

A weakened Enrique Peña Nieto faces calls to roll back his tax reform

Back to the table

The FARC's kidnapping of a Colombian general last month did not kill the peace process


The new brooms

Dilma Rousseff's new economic team talk about their plans