Police killings in the state of Rio de Janeiro are at a 20-year high

JAIR BOLSONARO, Brazil’s populist president, was elected on a promise to crack down on crime. He can claim at least one victory. In the first five months of this year, which were also his first five in office, violent deaths in the country—including those from homicides, assaults and robberies—were 22% lower than in the same period in 2018. But Mr Bolsonaro, who has said that “a good criminal is a dead criminal”, has also talked up the use of lethal force to deter crime. On this score, the statistics are striking, too. Between January and June, police in the state of Rio de Janeiro, one of Brazil’s most violent states, killed 881 people, or about five per day. This represents a nearly 15% increase on the same period last year. By way of comparison, there were 2,964 homicides in the state in the same period.

This toll has been climbing since long before Mr Bolsonaro came to power. In 2015 there was a brief decline in violence brought about by a police strategy that sought to reduce crime in the favelas through a combination of saturation policing and social-assistance programmes. After the Rio Olympics in 2016, and with Brazil in the throes of a record recession, public resources dried up. Drug gangs in the favelas and militia groups led by rogue ex-police regained ground. Since then police shootings have increased steadily; a reaction to the rise in crime. In 2018 1,534 people, or 8.9 per 100,000 people, were killed by police officers. Wilson Witzel, Rio de Janeiro’s governor, has little sympathy for the slain, describing the increase in killings as “normal”. The former federal judge and Brazilian marine, who also took office on January 1st, has promised to deploy as many as 120 snipers in helicopters to “slaughter” armed criminal suspects.

Under a proposed anti-crime bill, killings could rise further. The legislation, which is being pushed through congress by Sérgio Moro, Brazil’s justice minister, would expand the excludente de ilicitude, an article in the country’s criminal code which permits actions normally considered crimes to go unpunished, such as killing in self-defence. Advocates of the bill say it would allow police and civilians to go after criminals without fear of prosecution. Critics fear an escalation of violence. In 2017 an investigation into police killings in the state of São Paulo found that excessive use of force was employed in 75% of cases (including cases in which those who died were unarmed). Mr Bolsonaro, for his part, is an enthusiastic supporter. In August he said that if the bill was approved, criminals would “die in the streets like cockroaches”.