Military police in Rio de Janeiro have killed 1,519 residents in the past five years, according to a new report by Amnesty International, which says that extrajudicial executions are claiming a disproportionate number of lives in a generation of young, poor and mostly black men.
In a study of official data and newspaper reports of the Olympic host city, the civil rights groups found that almost one in six homicides were carried out by on-duty policy officers as part of a “strategy of fear” in favela communities.
It said more than 75% of the victims from 2010 to 2013 were black men aged between 15 and 29.
Most cases were filed as “resistance followed by death” which shields the perpetrators from civilian courts. Of 220 investigation, Amnesty found only one case that led to an officer being charged.
“Rio de Janeiro is a tale of two cities. On the one hand, the glitz and glamour designed to impress the world and on the other, a city marked by repressive police interventions that are decimating a significant part of a generation of young, black and poor men,” said Atila Roque, director at Amnesty International Brazil.
The report – released to coincide with the one-year countdown to the Olympics – has been fiercely criticised by Rio authorities.
The state security secretary, José Mariano Beltrame, said the Amnesty report was “reckless and misleading” because it failed to recognised that crime levels are down and killings by police have fallen by 85% in favelas where they have installed police pacification units, a programme aimed at reclaiming territories from drug dealers. He said the study also neglected to mention that police have already adopted many of the recommendations mentioned in the report and now use fewer rifles and less ammunition.
Police unions say the wider context has been missed. More people are murdered in Brazil than in any country. Police face considerable risks in what many describe as a war on drug traffickers. More than 100 officers were killed in Rio last year.
Prosecutors have also contradicted Amnesty’s claims that police benefit from impunity, saying 587 officers have been brought to justice in the past five years.
The office of the Rio public prosecutor condemned Amnesty’s report as “empty, generic, and contributing nothing to a solution of the problems.” It denied that police enjoy immunity, saying prosecutors have done a “lonely and Herculean task” bringing officers to justice in 247 cases in the past five years.
While most figures suggest improvements in crime levels and greater efforts to ensure police discipline over the past 10 years, few doubt that Rio is still home to alarming levels of killings by police.
There is increasing pressure on officers to change. The proliferation of mobile phone cameras and internet access has made it harder for police to put a lid on killings, beatings and “accidental deaths” such as the shooting of 10-year-old Eduardo Ferreira in April as he tried to take a phone out of his pocket, or 15-year-old Lucas Lima who was gunned down on his way home from a football game.
Civil society is also better mobilised than in the past, particularly in favela communities, where the vast majority of the predominantly poor, black or mixed race male youths are killed. Protests ensured an investigation into Amarildo de Souza , a resident of the Rocinha favela who was initially classified only as “missing”, but was later revealed to have been tortured and killed by police.
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