The shooting in the Complexo do Alemão favelas was so intense on Thursday that the elite battalion of the Rio de Janeiro Military Police ran out of ammunition in two hours. And the final balance was 18 dead.
According to the police, the operation with some 400 men was chasing a group that was robbing vehicles, cargo and banks, and had attacked police stations. Among the dead are two women, 15 “suspects” and a policeman.
But relatives of victims, residents of the area and experts criticized the police action as excessively violent.
One of the dead women was shot while passing in her car on an avenue; the other when the police removed barricades in the area on Friday, although the corporation rejects testimonies that say the shot came from their ranks.
This police operation was the fifth deadliest in the history of Rio de Janeiro, according to a record by Geni, a study group on public security and violence at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF).
Two other police operations, which occurred in the last 14 months, claimed even more lives: one in the Jacarezinho favela in May 2021 (the deadliest in Rio, with 28 dead) and the second in Vila Cruzeiro in May this year ( with 23 dead).
The Rio police ensure that these actions are based on intelligence reports and are carried out in accordance with what is established by law, justice and even technical protocols.
But Daniel Hirata, a sociologist who coordinates the Geni, affirms that these police operations in Rio lack any effectiveness, are usually motivated by a thirst for revenge and enjoy great impunity.
“The Rio de Janeiro police is a killing machine,” says the expert in an interview with BBC Mundo.
What follows is a summary of the telephone dialogue with Hirata, who is also a professor at UFF.
In recent months, three of the five deadliest police operations in the history of Rio de Janeiro have occurred, according to Geni data. Is there an explanation why this happens?
There are many factors that add up. One, quite important, is the management that begins with the former governor of Rio, Wilson Witzel, and continues with Cláudio Castro.
It is a management marked by an encouragement to police violence. Governors have perhaps never been seen speaking out so openly in favor of police brutality.
That same management gave the police forces a very large autonomy in relation to the elected powers. We had the end of the Secretary of Public Security and today there are two secretaries that deal with the issue: one from the Military Police and another from the Civil Police. In other words, there is no civil body that deals with the use of force in Rio de Janeiro, which is very emblematic.
And there is a denial regarding the issue of police lethality, which is without a doubt the main public problem in the area of security.
Since Governor Castro took office less than two years ago, in addition to those three massacres, there have been other police operations in which more than 330 people have died. Is there an order from the Rio government for the police to be more aggressive or violent?
Yes, there is an encouragement to police forces to act brutally.
Governor Castro until recently was not seen as an ally of the federal government in such a direct way by those who support the president.
With each new massacre, it seems that the governor wants to prove that he is part of the same vision of the world as the president of the Republic.
The statements that the governor makes after the massacres are always justifying the brutality of the police actions.
And in this way, the police themselves feel empowered to position themselves even against determinations of the Brazilian Supreme Court, which had restricted operations during the pandemic.
There is a clear electoral climate. It may seem incredible, but those deaths have served electoral purposes.
President Jair Bolsonaro has publicly supported this type of lethal operation. What impact does this support have for the Rio police?
It has a very big impact, because the police forces feel that they are acting in accordance with their commanders in chief.
Members of the police forces have a tendency to present positions further to the right within the ideological political spectrum. When that is reinforced by political authorities, violence increases.
Historically, attempts to control police violence in Brazil have been followed by large massacres. And now we are in another of those moments for the “ADPF of the Favelas” (an appeal presented by different organizations to the Justice) that tries to impose some reasonable limits in relation to police lethality. Police forces argue that this decision hampers their work.
How effective is this kind of lethal police operation in Rio de Janeiro?
There is no effectiveness.
We have already shown in various reports that police violence in general and police operations in particular are not efficient in controlling common crime, crimes against property, or the organized crime of the various armed groups in Rio de Janeiro.
For example, the justification for this last operation is to confront the theft of vehicles and cargo. In Rio de Janeiro there is a public security institute that is a national reference, with very precise data on the places where these crimes occur and their hours. It would be much more effective to position those 400 men who participated in the operation in those places, than where the police forces believe the criminals live.
You’re not going to decrease vehicle and cargo thefts with a police operation of that size.
You have also associated actions like the one in Complexo do Alemão last week with “revenge operations” by the Rio police. Can you explain this?
The so-called revenge operations are operations that are initiated when the motivation would be retaliation for the death of a police officer or an attack on a police unit.
They also transform into a revenge operation when, after the start of an operation, a policeman is killed. That was the case, for example, with the Jacarezinho and Alemão massacres. The chronology of events shows that the operation loses its original objectives and becomes basically one of revenge.
It is an absolutely illegal type of operation.
The police forces behave at that moment like the armed groups themselves that act motivated by revenge.
We do not expect anything from the armed groups: they are criminal groups. Now, the police forces are representatives of the Brazilian State; they cannot act out of revenge.
Listening to you, it gives the impression that the Rio police have become a killing machine…
The Rio de Janeiro police are a killing machine.
In the Rio metropolitan region, a third of all deaths are committed by the police.
In the state of Rio, a quarter of the deaths are committed by the police.
International parameters indicate that (if the police commit) more than 10% of deaths, there is a clear indication of abuse in the use of force. Here in the metropolitan region we are with almost three times that value.
In other words, the police forces are an engine of violent lethality in Rio de Janeiro. This is what the data shows.
And what happens with the control mechanisms to avoid abuses and impunity in the police?
The internal control mechanisms were dismantled by the current state government.
Now we have review commissions that function based on police corporatism, without any independence to carry out their investigations.
And the Public Ministry of Rio de Janeiro is historically complacent with what happens.
We have two studies in 10 years that show very similar data: more than 99% of the deaths resulting from the action of State agencies are archived at the request of the Public Ministry itself.
When there is no indication that the control bodies are working, there is an encouragement for the police who act outside the law and a lack of encouragement for those who act within the law.
It is a machine that only produces more violations, more abuse from the point of view of police brutality.
And it also opens spaces for illegal transactions associated with police corruption.
This is how extortions begin to be charged and that is a basic mechanism of operation of the militias that come from the police forces.
The Rio police is one of those with the highest fatality rate in Brazil, but also one of those that suffers the most deaths. Is this a justification for them to act violently?
The issue of police lethality relates to a quite different set of factors than police victimization.
Police lethality occurs on duty and in particular during police operations. They are security actions aimed at military confrontation. That’s how cops kill.
Police officers die most of the time outside of duty hours, in complementary activities that serve to increase their income.
They also die a lot in reactions to assaults.
And there is a phenomenon that has been quite identified in recent years: suicides among police officers.
All this shows that the police are being mistreated by the rulers.
We have extreme right-wing rulers who say that they support the police forces but do not take care of them as workers, nor their mental health or the precariousness of their work.
The police said that in the operation in the Complexo de Alemão they captured a .50 rifle, considered a weapon of war capable of piercing armor and aircraft, in addition to other weapons, explosives and drugs. Isn’t this a sign that criminal organizations are arming themselves with more firepower to take on the police in Rio?
Of course, the armed groups and especially the drug traffickers —because the confrontations are normally carried out in drug trafficking areas and in particular the Comando Vermelho— act extremely violently in Rio de Janeiro. That fact cannot be ignored.
And the weapons that have reached those places are not just long weapons. That .50 machine gun really is very dangerous and is intended to pierce the armored vehicles of the police forces.
What could be done more efficiently to deal with arms trafficking is the opposite of what is being done.
The seizures made in Alemão are insignificant compared to the volume of weapons circulating in Rio.
It would be much more efficient to act on the distributors and suppliers of these weapons.
An important part of these weapons has been purchased for many years, but it was amplified with the liberalization of weapons that the Bolsonaro government promoted. They are legal weapons that are immediately transferred to illegality.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-62314453, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-07-27 12:00:06
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