Violence Erupts in Rio de Janeiro

[Hortical]

21 March 2014 Last updated at 13:56 ET

Rio de Janeiro seeks federal help to quell recent violence


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The governor of Rio de Janeiro state is meeting Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff to discuss a series of recent attacks against police facilities.
Governor Sergio Cabral is expected to ask for support from federal troops after three police bases were attacked on Thursday.
At least one officer was shot.
The police stations were set up in recent years to push drug dealers out of Rio's favelas or shanty towns, ahead of the football World Cup in June.
Just over a week ago, another policeman was shot dead in a similar attack. Three more have been killed since February.
"It is clear that criminals want to weaken our policy of pacification and take back territories which were in criminal hands for decades," Mr Cabral said ahead of the meeting with Ms Rousseff.
In Manguinhos, a shanty town in the north of Rio, police vehicles were set on fire on Thursday night and the police unit's commander was shot in the leg.
"The state will not back down. The public may be sure we shall act," the governor said.
Murders are down in Rio's favelas, but residents accuse the police of using heavy-handed tactics
In the past five years, the authorities in Rio have installed more than 30 police bases in favelas to drive out drug gangs.
Correspondents say murders are down in those areas and the number of shootouts has dropped, but residents there have often accused the police of using heavy-handed tactics.
The BBC's Julia Carneiro in Rio says the deaths of security forces in recent weeks have prompted some groups to express solidarity towards police and their families.
The backlash to the police operations in Rio, Brazil's second largest city, has heightened concerns about law and order ahead of the World Cup, which begins on 12 June.
Seven World Cub matches, including the final, will be played in the city.
It will also host of the 2016 Summer Olympics, the first ever to held in South America.

[Hortical]

Police kill 2,000 people annually

Police violence in Brazil

Serial killing

Mar 20th 2014, 15:52 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.

[Peter R]

That translates to about 1 person per 100,000 (of Brazil's almost 200M population). Compare that to JA at 9.5 per 100,000 in JA last Year. According to one report I read police killed 258 in JA in 2013!!

Not making any justifications or passing judgment but what does it say about JA police?