2020 was the year of the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil. What not everyone knows is that it was also the year in which the police killed the most in the country, since when the indicator of deaths produced by police began to be monitored by the Brazilian Public Security Forum (2013).

Before the confirmation of the first case of infection by the virus, on February 16, young black men had already lost their lives that year due to firearm shots carried out by security agents, such as William da Silva Melo, 19, resident of the neighborhood of Ibura, in the South Zone of Recife. Ammunition purchased and civil servants’ salaries paid with public money.

In Brazil 2020, 6,416 people were victims of police lethality. A number that grows year after year. Officially, these cases are described in the statistics as Deaths by Police Intervention, a nomenclature that suggests confrontation or legitimate use of force, including lethal force. But this is not exactly the case, as the cases exposed here in this special report show.

Data obtained by the Security Observatories Network through the Access to Information Law, together with the state government, reveal that of the 113 people killed by the police in Pernambuco in 2020, 109 were black. In Recife, there were 14 victims. They were all black.

This scenario reveals the structural racism that sustains the logic and actions of the public authority in the domain of public security.

Historically, that’s the way it has been.