On average, 17.6 deaths were produced by the police forces of the Brazilian states, in each day of the year 2020. In all, 6,416 victims, the highest number since 2013, when the indicator started to be monitored by the Brazilian Public Security Forum. A 190% increase in less than a decade.
In the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the movement of people was reduced as a result of social distancing and virus prevention measures, 12.8 of every 100 homicides registered in the country were the result of the direct actions of security agents, the vast majority of them by military police on duty.
This growth in the number of deaths by police intervention in 2020 in Brazil is surprising because it happened even with the reduction of 31.8% of police incidents in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which fell from the historic record of 1,814 in 2019 to 1,245 last year. The numbers began to fall after the allegation of non-compliance with fundamental precepts (ADPF) 635, which limited police operations in Rio de Janeiro communities.
In Brazil, police victims have a well-defined color, age and gender. When the topic is police violence, racial inequality is evident. The police fatality rate among blacks is 4.2 victims per 100,000. Among whites, it is almost three times smaller, 1.5 per 100,000.
Data from 2020 from the bulletin “Skin Target: the color of police violence”, produced by the Security Observatories Network, show the selectivity of police action. A survey carried out in seven states, via the Access to Information Law (LAI), indicated that the proportion of black people killed by the police in Bahia, Ceará, Pernambuco, Piauí, Maranhão, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo was much higher than the proportion of blacks in the general population of each of these states.
The greatest disparity occurred in Pernambuco, when the difference reached 35 percentage points, considering that the black population is 61.9% of the general population of the state and that this same group represented 97.3% of the people killed by the Pernambuco police.
Young black men, living in peripheral neighborhoods, are the ones that Brazilian police kill the most. The data that they also make up the majority of victims of intentional violent deaths in general and of the incarcerated population reaffirms the structural racism that has shaped Brazilian society since the time of enslavement.
“Access to civil rights, the most fundamental, is so regulated by social markers of difference (race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability), that such social representations legitimize deaths, mostly of black and poor youth, as if there were no right to non-discrimination, to life and physical integrity in the country. There is formal recognition of the civil, political and social rights of these groups in the letter of the law, but the abyss between the legal formality expressed on paper and the actual realization of such rights remains immense”, states a report by the Brazilian Public Security Forum.
Cover photo: Tomaz Silva/Agência Brasil
Photo on the side: Veetmano/JCMazella
THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE
KILLED BY POLICEMEN
GROWS YEAR BY YEAR:
2013 – 2,212
2014 – 3,146
2015 – 3,330
2016 – 4,220
2017 – 5,179
2018 – 6,175
2019 – 6,351
2020 – 6,416
AGE RANGE OF VICTIMS OF POLICE INTERVENTIONS THAT RESULTED IN DEATH IN BRAZIL
- 0 to 11 0%
- 12 to 17 7.4%
- 18 to 24 44.8%
- 25 to 29 24%
- 30 to 34 11.3%
- 35 to 39 5.5%
- 40 to 44 3.6%
- 45 to 49 1.6%
- 50 to 54 0.9%
- 55 to 59 0.5%
- 60 + 0.5%
RACE/COLOR VICTIMS OF POLICE INTERVENTIONS THAT RESULTED IN DEATH AND THE BRAZILIAN POPULATION
- WHITE 20.9%
- BLACK 78.9%
RACE/COLOR IN THE BRAZILIAN POPULATION:
- WHITE 42.7%
- BLACK 56.3%
ABOUT WHO SHOOTS
ABOUT WHO DIES
%
OF DEATHS PRODUCED BY POLICEMEN IN BRAZIL WERE BY THE MILITARY POLICE; IN 24.5% OF THE CASES, THE INFORMATION ON AUTHORSHIP WAS NOT AVAILABLE
%
OF DEATHS PRODUCED BY POLICE OFFICERS IN BRAZIL HAPPENED DURING THEIR ON-DUTY HOURS; IN 24.5% OF THE CASES THIS INFORMATION WAS NOT AVAILABLE
%
ARE MEN
%
ARE BLACK PEOPLE (THE BLACK POPULATION REPRESENTS 56.3% OF THE GENERAL POPULATION IN BRAZIL)
%
ARE UP TO 29 YEARS OLD
%
UP TO 39 YEARS OF AGE
ABOUT WHO SHOOTS
%
OF DEATHS PRODUCED BY POLICEMEN IN BRAZIL WERE BY THE MILITARY POLICE; IN 24.5% OF THE CASES, THE INFORMATION ON AUTHORSHIP WAS NOT AVAILABLE
%
OF DEATHS PRODUCED BY POLICE OFFICERS IN BRAZIL HAPPENED DURING THEIR ON-DUTY HOURS; IN 24.5% OF THE CASES THIS INFORMATION WAS NOT AVAILABLE
ABOUT WHO DIES
%
ARE MEN
%
ARE BLACK PEOPLE (THE BLACK POPULATION REPRESENTS 56.3% OF THE GENERAL POPULATION IN BRAZIL)
%
ARE UP TO 29 YEARS OLD
%
UP TO 39 YEARS OF AGE
A LEAP OF 56,6%
IN Pernambuco
In Pernambuco, 115 people were killed by the police in 2020, a leap of 56.6% in comparison to 2019, according to the Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Pública (Brazilian Yearbook of Public Security). All by on-duty police officers, 107 by the Military Police and 8 by the civil police. This growth that took place in Pernambuco also took place, to a greater or lesser extent, in other states in Brazil and countries around the world, in 2020, a year that echoed the anti-racist motto “Black lives matter”.
Pernambuco has a mortality rate from police intervention of 1.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, which is below the national average of 3.0, but its increase in the last year worries civil society entities that follow the theme of public security and human rights in the state. In 2019, the rate was 0.8 per 100,000.
According to data released by the Secretariat for Social Defense, by the end of October 2021, 88 deaths had been reported as a result of police intervention in Pernambuco.
Photo: Veetmano/JCMazella
CIVIL SOCIETY
SEES INSTITUTIONAL RACISM
The increase in the number of deaths due to police intervention in Brazil is a serious problem and needs to be faced from the perspective of being a result of institutional racism and in the context of the advance of the “license to kill” discourse disseminated even by public authorities. That is what Edna Jatobá, the executive coordinator of the Office of Assistance to Popular Organizations (GAJOP), warns: “It is very dangerous for society to start making an association that the numbers of homicides are falling because the police are killing more. Such association reinforces an entire racist argument, an entire argument of penal selectivity, as if there were even “killable” bodies. We have to carefully observe what leads to this increase in police lethality, disassociate it from the decrease in homicides and understand this as a serious social problem.”
In Brazil, after the record number of intentional violent deaths in 2017, the numbers of general homicides fell in 2018 and 2019, but they rose again in 2020. The same movement occurred in Pernambuco.
For Edna Jatobá, the training given to military police officers is an important point in the debate about security. “If they are going to invest in a dynamic of war against the black and poor population, which is seen as a target by the police, the structural racism of Brazilian society has the addition of institutional racism to the question of how these formations are being conducted because the police are trained to find these targets and shoot them down. We need, as a society, to discuss this”.
Lawyer José Vitor, from the Pernambuco Black Articulation (Anepe – Articulação Negra de Pernambuco), understands the role of the police as part of the genocide process of the black population in Brazil, which, he claims, is constituted on several fronts. “You have violent unemployment, the precariousness of work for this population. You eliminate the individual economically, you eliminate this individual’s access to health and when he has nothing else, you directly exterminate him through police violence”.
For José Vitor, the militarization of the Bolsonaro government and the president’s speech have a direct impact on the performance of military police throughout Brazil, increasing violence and deaths in their operations. He was at the Fora Bolsonaro (Bolsonaro Out!) demonstration in the center of Recife, on May 29, when two people were hit in the eyes by rubber bullets fired by the Military Police. He claims to have noticed an “ideological radicalization” of the military against the demonstrators in their attempts to dialogue with the security forces during the attacks.
Edna Jatobá claims that the situation in the discussion about public security in recent years in the country also has an important influence on the approach taken by the police. “In the last period, there was a lot of discussion about the ‘license to kill’, the attempt to expand the exclusion of illegality, the anti-crime package by Moro (Sérgio Moro, former justice minister), all of this reinforcing a narrative of more flexibility in investigations (about police violence). Police officers may feel more encouraged to go further, understanding that there is a situation that gives them a back-up”.
Photo: Roberto Parizotti/Fotos Públicas
THE SECRETARIAT OF SOCIAL DEFENSE TALKS ABOUT RIGOROUS INVESTIGATION
The Secretariat of Social Defense of Pernambuco (SDS – Secretaria de Defesa Social) claims to carry out an internal policy of training, capacity building and recycling to guarantee “a technical performance in the framework of legality” by the police forces in the state. In a note sent to the press, he defended the “rigorous and impartial investigation of disciplinary infractions”
According to the SDS, the Internal Affairs Unit registered 57 cases resulting from police intervention that required an investigation by the agency in 2020. As of October 2021, there were another 58 records. “When there are signs of imprudence, malpractice or intentionality, there is no condescension on the part of the Internal Affairs Division of SDS”, he pointed out.
The note brings numbers of investigations carried out and punishments applied by the Internal Affairs Office “considering all the reasons and nature of the complaints” in the last three years. It says that 65 police officers, including military personnel and civilians, were excluded from the corporation between 2019 and 2020, without, however, indicating whether these exclusions are directly related to investigations of deaths caused by police intervention. >> READ THE NOTE IN FULL
Photo: Veetmano/JCMazella