Domination of criminals makes the police kill and die more in Brazil

The actions of the São Paulo Military Police in Guarujá occupied a considerable amount of news last month. The operation — launched after a military police officer was murdered by bandits — left 14 people dead and generated accusations that ROTA, the corporation’s elite unit, committed extrajudicial executions.

At the same time, the Military Police of Bahia killed 23 people over a period of four days, without the same scrutiny. Bahia is governed by Jerônimo Rodrigues (PT), while São Paulo has Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicans) as governor. Could criticism of the lethality of the Brazilian police be a mere political weapon, used by the left only when it suits them?

First, the facts: the Brazilian police are, yes, one of the ones that kill the most in the world.

A study carried out by a professor at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, showed that Brazilian police officers cause, on average, 30.2 deaths per 1 million inhabitants per year (data are from 2020). The country appears in second place on a list of 18 countries, with much higher numbers than the United States (3.4 deaths per 1 million inhabitants), Argentina (2.1) and Canada (0.9).

Human rights NGOs and organizations such as the Workers’ Party blame police racism and the “war on drugs” for the worrying statistics. But the problem is much more complex.

The same study by Rutgers University, in fact, shows that another country occupies the top of the list with frightening numbers: Venezuela. There, the police killed 185 people per 1 million inhabitants in 2019. The Chavista dictatorship, however, is not usually mentioned in Brazil as a bad example of police brutality or persecution of the poorest classes — which is a sign that , to a large extent, the opposition of left-wing groups to the actions of the Brazilian police has political reasons.

violence is widespread

The numbers of violence in Brazil are high in general. If it has one of the most lethal police forces in the world, the country is also at the top of the list when the criterion is the number of police officers murdered — or the number of homicides as a whole.

In 2022, according to the Brazilian Public Security Yearbook, the country had 47,398 murders. According to the WHO (World Health Organization), the number is equivalent to approximately 10% of the world’s homicides, although Brazil has only 2.5% of the global population. In other words: out of every 200 people, five are Brazilian. Of every 200 murders, 20 happen in Brazil.

The Brazilian police also have one of the highest rates of police victimization. In 2022, according to the Brazilian Public Security Yearbook, 161 active police officers were murdered in Brazil in 2023. More than two thirds of them (67.3%) were black (according to the classification used by the publication, which includes browns and blacks).

Despite having a larger population than Brazil and a much larger police force, the United States recorded 60 police officers murdered last year. In Chile, there were only two.

The so-called “police lethality” figures need to be seen in this context.

Drug prohibition and racism seem to have little to do with the problem. Since 2006, possession of narcotics for personal use no longer leads to jail time in Brazil. And the majority of murdered police officers are black.

High crime seems to be a better explanation.

In 2020, an article published in an American academic journal showed that the death rate of police officers in Pará was in line with the state’s homicide rate.

Furthermore, the study by the Rutgers University professor mentions the peculiarities of policing in Brazil. Unlike what happens in safer countries, the Brazilian police need to always be on standby — which means, for example, drawing their gun while moving around a favela, instead of leaving it in its holster. This also increases the chances of accidental shooting.

Finally, the combination of impunity and lack of clarification of crimes means that Brazil has more criminals on the streets than most countries, even when only taking into account its South American neighbors. And in places where organized crime dominates, criminals often have heavy weapons.

Concentration in three states

The alleged racism of the police falls to the ground with a simple fact: in the two states with the most deaths caused by the police (Bahia and Rio de Janeiro), the majority of police officers are black. Accompanied by Pará, these accounted for the majority of cases of death due to police intervention in Brazil in 2022.

It makes sense. In Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, criminal factions control entire favelas, many of them located on hills, which makes police access difficult and increases confrontational situations. In Pará, vast regions have a reduced presence of the State. The south of the state, more specifically, has “lawless land”. Often, by the time the police take action, the situation has already become high-risk.

For Colonel Mário Sérgio de Brito Duarte, former BOPE commander in Rio de Janeiro, the situation of the Brazilian police — especially the Rio de Janeiro police — is very peculiar. “It is a crime with characteristics of criminal insurgency, where narcopower imposes itself in a deliberate, organized way and with the purpose of causing casualties in state forces, with weapons of war and military tactics”, he says.

Duarte adds that the context of some Brazilian regions resembles an armed urban conflict (as in civil wars), although with a lower degree of intensity than that of countries such as Syria and Afghanistan. “Brazil has criminal violence with the aesthetics of urban armed conflict, due to the presence of thousands of weapons of war,” he explains.

Bahia, Rio de Janeiro and Pará have something else in common: the high number of murdered police officers. Together, they make up 34% of these records — although they represent only 15% of the Brazilian population.

Nor is it surprising that the overall number of homicides in these three places is higher than the national average. The three states together had 29.8% of homicides in the country in 2022.

It is difficult to show that racism is the cause of the problem. A survey by the Ministry of Justice showed that, of the military police officers in Rio de Janeiro who declared their race, 55.2% are black.

In Pará, the sum of browns and blacks is equivalent to 85.3% of military police officers. The proportion is practically identical in Amapá, which occupies the top of the list in relation to police mortality.

Bahia did not provide data for the survey. However, a recent study of 545 military police officers in Bahia indicated that 89% of them were non-white.

Across the country, according to the Ministry of Justice, white military police officers are a minority (47.4%).