STF and STJ can make police approaches unfeasible, says jurist

New understandings by ministers of the STF and STJ, who annulled evidence of trafficking crimes and returned convicted criminals to the streets, some of them faction leaders, tend to weaken and even end police approaches. The warning comes from Fabrício Rebelo, a public safety researcher and founder of the Law and Security Research Center (Cepedes).

A series of court decisions that have invalidated drug and other illicit seizures – and, as a consequence, annulled convictions – are based on a decision handed down last year by the Sixth Panel of the STJ, which created restrictions on police approaches under the justification to curb “structural racism”. Since then, especially convicted of drug trafficking, they have managed to annul evidence of their crimes and have been cleared.

“Initially, some began to understand that if the individual gets nervous [ao se deparar com a presença policial], or tries to break away from the garrison, is no longer considered a well-founded suspicion. There it was extended that if he runs it is not either. If he runs away and takes shelter in a house, even so, there is no grounded suspicion”, explained Rebelo, in an interview for the People’s Gazette.

“So, practically everything that the police use or has always used as a reasoned suspicion for an approach began to be invalidated. This sequencing of new understandings in relation to the well-founded suspicion has been greatly weakening police action”, declares the researcher. “If this continues, in the future we will no longer have any situation that is understood as valid to authorize an approach”, he points out.

The new way that Justice has seen the legality of police approaches has also been reaching those that are made in suspicious vehicles and can inhibit one of the most effective resources of the police forces to identify large amounts of drugs, in addition to firearms and other contraband objects. .

At the end of May, the São Paulo Military Highway Police celebrated the second largest drug seizure in the history of the corporation – 12 tons of narcotics were removed from circulation. Strictly following the new understanding, however, such an apprehension would not be possible: it was precisely the suspicious behavior of the driver when he came across the vehicle that led to the distrust of the police and, finally, culminated in the approach.