Rio and São Paulo police together kill more than 1,000 people every year says human rights watch. In our society the poor become homo sacer.
hrw.org/en/news/2009/12/08/brazil-curb-police...Posted Dec 9, 2009, 9:37 AM UTC
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hrw.org
They must have been training with Americans.
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Any Brazilians around to comment? I would really appreciate a local take on this.
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I'm Brazilian and I think it's a good sign that the police is doing their job. The drug dealers are using heavy assault weapons, and I don't think anyone expect cops to ask nicely for them to surrender.
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I hear you, but it seems violence in Brazil escalating and it might cause a irreparable scar in your society, if it hadn't already.
What about the high rates of uninvolved civilians that are being killed? What about the right to a fair trial?
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The innocents are the only ones I care. But I don't care with anyone that is holding an AK-47 rifle in the slum. American police wouldn't deal any better with anyone pointing one of these at them. What is happening in those communities is more like a war than normal crime fighting.
I would prefer that all drugs be decriminalized, so all this money would stop fueling crime.
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As a Brazilian, I'm not surprised.
We pretty much take for a fact that the police kills people and we take it very lightly.
There are many conservative people here, markedly among the ruling elite and in the media. And many among them condone or even encourage police violence, because they think our penal code is too light and our judicial system doesn't work (that's pretty much true, our Justice is very slow and corrupt).
Moreover, most of our police is badly paid, badly equipped, badly organized and actually afraid of the heavily armed and violent gangs that we have in those major cities. Combining that with their traditional truculent behaviour and the aforementioned veiled media support, we have a bunch of killings.
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I'm Brazilian and i think lenient laws are one cause.
It' s very difficult to convict criminals here. There are so many possibilities to appeal any conviction and criminals get parole so easily that police officers feel powerless.
Criminals get parole after doing just one sixth of their time. The minimum jail time for manslaughter, for instance, is six years so it' s possible to kill someone and spend no more than one year in jail.
The root problem here is that the Brazilian Constitution says that the primary objective of the penitentiary system is to recover the criminal. Too often judges will use this argument to release hardened criminals. Having enough money to pay for a good attorney is almost certain to set one free in Brazil, no matter what crime you committed. And drug dealers have lots of money.
Faced with this situation, police officers too often fall into vigilantism, judging and executing suspects on the street.