RIO DE JANEIRO, (Reuters) – Police in Brazil’s biggest cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro routinely execute suspects and cover up the killings as self-defence, U.S.-based group Human Rights Watch said in report yesterday.
The report, the result of a two-year investigation, adds pressure on Brazil, and particularly Rio, to reduce violence before the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games.
The rights group said it found consistent evidence contradicting police claims that victims, mostly poor youths from slums, had died in shootouts after resisting arrest. It called on Brazil to make police accountable for such killings.
Police in the states of Rio and Sao Paulo have killed more than 11,000 people since 2003, making them among the most lethal in the world. Police in Rio state, whose capital city is plagued by competing violent drug gangs, kill the most, with 1,137 deaths last year classified as resisting arrest.
Police are responsible for investigating alleged abuses by their own officers, a fact the report said was the main cause of the “chronic failure to hold police to account for murder.” Police in Rio and Sao Paulo are very rarely prosecuted or convicted for killings.
“There’s a system in place where police in many poor neighborhoods are completely out of control. It’s a system of toleration that basically relies on the police to police themselves and they don’t do it,” said Daniel Wilkinson, Human Right Watch’s deputy director for the Americas.
Despite Brazil’s strong economic rise in recent years, many of its major cities remain scarred by violence, often linked to the drug trade. A violent police response in slum areas is often tolerated as necessary to combat high crime levels, although rights groups say it only exacerbates the problem.
Human Rights Watch said it had found credible evidence in 51 “resistance” killing cases that contradicted the police account, adding that this indicated a much broader problem. In 33 of the cases, forensic evidence was at odds with the official version — including 17 cases in which victims were shot at close range.
The report said police often cover up their killings by destroying crime scene evidence. One common technique, it said, is for officers to take corpses to hospitals in the pretense of trying to rescue victims.
As its main recommendation, Human Rights Watch called for the creation of specialized units within state prosecutors’ offices that would thoroughly investigate suspect police killings and bring officers to justice. It also called for police to notify the prosecutors’ office of killings immediately rather than waiting a month as they now do.
