Thousands of killings by Brazilian police are going largely unpunished because of public approval for a perceived crackdown on crime, a UN envoy said on Sunday.
Officials have often turned a blind eye to extrajudicial executions by police in crime-riddled Rio de Janeiro state because of “policing by opinion poll,” UN special envoy Philip Alston wrote in a preliminary report.
Alston investigated the killings in November and was to present his findings to a UN Human Rights Council session that opened in Geneva yesterday.
Clashes with police killed a record 1,260 civilians in Rio de Janeiro state last year — nearly the same number of all people murdered in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, where a combined 1,328 homicides occurred last year. The tally includes killings reported only by police stations that have computers — omitting about one-third of precincts.
Most police killings occurred during “acts of resistance” — police jargon for armed confrontations with civilians, a January report by Brazil’s Institute of Public Safety said.
Alston said the deaths were “politically driven” because they are “popular among those who want rapid results and shows of force.”
Police officials in Rio de Janeiro state did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Many of the deaths are tied to a new, more aggressive police approach against drug traffickers who control most of Rio’s 600-plus shantytowns, police have said. Rio de Janeiro state officials have praised many of the actions.
Alston’s report sharply criticized those tactics, which include large police invasions into Rio slums that caused scores of civilian deaths.
An operation in June last year that killed 19 civilians was “declared a model for future action,” he said.
On Jan. 30, six people were killed in a large police operation; on April 3, 11 were killed; and on April 15, 14 were killed.
“These recent events highlight the continuing and urgent need for reforms to policing approaches and the criminal justice system,” Alston wrote.
Rio de Janeiro State Governor Sergio Cabral has defended the tactics, accusing the media of sympathizing more with criminals than with their victims.
But Alston’s report said Rio police themselves become criminals at times.
They “all too often engage in excessive and counterproductive violence while on duty, and participate in what amounts to organized crime when off duty,” he wrote.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS