Brazilian police carried out a “significant proportion” of the 48,000 murders that swept Brazil last year, a UN report said on Monday, casting doubt on the government’s ability to curtail drug violence and reign in vigilante militias.
The report by UN special envoy on extra-judicial killings Philip Alston said police murder three people a day on average in Rio de Janeiro, making them responsible for one in five killings in the city, which is plagued by drug-gang violence and roving militias of off-duty police.
Rio de Janeiro State Security Chief Jose Beltrame dismissed the findings, saying Alston spent less than two weeks in Brazil and did not fully understand what was happening.
“He is a person who comes from Australia ... [and] came up with a shortsighted report of police operations,” Beltrame said. “I want him to prove it.”
The UN report found that police are rarely punished for their involvement and many Brazilians are resigned to the violence, seeing no other way to fight the drug gangs that rule the slums.
Alston toured some of Brazil’s most crime-ridden areas in November, gathering statistics from the government, police and NGOs, and interviewing local commanders, top ministers, activists and more than forty witnesses to police abuses. He presented his findings to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday.
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 combined last year. The Brazilian tally was in fact likely higher: a third of precincts lacked computers to report any murders.
Most police killings occurred during “acts of resistance” — police jargon for armed confrontations with civilians, Brazil’s Institute of Public Safety said in a January report.
Alston said that the deaths were “politically driven” because they were “popular among those who want rapid results and shows of force.”
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