Black Brazilians And Police Brutality , A Race In Extintion

Black Brazilians And POLICE BRUTALITY , A Race In Extintion.

Police disproportionately kill black youths in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro States of Brazil , indept study reveals a stop and shoot tactics

Like the United States, Brazil faces a huge problem with police violence. In the last five years in the US, police have killed around 5,900 people. In Brazil, the numbers for the same period are nearly four times that. Even when taking into account that Brazil’s population is around 36 per cent smaller than that of the US, the death rate is almost six times higher. Not to mention, just like Floyd, most of the victims in Brazil are black. And yet they have never received a global reaction like the one in the US in 2020.

The military police , Polícia Militar, or PM , are the state police forces that currently maintain public order in Brazil. Since 1985, after the fall of the 21-year military dictatorship, their role has become increasingly blurred. Between 2014 and 2020, police brutality surged nationwide. For a long time this was viewed internationally as simply part of a wider human rights issue. But that doesn’t explain how one group in particular continues to be disproportionately affected. In 2021 alone, nearly 80 per cent of police murder victims were black, in a country where black people make up just over half the population.

Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, making it one of the last countries to do so. As a result, the legacy of racism still looms heavily over the country today, and particularly within the police. “The PM was created primarily to persecute slaves who escaped,” Delay de Acari, a 68-year-old human rights and black movement activist in the Acari favela in Rio de Janeiro, tells ancestrals.com.ng : “ There were many slave revolts in Brazil, and the military police was cruel in its persecution.”

He says the Black Lives Matter movement in the US helped mobilise black Brazilians to recognise their oppression as being a race struggle, too: “It influenced us. It brought the issue of racialisation to the movement.”

The case for change is a strong one, but Brazilian resentment towards the police could be hindering it. According to de Acari a lot of those who live in the favelas, or urban slum housing, don’t trust the current police. But they still want protection.

Young black men are disproportionately killed by police in São Paulo, one of the richest states in Brazil and Latin America, according to a study released last week by Samira Bueno, a sociologist and chief executive officer of the Brazilian Forum on Public Security.

The survey looked into 3,107 records in 20 cities in the state of São Paulo between 2013 and 2020. Bueno also interviewed 16 ex-police officers at the Romão Gomes military prison. She found that 67% of the people killed by police officers in the period were black or mixed-race, while 16% were under 17 years of age.

Valdênia Paulino Lanfranchi, a human rights activist and member of the Sapopemba Human Rights Center who works especially with youth, points to the fact that a significant number of victims are teenagers, who should be protected by the State. “The results of this study are daunting. The answer that São Paulo state authorities have been giving to this issue of lethal violence is daunting,” she says.

Reseach shows that, for every 1,000 teenagers arrested, 6.1 were killed by law enforcement officers. The number of adults killed by police officers is 3.4 for every 1,000 individuals who are arrested.

While the number of killings by police is on the rise, police officer deaths are steadily dropping in the state. In 2016, 856 people were killed by police, while in 2017 the number of victims was up to 943. Meanwhile, the number of police officers killed dropped from 80 in 2016 to 60 in 2017 . The Police officers killed at work dropped more in 2020 and 2021

Bruno Paes Manso, a journalist and researcher at the Violence Research Center of the University of São Paulo, argues that the issue of police brutality should be one of the top priorities to be tackled by law enforcement agencies – which still see these killings as a matter of preventive measures, not a political problem.

“As the overall number of deaths has dropped, deaths by police now represent nearly 20% of total killings in São Paulo. Murder rates have dropped over the last few years, while fatal police violence rates remain high,” he says.

Bueno’s research shows the youngest victims of police killings are 10-11 year old boys who live on the outskirts of São Paulo. Lanfranchi argues that police image among residents in these areas is negative “because you don’t have a preventive police force, only reactive policing.”

She points out that, in these areas, residents have firsthand experience witnessing police corruption, where officers who kill people are also spotted at drug-dealing locations or collecting bribes from businesses to provide “protection.”

Manso argues that, while the police are defensive when confronted with high killing rates, society at large is somehow complacent in face of these deaths.

“The big problem ends up being the stigma carried by these groups, these young men who live on the outskirts, who are seen as the bad guys. People are scared [of violence] in cities, and they accept this kind of policing without realizing the collateral damage it has been generating,” he says.

Black and human rights movements in Brazil have been arguing for a long time that there is a genocide going on in the country, where black people and people who live on the outskirts are disproportionately killed, and these two elements, race and geographic location, are directly linked with the number of deaths by law enforcement officers.

“It’s not an issue of individual officers. What we have is a state policy that is genocidal. There is no doubt about that, it’s not a matter of ‘mistakes.’ There is an ongoing policy that exterminates and executes people, and it’s been carried out by the Executive branch of São Paulo state.” In Brazil, the so-called military police are gendarmerie-style forces responsible for policing the civilian population. They are the responsibility of state governments.

Murders in São Paulo dropped by 65% between 2001 and 2016 , but increased lately since the rightist government came to power , the easy access to licensed guns by the elites increased killings of black population in the name of self defense . The police killings increased in 2019 and 2020 , it went up by 42%

Fighting police violence has been one of the central objectives of the Brazilian black movement since its reorganisation during the phase of re-democratisation at the end of the military dictatorship in the late 1970s. A fundamental landmark in the movement’s reorganisation was a public protest event organised by the Unified Movement against Racial Discrimination (Movimento Unificado contra a Discriminação Racial) on the steps of the Municipal Theatre of São Paulo in July 1978, to denounce the murder of the market-seller Robson Silveira da Luz by police officers. Since then, throughout the different phases of democratisation in Brazil ­numerous further cases of police violence have sparked black protest. This protest has always related other social problems to police violence and has sought alliances with ­other social movements, in its effort to dismantle the dominant public discourse of the myth of racial democracy according to which the different peoples forming the ­Brazilian nation – blacks, whites, and indigenous – were supposedly living together in equality, harmony, and without any conflicts.

When the Unified Black Movement (Movimento Negro Unificado, MNU) was formed in 1978, numerous other social movements and political actors were also re-emerging and reorganising themselves as part of the process of re-democratisation. In this context, collectives and associations valorising and promoting black culture allied with socialist activists returning from exile; black activists from the student movement collaborated with organised groups from unions; and, collectives of ­writers, teachers, journalists, and university students joined the black protest. The time was marked by the reinterpretation of the impact of slavery on inequalities between blacks and whites in Brazil: authors challenged the assumption that racial inequalities were a simple legacy of past slavery. In a study on the social mobility of black and white Brazilians, Hasenbalg (2005 ) showed that racism still persisted in Brazilian society and that racial discrimination was creating new forms of exclusion for blacks in the job market, the education system, and in other spheres of social life (Hasenbalg 2005). This understanding of racial inequalities and discrimination was reinforced by several of the black movement’s objectives, such as fighting racial discrimination in the labour market, including Afro-Brazilian and African history in school curriculums, and ending the sterilisation of black women. Throughout the country these kinds of demands would emerge and strengthen over the years that followed.

With the beginning of formal democracy following the promulgation of the Brazilian constitution in 1988, official data and information became more accessible – allowing institutions like the police to now be analysed more closely. It was then that studies at the University of São Paulo revealed that the victims of police violence were primarily young, black men and that the police preferentially stopped and controlled citizens matching this profile. The violence was so evident that it became the main topic of rap songs as a part of the hip-hop movement – which in Brazil identified strongly with the black movement. Over the years further emblematic cases of police violence gained unfortunate fame, such as the slaughter of Candelária, Rio de Janeiro, in 1993, or the death of Mario José Josino – who was executed in Favela Naval in Diadema, São Paulo, in 1997. During this period, the concept of “racial violence” gained ground in the black movement.

When the National Healthcare System began to register information on the ­ethnic identification of patients, it was, moreover, possible to observe that young, black men were not only overrepresented among the victims of police violence but also among those of deadly violence in general. In light of this data, the movement of the black youth started to organise to denounce what they call the “genocide of the black youth.” The term “genocide,” which was first applied to the situation of black people in Brazil by the politician, writer, actor, and thinker Abdias do Nascimento in the late 1970s, was taken up again during the organisation of the First National Meeting of Black Youth (Primeiro Encontro Nacional de Juventude Negra) in 2007. Hundreds of young activists from 14 different states in Brazil participated in the reunion, which was followed up on by a series of grass-roots events, the creation of new local organisations, and by national- and regional-awareness campaigns (Ramos 2014).

Due to the continuous murder of young, black people and a substantial increase in the imprisoned population, this movement has been further strengthened since then. So when the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement reverberates worldwide, it is embraced by an extensive network of mobilisation in Brazil. The current wave of organisations aiming to protect lives in Brazil, was, thus, not initiated recently, or in 2014 with the BLM movement; its roots lie in events that occurred decades ago.

Today, activists from the Brazilian black movement in their denunciation of what they call the “black genocide” point to the violence and repression directly perpetrated against blacks by the state, in the form of police violence and mass incarceration, as well as to the general deadly violence against blacks and the higher mortality rates among the latter as caused by racism and structural discrimination. They refer to a historical-social process that commenced with more than 300 years of slavery and the politics of “whitening” advocated by Brazilian elites at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, and to the existence of a system of social exclusion that has historically made black Brazilians more prone to losing their lives, their freedom, and their rights. Activists from the black movement denounce that until today the systematic exclusion of blacks has limited their opportunities to live and fully realise their social, economic, and political rights (Belchior et al. 2020; Pistache 2017). This historic and systematic production of inequalities calls the performance of democracy in Brazil into question, as the ­slogan “as long as there is racism, there is no democracy” of the recent manifest of the Black Coalition for Rights illustrates (Coalizão Negra por Direitos 2020).

Due to the pressure exercised by activists and organisations from the black movement, some progress has been made over the last few decades with regards to anti-discrimination and equality policies in Brazil. One crucial advancement was the law establishing that racism is a crime. This legislation is a legacy of the National Constituent Assembly of 1988, and the result of the direct participation of the black movement (Santos 2015). The same year, the Cultural Foundation Palmares – a public entity linked to the Ministry of Culture which is aimed at contributing to the preservation of Afro-Brazilian and indigenous cultural expressions – was established. Throughout the 1990s, numerous local governments, furthermore, adopted local policies to respond to the demands of the black population (Ribeiro 2013) and created participatory councils to foster the political participation of that community.

These and other experiences culminated in the creation of the Special Secretariat for Policies to Promote Racial Equality (SEPPIR) in 2003 – which had the ­status of a ministry until 2015 – and the National Council for the Promotion of ­Racial Equality (CNPIR) – which united high-ranking government members with representatives of civil society organisations, with the objective of developing policies to promote the equality of black Brazilians. Years of black mobilisation and the participation of members from the black movement in the government of Luiz ­Inácio Lula da Silva from the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) brought these and other advances about. Several public policies are to be mentioned in this regard: the Statute of Racial Equality, which lists numerous rights of black Brazilians that the state is obliged to fulfil; policies related to the concession of land titles to quilombola communities (traditional communities that are descended from runaway enslaved people); policies regarding the health of the black population; and, a law making the teaching of Afro-Brazilian and African history mandatory in school (Lima 2010).

Two extensive programmes to promote the inclusion of black and low-income students in higher education were, furthermore, implemented: the politics of ­quotas at public universities and the Programme University for Everyone (Programa Universidade para Todos, Prouni). The latter was adopted in 2004 to provide students at private universities with scholarships. Together these measures changed the profile of university students and universities in Brazil by quadruplicating the presence of blacks.

While these public policies in the areas of education, health, and culture represent important advances, some of them have not been implemented effectively, many of the black movement’s demands have never been met, and social inequalities between Afro-Brazilians and white Brazilians have persisted. With the extreme-right and openly racist Bolsonaro in the presidency and a conservative Congress, it is now more difficult than ever to push for further policies to promote the equality of blacks. Instead, advances made during the last few decades are, currently, under pressure to survive, and, thus, need to be protected and defended.

The problems of violence and policy brutality against blacks were, however, in previous years never tackled efficiently either. The scarcity of policies formulated in the area of public security that consider the specific situation of the black population is, among other things, related to the detachment of experts working in this area from social movements – and, in particular, from the black movement. It is a policy area which is still working under the logic of the myth of racial democracy, and in which racism is still not considered a social problem.

One exception in this regard is the Programme Youth Alive (Plano Juventude Viva), which was developed in response to the demands of the movement of the black youth and began to be implemented by the federal government of Dilma Rousseff from the PT in 2012. Its objective was to direct the investment of dozens of social programmes preferentially to marginalised neighbourhoods in the ­municipalities with the highest homicide rates and to fight institutional racism – for instance, by sensitising public functionaries. The programme was promising, but due to limited time frames and resources it has not yet resulted in an extensive and enduring reduction of overall homicides throughout Brazil.

The black movement was also actively involved in pushing for the exclusion of certain proposed measures from the anti-crime package promoted by former ­Justice Minister Moro – such as to extend the protection of public-security officers from potential legal repercussions for killings committed during operations and to establish plea-bargain procedures in the criminal justice system. Activists from the Brazilian black movement warned that these measures would further increase violence against Afro-Brazilians, accompanied the proceeding of the bill through Congress, participated in public sessions during which it was discussed, and denounced the bill at international organisations such as the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights (Simões 2019). Consequently, the most controversial measures envisaged by the anti-crime package were ultimately excluded from the bill by opposition politicians in Congress.

In the first four months of 2020, Rio police, by their own count, killed 606 people. In April, as isolation measures came into place, robberies and other crimes dropped dramatically, but police violence surged. Police killed close to six people a day, a 43 percent increase from the same month last year. They were responsible for 35 percent of all killings in Rio de Janeiro state in April.

To put that in perspective, imagine police in the United States killing at a similar rate; they would be responsible for more than 36,000 deaths each year. Instead, US police shoot and kill about 1,000 people per year. That number includes cases where the use of deadly force was excessive and unwarranted, and too often indicative of flagrant discrimination against African-Americans. Some of those cases have led to public protest and unrest, as with the recent killing of George Floyd.

More than three quarters of the close to 9,000 people killed by Rio police in the last decade were black men. Nationwide, police killed more than 33,000 people in the last ten years. There have been some protests, particularly in the communities that suffer the brunt of that violence, but not the uproar seen in the United States.

The numbers alone cannot convey the tragedy. On May 18, three police officers, supposedly pursuing suspects, entered a home in the Salgueiro favela where six unarmed cousins had gathered to play. They opened fire hitting 14-year-old João Pedro Matos Pinto in the back. A relative drove João Pedro to a helicopter used by police in the operation, which took him away. The family spent more than 17 hours not knowing his whereabouts or condition, and finally found João’s body at the coroner´s office.

Three days later, as teachers, students, and other volunteers outside a school in the Providência favela handed out food packages to families left hungry by the economic fallout from Covid-19, the police opened fire. They said they were responding to gunfire from unidentified suspects. They killed Rodrigo Cerqueira, a 19-year-old whose teacher described him as a “wonderful boy” who always sat in the front row in school.

In their statement to investigators, the police did not mention the food distribution, the newspaper Extra noted. Officers claimed, as they usually do in police killings cases in Rio, that they’d found a gun and drugs on their victim. His family denies he was involved in any criminal activity.

Fogo Cruzado, a digital platform that collects violence data, says shootings involving the police have disrupted food distribution in uncountable times .

In the May 18 and May 21 operations, the police made no arrests and no officer was injured. The police routinely excuse themselves in killings, saying they opened fire in self-defense. Sometimes, it is true, as they face dangerous gangs. But many times, it is not.

The same rules for the use of lethal force apply in Providência or Salgueiro as in Copacabana and other wealthy Rio de Janeiro neighborhoods, but you wouldn’t know it. Human Rights Watch research over more than a decade shows that in poor neighborhoods, police open fire recklessly, without regard for the lives of bystanders. Sometimes they wantonly execute people.

“That they only behave so abusively in poor neighborhoods may explain the lack of an uproar over the killings in a society as deeply unequal as Brazil ” Says Lili Brito , a black activist

Police operations resulting in injuries and killings make law-abiding citizens of poor neighborhoods see officers as the enemy and a threat to their children. Such brutality does nothing to dismantle criminal groups. Instead, it feeds a cycle of violence that also puts officers at risk.

When President Jair Bolsonaro and Rio de Janeiro Governor Wilson Witzel encourage police to kill even more, as they have done in public remarks, they only empower corrupt, abusive officers, while undermining and endangering officers who abide by the law.

In an April 17 ruling, Supreme Court Justice Edson Fachin required Rio de Janeiro police to preserve crime scenes and stop taking bodies to the hospital as a ruse to destroy evidence. The ruling required forensic experts to include photographs in their reports.

That a Supreme Court justice has to order such basic steps is testament to the dismal investigations into police killings that Human Rights Watch has documented in scores of cases over the years. The result is a prevailing impunity for police abuses in Rio de Janeiro.

Rio de Janeiro state authorities need to draft and put into effect a plan with concrete steps and goals to reduce police killings. And when those killings occur, the Rio de Janeiro prosecutor´s office needs to ensure prompt, thorough, and independent investigations, including by opening its own investigations, in addition to those undertaken by the police.

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