This week Human Rights Watch reported that police is Brazil’s two-largest metropolitan areas have killed 11,000 people since 2003.
The report said investigators for Human Rights Watch studied 51 fatal shootings in which “credible evidence” contradicted official accounts given by officers about the circumstances of the killings. In dangerous slums, authorities classify nearly all fatal shootings as “resistance killings”.
The author of the report, Dan Wilkinson, said the killings are a signifying of a larger problem in Brazil: a pressure to give the police “carte blanche” to fight violent crime.
State and local officials acknowledged the problem in meetings with Human Rights Watch, Wilkinson said.
Recently, in an interview with the Washington Post, Rio’s secretary of public security acknowledged a program but said he could not simply dismiss officers suspected of rights violations: "We only have one way to do this and that is to develop proof that the officer has committed a crime," he said.
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