Law-enforcers on the rampage

Brazil's trigger-happy police

Apr 7th 2005 SÃO PAULO
From The Economist print edition

A murderous day in Rio

TWO of the victims were riding bicycles. Four of them were adolescents playing pinball in a bar. Two were transvestites, lounging outside a hotel. They were among the 30 people murdered on the single day of March 31st in Baixada Fluminense, a poor area outside Rio de Janeiro, apparently in a co-ordinated action by rogue members of the state police force. Only two of the victims had criminal records.

Twelve policemen have been arrested, including eight charged with murder. Brazilians were shocked by the worst massacre in the history of Rio state, but perhaps not shocked enough. That is because such outrages are not that uncommon. In 1993 a group of policemen murdered 21 people in a Rio favela to avenge the killing of four of their colleagues. In the same year seven children were shot by police near the Candelária church, in the centre of the city of Rio. The state's mix of murderous drug-trafficking gangs and ill-trained, poorly paid police makes such violence a daily occurrence. Last year the state's police killed a total of 983 people out of a population of 14m, slightly fewer than the 1,195 they killed the year before.

The Baixada Fluminense massacre seems to have started as a reaction against a crackdown by a local commander against crooked officers, but has its roots in a police force that is both fiercely repressive in its approach to crime and prone to criminality itself. Police “extermination groups” kill for hire and sometimes engage in theft and kidnapping. Since their victims are generally criminals, most people approve of them, says Pedro Strozenberg of Viva Rio, an anti-violence organisation. In some areas of Rio, police “militias” have driven out drug-trafficking gangs and imposed a harsh order. The perpetrators of last week's massacre may have belonged to an extermination group.

Rio's security secretary, Marcelo Itagiba, has set up a task-force to fight such groups and had earlier promised to take a “meat cleaver” to corrupt policemen. The state is already experimenting with promising initiatives to weave police forces into the communities they serve—a better way of catching criminals than invading their neighbourhoods. “Things are advancing,” says Mr Strozenberg, but not yet far enough. The streets of Baixada Fluminense and other depressed areas will not be secure until both the locals and the police are convinced that there is more to be gained from obeying the law than breaking it.

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