"Eduardo de Jesus was on his doorstep in Complexo do Alemão, a vast maze here of cinder block homes, when his mother heard the loud blast of gunfire. Seconds later, she saw Eduardo, 10, lying dead from a gunshot wound to the head, and she ran toward the police officer holding the gun. 'I grabbed him by the vest and yelled, ‘You killed my boy, you wretch,’ said his mother, Terezinha Maria de Jesus, 40. 'He told me, ‘Just as I killed your son, I can kill you, too,’ as he pointed his rifle at my head,” she continued. “I told him: ‘Go ahead. You just killed part of me. Take the rest.’ The images of Eduardo’s lifeless body and the piercing screams of his neighbors denouncing the police, captured on cellphones and shared on social media around Brazil since the episode last month, offer a rare glimpse into the sense of despair in a society where killings by the police are so common that they dwarf the number in the United States."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/world/americas/police-killings-brazil-rio.html?ref=topics&_r=0
Simon Romero is my favorite Brazilian journalist and I try to read him whenever I get a chance. Most recently is this harrowing account of the Brazilian Police's tactical choices i.e. murder/execution to combat the rampant crime rate that plagues targeted areas in many of its large metropolitan cities.
I want to stress "targeted" on two counts:
I imagine many readers of this article will be appalled and state an obvious alternative, non-lethal, tactic of incarceration but the reality of many Brazilian prisons (not unlike American ones) is that "as drug gangs [further their] control, arresting criminals and sending them to jail is viewed by some police officers [and the general population] as feeding the growth of crime, not reducing it."
So which is it?
Blatant neglect of a segment of the society that the country finds "undesirable" or the result of a still growing and maturing democracy that doesn't have the institutional bandwidth to deal with its citizenry in a humane way?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/world/americas/police-killings-brazil-rio.html?ref=topics&_r=0
Simon Romero is my favorite Brazilian journalist and I try to read him whenever I get a chance. Most recently is this harrowing account of the Brazilian Police's tactical choices i.e. murder/execution to combat the rampant crime rate that plagues targeted areas in many of its large metropolitan cities.
I want to stress "targeted" on two counts:
- Most of Brazil's cities are not riddled with crime
- Most of the recipients of this brand of "justice" are poor and, euphemistically, "persons of color"
I imagine many readers of this article will be appalled and state an obvious alternative, non-lethal, tactic of incarceration but the reality of many Brazilian prisons (not unlike American ones) is that "as drug gangs [further their] control, arresting criminals and sending them to jail is viewed by some police officers [and the general population] as feeding the growth of crime, not reducing it."
So which is it?
Blatant neglect of a segment of the society that the country finds "undesirable" or the result of a still growing and maturing democracy that doesn't have the institutional bandwidth to deal with its citizenry in a humane way?