7 ms·

Rio de Janeiro’s police killed a record number of people in three months

57 points by egusa 7y ago

rossenberg79 7y ago
Probably should replace the word “people” in the title with “criminals” to be more specific, and less click-baity.
- delinka 7y ago
  Whose definition of 'criminal' are we using? Is it "anyone who dares defy police?" Or "someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was mistaken by the police as the person they were after?" Or maybe you prefer "anyone who is a target of police inquiry and lethal force because they're obviously guilty?" Until the evidence is presented and decided upon, people are not criminals.
  - rossenberg79 7y ago
    I think there’s a clear difference between “poor guy in the wrong place at the wrong time” and gang members dealing drugs and toting firearms.
    - NullPrefix 7y ago
      The Unarmed Combatants killed by a drone strike type of situation. If they're dead, they must be the enemy.
  - brutally-honest 7y ago
    How about "people openly flaunting assault weapons"? As someone who lived in Rio most of their life, I think that's a good line to draw. Opinions filled with "human rights" concerns from people far removed are probably ethically and morally correct, which is... cute. We're fighting an Urban War over here. This is a Concrete Jungle. This is a crazy post-apocalyptic situation to which most people in Rio grew accustomed to while most people outside Rio can barely picture. As a police officer once told my wife as she was leaving her house in Rocinha and stopped to be patted down and inquired why was she being selected: – Mam, do you know where you are? You are not in in Los Angeles. You are not in Paris. My moral qualms went out the window around the same time my grandmother was murdered by being thrown off a bridge in Aterro do Flamengo.
- decebalus1 7y ago
  That's debatable. Because the police (especially the military police) should not be judge, jury and executioner. I'm on the fence about this as I don't have enough information to form an opinion. I'm European living in the US and so far removed from anything happening in South America that I cannot judge based on the news. I have one Brazilian friend who does agree with this approach so that's that. Bun in general, this is going too far. It's no longer a slippery slope. If the cops have authority to fly around and snipe 'criminals' then the opportunity for abuse is ridiculous. Nobody should have that power.
  - rossenberg79 7y ago
    This is what the Brazilian people asked for. And I’m willing to bet if anyone who disagrees spends some time living in the hard areas of Brazil, they will agree with it too. In the short term, “judge, jury and executioner” can be a perfectly fine policy because criminals tend to be very obvious in places where law has broken down, at least the violent ones.
  - dictum 7y ago
    Reply to the grandparent, now dead/flagged: Criminals are people too. Your distinction would apply if the headline had "non-criminals" (a rare construct, but for sake of comparison, akin to "civilians" or noncombatants) instead of "criminals". The geography of Rio's slums makes killing innocent people rather easy even if you don't set out to kill them; however, there's significant paramilitary activity in the area, both as the drug trade groups you mention, made up of civilians, and groups of officers and ex-officers who initially ran protection rackets, but now run drug operations too. These officers are often high up on the police hierarchy, and use the police structure for their own goals. (As a reply to another comment: fascism and various genocides have been asked for by citizens throughout history; public approval doesn't make a policy good or moral per se.) An example of what their "judge, jury and executioner" mandate can bring, aside from direct executions: https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-brazil-rio-militias-20190504-story.html https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-brazil-rio-militias-2019...
- tdb7893 7y ago
  In absence of an actual conviction I think "people" is a fine description.
  - Loughla 7y ago
    Even with an actual conviction, I'm pretty sure "people" is still the appropriate way to describe humans.
- danharaj 7y ago
  Nobody: You: this article about a spike in extrajudicial killings after a far right mayor was elected is making it sound worse than it is
- chc 7y ago
  If anything, "criminals" would be a prejudicial framing. "People" is a pretty neutral word to refer to, well, people.
- gota 7y ago
  First, cute wordplay but criminals are people, despite your feelings. Second, in many cases you can _at most_ use the word "suspects" because the people murdered were not in flagrant delict an were not tried and convicted. Third, all it takes is to read the article to understand the situation. Hyper-scalation of violence has been going on for a long while and this is _not_ a plan to fight crime as much as it is a political reaction of the conservative faction that just won the election with populist claims of "safety through increased state violence". With that knowledge at hand its harder to dismiss the issue as some attempt to push a "liberal agenda" as you tried to do (although the expression and eveb the concept don't translate to Brazil). I'm sad to have to answer a comment like yours in this forum.
- lawlessone 7y ago
  Knew this comment would pop up. Some people genuinely want to live in the Judge Dredd universe..
  - dmix 7y ago
    Nearly every news website's comment section for a serious crime has someone saying "we should just line them up and shoot thm, save everyone the time and money". As if this hasn't been said a million times and wasn't a terrible idea each of those million times. Anyone can spend 2min googling "wrongful convictions" and the number of people found innocent by the judicial process to see why. Not to mention the whole reason why "lynch mob" style justice is a terrible idea (it's a highly emotional process which gets it wrong wayyy more often than courts/police, the punishments are often way out of proportion to the crimes, no due process, etc, etc).
    - luckylion 7y ago
      > Anyone can spend 2min googling "wrongful convictions" and the number of people found innocent by the judicial process to see why. This is just as good an argument against any form of law enforcement though. Don't imprison people because you will undoubtedly also target innocent people. Mind you, I'm not pro capital punishment, but "don't do it, because you will also hit innocent people" isn't a good argument against it.
  - conanbatt 7y ago
    Can't see the original comment, but I think americans don't appreciate that their system is amongst the most brutally repressive in comparison to south america. In San Francisco you can walk down market and see people dealing drugs, but would never rob you. The former because the police have a no persecute policy, the latter because they have a no tolerance policy. In places like Argentina or brazil, the mere sight of people like this means 100% guaranteed robbery. I believe americans visiting the wrong neighborhood in Argentina or Brazil would have deeply false sense of security, which is why they are prime targets.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    > Some people genuinely want to live in the Judge Dredd universe.. Pretty much everybody prefers that over total gang land chaos. Don't forget that "living in Scandinavia" isn't the usual alternative.
hazdiego 7y ago
Ironically, Rio de Janeiro is considered one of the safest capitals in Brazil [1]. The absolute numbers are high, but that's a huge city with millions of habitants. I lived there for 27 years in favelas like Rocinha and Santa Marta (when I didn't have money), and in apartments in Botafogo and Flamengo (after making money). I walked on the streets midnight and later. Nothing has ever happened to me. I've never even witnessed anything. Of course, it's my own experience and I have some privileges. The only time I was robbed in my life I was in the US. My computer has been stolen in the Houston International Airport (thankfully, it was recovered by a super professional Mexican police officer). [1] https://thebrazilbusiness.com/article/the-10-safest-state-capitals-in-brazil https://thebrazilbusiness.com/article/the-10-safest-state-ca...
- dmix 7y ago
  How was your laptop stolen in Houston recovered by a Mexican police officer? Was there Mexican customs officers or baggage handlers at the Houston airport? I had a friend have his $2500 Macbook stolen from his bag by baggage handlers while in a Thai airport. You're lucky you got it back.
  - hazdiego 7y ago
    Mine was a Macbook too. It was stolen on that security part where you have to put your personal belongs on the "running machine" (no idea how to call that) and pass through the scanner. The woman that passed before me took my laptop. I thought it was by mistake, but the cameras proved otherwise. Surprisingly or not, nobody cared. I was already hopeless in the airplane (which was late because of it) when this police officer came with my computer. I don't know what happened to the woman. The police officer was American. I said he was Mexican because he was speaking Spanish with us (which helped, because my wife's Spanish is better than my English, and I was too anxious to speak).
    - hazdiego 7y ago
      By the way, would anyone be interested in reading this story? I have the camera recordings with me.
dade_ 7y ago
A fictional account of the situation. It's a mess and iit isn't going to get better soon. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (2010) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1555149/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1555149/
hu3 7y ago
edit: didn't know people downvoted statistics in HN. Conversely homicides in Brazil registered the sharpest decline in its history. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/22/brazils-murder-rate-finally-fell-and-by-a-lot/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/22/brazils-murder-rate-fin... > One of the world’s most homicidal countries just registered the sharpest overall decline of lethal violence in its history. Brazil’s murder rate dropped by a whopping 13 percent between 2017 and 2018, from more than 59,000 people killed to just over 51,000. And homicides fell by 25 percent in the first two months of 2019 compared with the same period last year.
- ericol 7y ago
  "the sharpest decline in history" out of coming from the most violent year in history (2017), mainly due to gang wars. Also, this particular story is about police killings only, that are up almost 18% from the same period from the previous year.
- gota 7y ago
  Yes, but this _nothing to do_ with the issue of military police preemptively sniping people in slums. The drop in death rates is associated with 'peace treaties' between large criminal factions in peripheral states such as Rio Grande do Sul and, most importantly, Ceará. These factions have recently spread across Brazil (last decade and a half or so) and most recently, concurrently with the economical crisis of 2014~onwards, have been waging open war. The article you linked even says: > The drop in lethal violence started well before the election of the self-styled crime-fighter-in-chief, President Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected in October 2018. Rio's governor (who enacted the sniping) was elected along with Bolsonaro.
  - hu3 7y ago
    Homicide rate more than halved in a trend that was already bearish. Reduction went from 13% in Jan 2018 to 25% in Jan 2019. I find this outstanding enough to be considered a new trend in itself.
- GGfpc 7y ago
  That was before the record number of killings, which leads the question, will increased brutality of the police force improve or worsen overall security?
edpichler 7y ago
"... Rio de Janeiro police killed 434 citizens." All of them were innocents? Why do some journalists insist to call criminals as victims, citizens, and etc?
- coldtea 7y ago
  Being guilty of anything doesn't mean you get a death sentence by a cop. There are courts and procedures for that. When police just open fire, even when they're not in danger, or kill people by supervisor's suggestion, it's still murder.
- saalweachter 7y ago
  For comparison, US police have killed 323 people so far in 2019[1], and the US is widely regarded as the shootiest, killiest first-world country. Illinois, which has twice the population of Rio and contains the notorious crime-ridden hellhole known as Chicago, has had 5 police shootings in 2019. Assuming a similar trend over the full course of a year (that number is for 3 months), that gives Rio a murder rate by the police of 27.5 per 100k; that is higher than the murder rate by criminals in Newark, NJ. In short, that is just an insane number of people being summarily executed on the street without charges or trial by the police. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police...
- iron0013 7y ago
  Criminals are citizens.
brutally-honest 7y ago
Just posting this here in reply to a comment whose thread was flagged. Context is "whose definition of criminal should we use". How about "people openly flaunting assault weapons"? As someone who lived in Rio most of their life, I think that's a good line to draw. Opinions filled with "human rights" concerns from people far removed are probably ethically and morally correct, which is... cute. We're fighting an Urban War over here. This is a Concrete Jungle. This is a crazy post-apocalyptic situation to which most people in Rio grew accustomed to while most people outside Rio can barely picture. As a police officer once told my wife as she was leaving her house in Rocinha and stopped to be patted down and inquired why was she being selected: – Mam, do you know where you are? You are not in in Los Angeles. You are not in Paris. My moral qualms went out the window around the same time my grandmother was murdered by being thrown off a bridge in Aterro do Flamengo.
- drewblaisdell 7y ago
  > Opinions filled with "human rights" concerns from people far removed are probably ethically and morally correct, which is... cute. We're fighting an Urban War over here. War is always a good excuse to ignore ethical concerns.
  - hutzlibu 7y ago
    > War is always a good excuse to ignore ethical concerns. On Both sides
  - ufo 7y ago
    I think it is important to point out that this point of view that "human rights" (with the quotation marks) are something that exists solely to favor "bad guys", at the expense of "upstanding citizens", is one one of the central points of alt-right rhetoric in Brazil right now.
- the_jpg 7y ago
  Everything that you said is right, my problem with this kind of policy is that they sell it as the solution, I think that is better to fight organized crime with intelligence instead of with raw force. The weapons and the drugs that finance the traffic do not come from the poor communities, the crime in rio is deep within the society killing the poor that is already marginalized it’s not a soluction. I agree with you on the other side, people with weapons should be treated as the threat that they are, but the public policy should not be just “kill theses guys and we are good”.
ramon 7y ago
Why is the Brazilian police officer wrong when he kills someone and why is any other officer in any other country right when he does the same? Mistakes happen it's part of this duty of being the police. It's a matter of solving the issues it's the most important thing. I was thinking about the other day since the police is so involved why not start investigating the police and what they own so you can understand where there are the bribes.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >Why is the Brazilian police officer wrong when he kills someone and why is any other officer in any other country right when he does the same? Who said that? They are wrong in many cases, whether the country. >Mistakes happen it's part of this duty of being the police. Killing urban poor indiscriminately whenever crime is suspected (or even widely overusing open fire even when crime is actually committed), are not mistakes, are policies. Fascist policies. Brazil is as bad as the Philippines in this regard (and US trigger-happy cops and SWATing overuse are bad too, yes).
  - ramon 7y ago
    This is what I'm saying why is Brazil bad in this regard? How is any other place better? I think it's just people wanting to talk bad about something they don't know. Statistics is nothing if you are not living it, statistics can be hidden too, look at how many donators vs organ transplants in China.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >This is what I'm saying why is Brazil bad in this regard? How is any other place better? In the way that most other places have less butcher cops and less blood-thirsty supporters of them... And the more police-civilized places (e.g. most of Nordic and Western Europe, Japan, New Zealand, etc) have almost zero.
      - ramon 7y ago
        The problem is the police or the environment they act upon? Is it lack of training or it is the behaviour?
ufo 7y ago
I'm surprised that the article didn't mention the recent news story where the Brazilian army (currently also tasked with policing duty in Rio de Janeiro) fired 80(!!) rounds at a passing car, murdering a musician and and wounding his wife and children. A passerby who tried to help also ended up dying a few days later. The government was complicit and allowed the case to be tried in a military court so most likely nothing will come out of it.
throwawaymanbot 7y ago
Bolsonaro is giving consequence free reign to do this in all but legislation. Grotesque.

57 points by egusa 7y ago

rossenberg79 7y ago

Probably should replace the word “people” in the title with “criminals” to be more specific, and less click-baity.

delinka 7y ago
Whose definition of 'criminal' are we using? Is it "anyone who dares defy police?" Or "someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was mistaken by the police as the person they were after?" Or maybe you prefer "anyone who is a target of police inquiry and lethal force because they're obviously guilty?" Until the evidence is presented and decided upon, people are not criminals.
- rossenberg79 7y ago
  I think there’s a clear difference between “poor guy in the wrong place at the wrong time” and gang members dealing drugs and toting firearms.
  - NullPrefix 7y ago
    The Unarmed Combatants killed by a drone strike type of situation. If they're dead, they must be the enemy.
- brutally-honest 7y ago
  How about "people openly flaunting assault weapons"? As someone who lived in Rio most of their life, I think that's a good line to draw. Opinions filled with "human rights" concerns from people far removed are probably ethically and morally correct, which is... cute. We're fighting an Urban War over here. This is a Concrete Jungle. This is a crazy post-apocalyptic situation to which most people in Rio grew accustomed to while most people outside Rio can barely picture. As a police officer once told my wife as she was leaving her house in Rocinha and stopped to be patted down and inquired why was she being selected: – Mam, do you know where you are? You are not in in Los Angeles. You are not in Paris. My moral qualms went out the window around the same time my grandmother was murdered by being thrown off a bridge in Aterro do Flamengo.
decebalus1 7y ago
That's debatable. Because the police (especially the military police) should not be judge, jury and executioner. I'm on the fence about this as I don't have enough information to form an opinion. I'm European living in the US and so far removed from anything happening in South America that I cannot judge based on the news. I have one Brazilian friend who does agree with this approach so that's that. Bun in general, this is going too far. It's no longer a slippery slope. If the cops have authority to fly around and snipe 'criminals' then the opportunity for abuse is ridiculous. Nobody should have that power.
- rossenberg79 7y ago
  This is what the Brazilian people asked for. And I’m willing to bet if anyone who disagrees spends some time living in the hard areas of Brazil, they will agree with it too. In the short term, “judge, jury and executioner” can be a perfectly fine policy because criminals tend to be very obvious in places where law has broken down, at least the violent ones.
- dictum 7y ago
  Reply to the grandparent, now dead/flagged: Criminals are people too. Your distinction would apply if the headline had "non-criminals" (a rare construct, but for sake of comparison, akin to "civilians" or noncombatants) instead of "criminals". The geography of Rio's slums makes killing innocent people rather easy even if you don't set out to kill them; however, there's significant paramilitary activity in the area, both as the drug trade groups you mention, made up of civilians, and groups of officers and ex-officers who initially ran protection rackets, but now run drug operations too. These officers are often high up on the police hierarchy, and use the police structure for their own goals. (As a reply to another comment: fascism and various genocides have been asked for by citizens throughout history; public approval doesn't make a policy good or moral per se.) An example of what their "judge, jury and executioner" mandate can bring, aside from direct executions: https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-brazil-rio-militias-20190504-story.html https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-brazil-rio-militias-2019...
tdb7893 7y ago
In absence of an actual conviction I think "people" is a fine description.
- Loughla 7y ago
  Even with an actual conviction, I'm pretty sure "people" is still the appropriate way to describe humans.
danharaj 7y ago
Nobody: You: this article about a spike in extrajudicial killings after a far right mayor was elected is making it sound worse than it is
chc 7y ago
If anything, "criminals" would be a prejudicial framing. "People" is a pretty neutral word to refer to, well, people.
gota 7y ago
First, cute wordplay but criminals are people, despite your feelings. Second, in many cases you can _at most_ use the word "suspects" because the people murdered were not in flagrant delict an were not tried and convicted. Third, all it takes is to read the article to understand the situation. Hyper-scalation of violence has been going on for a long while and this is _not_ a plan to fight crime as much as it is a political reaction of the conservative faction that just won the election with populist claims of "safety through increased state violence". With that knowledge at hand its harder to dismiss the issue as some attempt to push a "liberal agenda" as you tried to do (although the expression and eveb the concept don't translate to Brazil). I'm sad to have to answer a comment like yours in this forum.
lawlessone 7y ago
Knew this comment would pop up. Some people genuinely want to live in the Judge Dredd universe..
- dmix 7y ago
  Nearly every news website's comment section for a serious crime has someone saying "we should just line them up and shoot thm, save everyone the time and money". As if this hasn't been said a million times and wasn't a terrible idea each of those million times. Anyone can spend 2min googling "wrongful convictions" and the number of people found innocent by the judicial process to see why. Not to mention the whole reason why "lynch mob" style justice is a terrible idea (it's a highly emotional process which gets it wrong wayyy more often than courts/police, the punishments are often way out of proportion to the crimes, no due process, etc, etc).
  - luckylion 7y ago
    > Anyone can spend 2min googling "wrongful convictions" and the number of people found innocent by the judicial process to see why. This is just as good an argument against any form of law enforcement though. Don't imprison people because you will undoubtedly also target innocent people. Mind you, I'm not pro capital punishment, but "don't do it, because you will also hit innocent people" isn't a good argument against it.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Can't see the original comment, but I think americans don't appreciate that their system is amongst the most brutally repressive in comparison to south america. In San Francisco you can walk down market and see people dealing drugs, but would never rob you. The former because the police have a no persecute policy, the latter because they have a no tolerance policy. In places like Argentina or brazil, the mere sight of people like this means 100% guaranteed robbery. I believe americans visiting the wrong neighborhood in Argentina or Brazil would have deeply false sense of security, which is why they are prime targets.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > Some people genuinely want to live in the Judge Dredd universe.. Pretty much everybody prefers that over total gang land chaos. Don't forget that "living in Scandinavia" isn't the usual alternative.

hazdiego 7y ago

Ironically, Rio de Janeiro is considered one of the safest capitals in Brazil [1]. The absolute numbers are high, but that's a huge city with millions of habitants. I lived there for 27 years in favelas like Rocinha and Santa Marta (when I didn't have money), and in apartments in Botafogo and Flamengo (after making money). I walked on the streets midnight and later. Nothing has ever happened to me. I've never even witnessed anything. Of course, it's my own experience and I have some privileges. The only time I was robbed in my life I was in the US. My computer has been stolen in the Houston International Airport (thankfully, it was recovered by a super professional Mexican police officer). [1] https://thebrazilbusiness.com/article/the-10-safest-state-capitals-in-brazil https://thebrazilbusiness.com/article/the-10-safest-state-ca...

dmix 7y ago
How was your laptop stolen in Houston recovered by a Mexican police officer? Was there Mexican customs officers or baggage handlers at the Houston airport? I had a friend have his $2500 Macbook stolen from his bag by baggage handlers while in a Thai airport. You're lucky you got it back.
- hazdiego 7y ago
  Mine was a Macbook too. It was stolen on that security part where you have to put your personal belongs on the "running machine" (no idea how to call that) and pass through the scanner. The woman that passed before me took my laptop. I thought it was by mistake, but the cameras proved otherwise. Surprisingly or not, nobody cared. I was already hopeless in the airplane (which was late because of it) when this police officer came with my computer. I don't know what happened to the woman. The police officer was American. I said he was Mexican because he was speaking Spanish with us (which helped, because my wife's Spanish is better than my English, and I was too anxious to speak).
  - hazdiego 7y ago
    By the way, would anyone be interested in reading this story? I have the camera recordings with me.

dade_ 7y ago

A fictional account of the situation. It's a mess and iit isn't going to get better soon. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (2010) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1555149/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1555149/

hu3 7y ago

edit: didn't know people downvoted statistics in HN. Conversely homicides in Brazil registered the sharpest decline in its history. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/22/brazils-murder-rate-finally-fell-and-by-a-lot/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/22/brazils-murder-rate-fin... > One of the world’s most homicidal countries just registered the sharpest overall decline of lethal violence in its history. Brazil’s murder rate dropped by a whopping 13 percent between 2017 and 2018, from more than 59,000 people killed to just over 51,000. And homicides fell by 25 percent in the first two months of 2019 compared with the same period last year.

ericol 7y ago
"the sharpest decline in history" out of coming from the most violent year in history (2017), mainly due to gang wars. Also, this particular story is about police killings only, that are up almost 18% from the same period from the previous year.
gota 7y ago
Yes, but this _nothing to do_ with the issue of military police preemptively sniping people in slums. The drop in death rates is associated with 'peace treaties' between large criminal factions in peripheral states such as Rio Grande do Sul and, most importantly, Ceará. These factions have recently spread across Brazil (last decade and a half or so) and most recently, concurrently with the economical crisis of 2014~onwards, have been waging open war. The article you linked even says: > The drop in lethal violence started well before the election of the self-styled crime-fighter-in-chief, President Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected in October 2018. Rio's governor (who enacted the sniping) was elected along with Bolsonaro.
- hu3 7y ago
  Homicide rate more than halved in a trend that was already bearish. Reduction went from 13% in Jan 2018 to 25% in Jan 2019. I find this outstanding enough to be considered a new trend in itself.
GGfpc 7y ago
That was before the record number of killings, which leads the question, will increased brutality of the police force improve or worsen overall security?

edpichler 7y ago

"... Rio de Janeiro police killed 434 citizens." All of them were innocents? Why do some journalists insist to call criminals as victims, citizens, and etc?

coldtea 7y ago
Being guilty of anything doesn't mean you get a death sentence by a cop. There are courts and procedures for that. When police just open fire, even when they're not in danger, or kill people by supervisor's suggestion, it's still murder.
saalweachter 7y ago
For comparison, US police have killed 323 people so far in 2019[1], and the US is widely regarded as the shootiest, killiest first-world country. Illinois, which has twice the population of Rio and contains the notorious crime-ridden hellhole known as Chicago, has had 5 police shootings in 2019. Assuming a similar trend over the full course of a year (that number is for 3 months), that gives Rio a murder rate by the police of 27.5 per 100k; that is higher than the murder rate by criminals in Newark, NJ. In short, that is just an insane number of people being summarily executed on the street without charges or trial by the police. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police...
iron0013 7y ago
Criminals are citizens.

brutally-honest 7y ago

Just posting this here in reply to a comment whose thread was flagged. Context is "whose definition of criminal should we use". How about "people openly flaunting assault weapons"? As someone who lived in Rio most of their life, I think that's a good line to draw. Opinions filled with "human rights" concerns from people far removed are probably ethically and morally correct, which is... cute. We're fighting an Urban War over here. This is a Concrete Jungle. This is a crazy post-apocalyptic situation to which most people in Rio grew accustomed to while most people outside Rio can barely picture. As a police officer once told my wife as she was leaving her house in Rocinha and stopped to be patted down and inquired why was she being selected: – Mam, do you know where you are? You are not in in Los Angeles. You are not in Paris. My moral qualms went out the window around the same time my grandmother was murdered by being thrown off a bridge in Aterro do Flamengo.

drewblaisdell 7y ago
> Opinions filled with "human rights" concerns from people far removed are probably ethically and morally correct, which is... cute. We're fighting an Urban War over here. War is always a good excuse to ignore ethical concerns.
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  > War is always a good excuse to ignore ethical concerns. On Both sides
- ufo 7y ago
  I think it is important to point out that this point of view that "human rights" (with the quotation marks) are something that exists solely to favor "bad guys", at the expense of "upstanding citizens", is one one of the central points of alt-right rhetoric in Brazil right now.
the_jpg 7y ago
Everything that you said is right, my problem with this kind of policy is that they sell it as the solution, I think that is better to fight organized crime with intelligence instead of with raw force. The weapons and the drugs that finance the traffic do not come from the poor communities, the crime in rio is deep within the society killing the poor that is already marginalized it’s not a soluction. I agree with you on the other side, people with weapons should be treated as the threat that they are, but the public policy should not be just “kill theses guys and we are good”.

ramon 7y ago

Why is the Brazilian police officer wrong when he kills someone and why is any other officer in any other country right when he does the same? Mistakes happen it's part of this duty of being the police. It's a matter of solving the issues it's the most important thing. I was thinking about the other day since the police is so involved why not start investigating the police and what they own so you can understand where there are the bribes.

coldtea 7y ago
>Why is the Brazilian police officer wrong when he kills someone and why is any other officer in any other country right when he does the same? Who said that? They are wrong in many cases, whether the country. >Mistakes happen it's part of this duty of being the police. Killing urban poor indiscriminately whenever crime is suspected (or even widely overusing open fire even when crime is actually committed), are not mistakes, are policies. Fascist policies. Brazil is as bad as the Philippines in this regard (and US trigger-happy cops and SWATing overuse are bad too, yes).
- ramon 7y ago
  This is what I'm saying why is Brazil bad in this regard? How is any other place better? I think it's just people wanting to talk bad about something they don't know. Statistics is nothing if you are not living it, statistics can be hidden too, look at how many donators vs organ transplants in China.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >This is what I'm saying why is Brazil bad in this regard? How is any other place better? In the way that most other places have less butcher cops and less blood-thirsty supporters of them... And the more police-civilized places (e.g. most of Nordic and Western Europe, Japan, New Zealand, etc) have almost zero.
    - ramon 7y ago
      The problem is the police or the environment they act upon? Is it lack of training or it is the behaviour?

ufo 7y ago

I'm surprised that the article didn't mention the recent news story where the Brazilian army (currently also tasked with policing duty in Rio de Janeiro) fired 80(!!) rounds at a passing car, murdering a musician and and wounding his wife and children. A passerby who tried to help also ended up dying a few days later. The government was complicit and allowed the case to be tried in a military court so most likely nothing will come out of it.

throwawaymanbot 7y ago

Bolsonaro is giving consequence free reign to do this in all but legislation. Grotesque.