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UN: Rio's Cops No Better Than Criminals

September 16, 2008 3:57 PM

By SONIA GALLEGO, ABC News Digital Reporter, Brazil

It’s a murky deal being a cop in South America’s largest country. High rates of violence and corruption compounded by a thriving drug trafficking industry make for a challenging job.

A United Nations report released this week has concluded that police are largely responsible for a “significant proportion” of 48,000 murders carried out in Brazil.

High crime rates in Brazil are not headline news and indeed are consigned to being a distasteful smudge in Rio’s picture postcard image. This statistic failed to cause a significant outcry amongst the locals who seem to have accepted the high crime and violence as part of a distorted normality, a result of the dysfunctional criminal justice system and people’s disbelief in the law to take on the powerful criminal factions.

But these figures read as a shocking indictment of what lies below the surface of Brazil’s most famous city. According to the UN report, conflicts with police officers killed a record 1,260 civilians in the state of Rio de Janeiro alone. That figure may well be higher as a third of the precincts lacked computers or facilities to report murders.

On average, a police officer will earn $450 per month for shifts that stretch from twelve to twenty-four hours. Security officials have long agreed that this is not a sufficient salary for a job that puts these officers in the direct line of danger. Also it does little to dissuade officers from seeking alternative means to supplement their wages.

The report claims that corruption and infiltration into criminal gangs are not uncommon and the creation of a militia in Rio has worsened the situation. The author of the report, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston himself alleges that "A remarkable number of police lead double lives. While on duty, they fight the drug gangs, but on their days off, they work as foot soldiers of organized crime."

Police officers by day and paid mercenaries by night, they wander around shanty towns asking resident to pay-up for services such as protection, cable TV and minivan bus journeys. Police officers have been ever-mindful that the development of such militas poses a greater threat than the much-maligned drug-trafficking factions, such as the Comando Vermelho (the Red Command).

The report also notes that part of the problem lies in a criminal justice system which is seemingly impotent and rarely achieves convictions even in ordinary murder cases. The UN report states that in Sao Paulo state, only 10% of murder cases are tried in courts and only half of those result in convictions.

The police know full well about the on-going battle to preserve their image in the face of these reports. However, when ABC News contacted the Rio de Janeiro state security department for a response to the matter, the report was rubbished, and I was told that the Secretary of State for Security would not comment on it as the Mr Alston only paid one visit to Rio.

The increased pressure to do something about the drug trafficking factions and high crime rates have pushed police squads to carry out more incursions into shanty towns. This is seen most frequently during the high summer months in Brazil in December, January and February, when more tourists visit the country. This strategy has not yielded much success. As I have found during my own reporting in the region, for every drug trafficker that is killed there are  plenty more foot soldiers to replace him.

It was not all bad news in the report – there was praise for the professionalism of Brazil’s prosecution service. While the organs that hold Brazil’s police to account are said to be impotent, this report could be seen as an important turn to repair and rebuild these broken instruments. It’s a Leviathan task and one that will take many years and much political will but is not without hope.

September 16, 2008 in Sonia Gallego | Permalink | User Comments (1)

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Posted by: Marcelo | Sep 17, 2008 2:43:42 AM

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