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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
The media coverage of Rio de Janeiro's violence is a bit inconsistent. For example, if you go by the numbers the capitals in northeastern Brazil are more violent than Rio but Rio still gets much more media coverage.
That said, The crime and violence situation is still pretty bad, specially if you compare to first world standards. In certain parts of the city, residents live at the mercy of drug trafickers or paramilitary groups of currupt police officers (milicias). Even in the relatively safe Zona Sul, where the well-off people live, most have been directly or indirectly affected by violence.
For example, here is a non-exhaustive list of personal anecdotes:
- My grandmother's sister was murdered back in the 90s, when her house was robbed.
- One time my parents were stuck in a traffic jam for hours, They later found that the source of the problem was a shootout between drug trafickers and the police, which blocked a major traffic artery of the city. People had to get out of their cars and lie down to avoid getting shot.
- A friend of mine works at the federal university. One they they came to work and there was a bullet hole in one of the walls.
>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.
Rio police are also globally considered fascist butchers... with frequent news stories of indiscriminately killing favela residents, kids, etc.
I agree. My post is more in the direction of "the violence practiced by the police is disproportionate to the real violence of the city".
Although I never suffered anything from the police either (maybe because I'm not black and didn't look poor when I was poor), I've seen a bunch of racist approaches from them in many situations.
Of course, it's based on my own experience (27 years living there) and statistics I find on the internet (which may not count the violence that happens deeper in the favelas).
> 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.
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.
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.
That was before the record number of killings, which leads the question, will increased brutality of the police force improve or worsen overall security?
This might not be a coincidence. Police shooting people without due process isn't an ethical system of justice, but it could be an effective way to decrease the homicide rate. In many places, the most powerful gang can only be matched or beaten by the government. And if the most powerful gang is too difficult to deter from murdering people by using due process, having cops kill them would probably reduce the overall homicide rate (even if you tally the police killings as homicides).
Police are supposed to be the most powerful gang, the one which is paid by your taxes to protect you from any criminal activity and eliminate any competition.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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”.
I agree with you. Trust me, in ordinary contexts I'd be the last person defending the PMERJ or the Military Intervention, it's all wrong and rotten and not a real public policy.
However on HN the discourse has the exact opposite bias. People have this idea of morality that's based on their conceptions and not directly on what's happening around them.
You imply that the police officers gain nothing from this state of affairs. In my own experience, a lot police officers grow up in the same hoods as the same criminals they pursue and the most corrupt ones use this to leverage relationships within gangs for money.
Just to give you an idea, an acquaintance of mine never knew his grandfather was in a federal prison, he was told it was a secure retirement home. The grandfather's crime was a dirty cop that had literal death squads killing people in cold blood for years and making money off dead dealers. He used the chaos in the streets to line his pockets with money and silence the people who tried to snitch on him.
As soon as you start unpacking why and how you got into an urban war, you'll approach the fussy philosophical questions raised by the human rights crowd.
In the movie Platoon they say: "The first casualty of war is innocence".
I can understand that. In despair, a lot of people in my Brazilian family think like you. But the problem is that this mentality opens a wide space for a whole different class of criminals. And that's what is going on in Rio : small business owners decided to bribe police officers in exchange of security. These corrupt policemen wiped away ordinary criminals but then they just replaced those, became organized crime by themselves, practicing drug traffic, extortion, monopolies in natural gas distribution and all sorts of illegal activities. In Rio they're called militias.
In the end, there's no alternative to the rule of the law. In the long run, a lynch mob mentality will only create bigger problems on the long run.
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.
>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).
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.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadUntil the evidence is presented and decided upon, people are not criminals.
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.
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.
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.
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-2019...
You: this article about a spike in extrajudicial killings after a far right mayor was elected is making it sound worse than it is
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.
Some people genuinely want to live in the Judge Dredd universe..
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).
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.
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.
Pretty much everybody prefers that over total gang land chaos. Don't forget that "living in Scandinavia" isn't the usual alternative.
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-ca...
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.
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).
This article seems to be not only old, but very far from the actual numbers.
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_unidades_federativas_...
That said, The crime and violence situation is still pretty bad, specially if you compare to first world standards. In certain parts of the city, residents live at the mercy of drug trafickers or paramilitary groups of currupt police officers (milicias). Even in the relatively safe Zona Sul, where the well-off people live, most have been directly or indirectly affected by violence.
For example, here is a non-exhaustive list of personal anecdotes:
- My grandmother's sister was murdered back in the 90s, when her house was robbed.
- One time my parents were stuck in a traffic jam for hours, They later found that the source of the problem was a shootout between drug trafickers and the police, which blocked a major traffic artery of the city. People had to get out of their cars and lie down to avoid getting shot.
- A friend of mine works at the federal university. One they they came to work and there was a bullet hole in one of the walls.
Rio police are also globally considered fascist butchers... with frequent news stories of indiscriminately killing favela residents, kids, etc.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/08/16/police-killings-are-out-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/14/brazil-13-dead...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/30/brazil-rio-pol...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/07/brazil-police...
https://www.humanium.org/en/children-victims-violence-brazil...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/world/americas/police-kil...
Although I never suffered anything from the police either (maybe because I'm not black and didn't look poor when I was poor), I've seen a bunch of racist approaches from them in many situations.
Of course, it's based on my own experience (27 years living there) and statistics I find on the internet (which may not count the violence that happens deeper in the favelas).
Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (2010) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1555149/
Conversely homicides in Brazil registered the sharpest decline in its history.
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.
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.
All of them were innocents? Why do some journalists insist to call criminals as victims, citizens, and etc?
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.
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...
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.
War is always a good excuse to ignore ethical concerns.
On Both sides
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”.
However on HN the discourse has the exact opposite bias. People have this idea of morality that's based on their conceptions and not directly on what's happening around them.
Just to give you an idea, an acquaintance of mine never knew his grandfather was in a federal prison, he was told it was a secure retirement home. The grandfather's crime was a dirty cop that had literal death squads killing people in cold blood for years and making money off dead dealers. He used the chaos in the streets to line his pockets with money and silence the people who tried to snitch on him.
As soon as you start unpacking why and how you got into an urban war, you'll approach the fussy philosophical questions raised by the human rights crowd.
I can understand that. In despair, a lot of people in my Brazilian family think like you. But the problem is that this mentality opens a wide space for a whole different class of criminals. And that's what is going on in Rio : small business owners decided to bribe police officers in exchange of security. These corrupt policemen wiped away ordinary criminals but then they just replaced those, became organized crime by themselves, practicing drug traffic, extortion, monopolies in natural gas distribution and all sorts of illegal activities. In Rio they're called militias.
In the end, there's no alternative to the rule of the law. In the long run, a lynch mob mentality will only create bigger problems on the long run.
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.
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).
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.
The government was complicit and allowed the case to be tried in a military court so most likely nothing will come out of it.