'Trigger happy' police in Brazil kill an average six people a day

Police in Brazil killed more than 11,000 people between 2009 and 2012, an average of six killings a day, according to a study by researchers in Sao Paulo.

The Brazilian Forum on Public Safety, a non-governmental organisation, claims that 11,197 people were killed by police officers over the past five years, with 416 people killed in Rio de Janeiro state last year alone.

In comparison, law enforcement agents in the US were responsible for the deaths of 11,090 people over the past 30 years. In England and Wales, six people were shot and killed by police in the last five years, with no deaths by police shootings in the last two years.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"The empirical evidence shows that Brazilian police make abusive use of lethal force to respond to crime and violence," the report says.

The study noted that 50,806 people were killed in Brazil in all homicides last year, around one person every ten minutes. Nearly 70 per cent of the homicide victims were black and more than half were aged 15 to 29, it said.

Officers involved often report shootings as legitimate acts of self-defence, but human rights campaigners have claimed in the past that there is substantial credible evidence that victims in alleged shoot-outs with police were in fact executed.

"Rio's police are notoriously trigger-happy," said The Economist earlier this year. For example, it reported that in 2012 several drive-by shootings with multiple victims were thought to have been carried out by police as "indiscriminate revenge for killings of their own comrades".

In one case in March this year, a 38-year-old mother-of-four was struck by gunfire during a shoot-out between police and suspected criminals. She was bundled into the boot of a police car, apparently in a bid to get her to hospital, but the boot was not closed properly. She fell out and, as a piece of clothing had caught on the car, was dragged for several hundred metres down the road.