In Brazil, Old Police Tactics Lead to Same Results 

Killings by police rose sharply in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, in the first two months of 2024, as authorities continue to rely on repressive tactics to try to curb crime, a strategy that has yet to produce any long-term results. 

Statistics obtained by GloboNews and g1 from the District Attorney’s Office (Ministério Público Estadual) show a 94% rise in deaths at the hands of the police, from 69 in the first two months of 2023 to 134 in the first two months of 2024. State authorities say the police are acting in self-defense.

To be sure, many of these deaths occurred during a security operation that began on January 26 in response to the killings of two members of a military police special unit (Rondas Ostensivas Tobias de Aguiar – ROTA) in Baixada Santista, a coastal area of São Paulo state that provides a staging area for criminal groups to ship cocaine through Brazil’s busiest port, Santos. 

The operation is an extension of Operation Shield, which occurred between July and September 2023, after another ROTA officer was shot while on patrol in the area. During Operation Shield, police reportedly killed 28 civilians, according to a Human Rights Watch report. 

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The current phase, dubbed Operation Summer, continues to target perpetrators of attacks on police officers, according to the São Paulo Secretariat of Public Security. And police violence has increased: To date, São Paulo police have killed 43 people in under Operation Summer, according to g1.

The government claims the operations are aimed at controlling gangs that operate in Baixada Santista. Police have also reinforced their presence and intensified patrols in the area. 

However, governmental and civil society groups have noted frequent discrepancies between police incident reports and witness testimonies during Operation Summer, intensifying allegations of police misconduct.  An investigative report by the São Paulo Police Ombudsman (Ouvideria de Polícia de São Paulo), for example, accused police of five extrajudicial executions since January, as well as torture and home invasions. Ombudsman Cláudio Silva has described the operation as displaying “tones of revenge.” 

Furthermore, police have been accused of taking the bodies of victims of police shootings to the hospital to avoid proper forensic examination at the scene. A team of forensic experts employed by Human Rights Watch reported similar patterns of investigative neglect during Operation Shield.

InSight Crime Analysis

Repeated militarized operations have not decreased organized crime in Brazil.

Indeed, similar missions in response to murdered police go back decades, but have yet to slow the evolution of criminal groups in the country. Bruno Paes Manso, an expert on Brazilian organized crime at the University of São Paulo’s Center for the Study of Violence (Núcleo de Estudos da Violência – NEV) and author of several books on criminal organizations in Brazil, told InSight Crime that the practice began after the death of a policeman in Rio de Janeiro in 1964. 

“The police promised to kill ten criminals for every officer killed,” Paes Manso said.

But the elevated number of killings under Operation Summer appear to have taken the police force’s tradition to new levels. And the continued support for the operation from São Paulo’s governor, Tarcísio de Freitas, and secretary of public security, Guilherme Derrite, seems to indicate official support for the practice.

“It’s a logic of confrontation, of open violence due to a political choice also made by the current governor,” Camila Nunes Dias, a sociologist specializing in organized crime at Brazil’s Federal University of ABC, told InSight Crime. 

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Far from making police safer, studies indicate that these operations are likely to increase the number of police killed. When governments rely solely on militarized anti-crime tactics, organized crime groups have little incentive to negotiate and see violence as an increasingly viable tool. 

An anti-drug trafficking policy that results in more deaths is counterproductive, according to Paes Manso. 

“You need to act economically to reduce the economic power of these groups with intelligence work and reduce the homicides caused by the problems that drug trafficking causes in Brazil. And the police are doing the opposite,” he said. “They’re betting on a war. They’re just creating disorder and confusion in these territories.”  
Baixada Santista, meanwhile, remains a strategic territory for organized criminal groups like the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital –  PCC) because of its proximity to the Port of Santos, one of the primary exit points for cocaine heading to Europe.

Featured image: Protest against civilian deaths under Operation Shield, in Baixada Santista. Credit: Allison Sales / AFP