Police killings
Brazil
At least 2,212 people were killed by the police in Brazil in 2013, according to the Brazilian Public Security Forum, an independent research group, and experts say the actual number is probably substantially higher because some states do not report killings by their police forces. - In the United States, which has well over 100 million more people than Brazil, the F.B.I. counted far fewer killings by the police: 461 in 2013, the latest year for which data is available. Other estimates put the yearly toll in the United States as high as 1,100, yet that is not quite even half as many police killings as in Brazil. - But while deaths at the hands of the police have set off fevered protests around the United States, igniting cities like Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., they are often accepted grimly in Brazil as a normal fixture of policing in a country fed up with violent crime. - “Of course, the sense of outrage would be different if these victims were boys with blond hair and blue eyes who lived in rich areas, but they were not,” said Antônio Carlos Costa, a Presbyterian pastor who helps track cases of children under 14 who were killed by the police. “The children, adolescents and adults killed by the police in Brazil are victims of a massacre in which the casualty figures are higher than in some war zones.” - Responding to widespread fears in a crime-weary country with more homicides than any other — 50,108 in 2012, according to the United Nations — conservative politicians with law enforcement backgrounds and tough talk on crime collected huge vote counts in recent state and federal elections, bolstering what is often called Brazil’s “bullet caucus” in Congress. - Some bullet caucus members openly celebrate the number of people they killed while patrolling the streets. One rising political star, Paulo Telhada, boasted of killing more than 30 people as a police officer in São Paulo, saying in a recent interview he felt “no pity for thugs.” - “There are parts of the middle class that accept killings by the police as a legitimate practice,” said Ivan C. Marques, director of Instituto Sou da Paz, a group that tracks police issues. - In the state of Rio alone, the police killed at least 563 people in 2014, a 35 percent increase from the year before, according to the state’s Institute of Public Security.That is significantly more than the F.B.I. recorded for the entire United States, which has a population about 20 times as large as that of Rio State. - “Sometimes it takes the killing of a 10-year-old boy to jolt people into grasping the fact that this tragedy is unfolding on an epic scale,” said Ignacio Cano, a researcher on police issues. “Sadly, only when the victim is scandalously innocent does it touch a nerve.”
USA
- Years of life lost to police violence, USA (The Atlantic 2018)
- Sheriff David Clarke: There is no police brutality in the U.S. anymore - nor racism
- The Killing of 22 yr old Stephon Clark March 2017 in his own back yard, Sacramento, Ca.
- The Killing of 22 yr old Stephon Clark ...
- The Killing of Stephon Clark; analysis