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.”
USA