100th police officer killed in Rio state in 2017
RIO DE JANEIRO — The number of police officers killed so far this year in Brazil’s crime-riddled state of Rio de Janeiro reached 100 on Saturday, local media reported.
Sergeant Fabio Jose Cavalcante, 39, was shot and killed during an attempted armed robbery in Sao Joao de Meriti, in the metropolitan area of the capital Rio de Janeiro, according to online daily Extra.
His death brings the homicide rate among both working and off-duty state police officers to one every 57 hours, the highest rate since 2016, when an officer was killed every 53 hours.
Rising crime led the federal government to dispatch some 10,200 military troops and police officers to help cap violence in the state. They were mainly deployed to Rio and its metropolitan area, the country’s leading tourism destination.
The state government announced this week it would restructure its Pacifying Police Units, special forces employed since 2008 to combat organized crime within the slums.
Some 843 Rio districts are under the control of organized criminal rings.
A year after the world applauded Rio’s successful staging of the Summer Games, Brazil’s second biggest city is in deep financial difficulty and the demoralized police are struggling to contain well-armed drug gangs based in the favelas.
President Michel Temer’s decision in July to deploy thousands of soldiers to Rio acknowledged that state police have lost the ability to cope with the often bloody struggle against the drug traffickers.
Brazil as a whole is one of the most deadly countries in the world.
Estadao newspaper recently reported that this year’s sixmonth homicide tally has reached just over 28,000. That is equivalent to 155 killings a day or six an hour around the country of 208 million people.
The toll is almost 7 percent higher than last year and indicates that Brazil may again break the ceiling of 60,000 homicides a year in 2017.
By contrast, the United States, with a population of nearly 326 million, had 15,696 murders in 2015, according to the FBI.