Killings by the police surge in Rio.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Shooting from helicopters, armored personnel carriers or at close range, police officers in Rio de Janeiro gunned down 558 people during the first four months of the year — the highest number in this period since the state began keeping records more than two decades ago.
This recent spike comes after years of policies that reduced police killings. But as the country dove into economic and political crisis in 2014, resources dried up. Criminal gangs reclaimed lost territory in Rio, and across Brazil violence exploded: More than 51,500 people were killed last year. Voters went to the polls in October and gave their support to candidates who promised to fight violence with violence by relaxing gun ownership rules and allowing the police to fire on armed suspects.
The number of people killed by the police in Rio de Janeiro jumped in 2018 to a high of 1,538, according to state statistics. If killings continue at the current pace — nearly five a day — that record will be beat.
The state’s new governor, Wilson Witzel, pointed to an overall drop in homicides to argue that the approach was working. President Jair Bolsonaro promised the police more leeway to kill suspected criminals, saying that a “good criminal was a dead criminal.”
Mr. Witzel, a former federal judge, said in January that there would be no shortage of places to send criminals. “We’ll dig graves,” he said.
In March, Mr. Witzel announced that snipers in the state were gunning down armed suspects who “have to be lethally neutralized.”
But some say officers are carrying out extrajudicial killings. “Summary executions are being carried out in favelas and other peripheral areas,” said Renata Souza, a state representative who urged the United Nations and the Organization of American States to investigate.
The state prosecutor’s office created a task force in 2015 to investigate allegations. Since then, the police have killed more than 4,000 people. The unit has charged 72 officers with homicide; of those, at least 19 have been acquitted and none are in prison. Paulo Roberto Cunha, a leader of the task force, said his team faced a crushing workload, deficient forensic investigations and witnesses who fear retaliation.
Rio de Janeiro has long been a complex state to police. Dozens of districts settled by squatters decades ago are controlled by drug traffickers and paramilitary groups. Soon after the first shots rang out in the Fallet-Fogueteiro district on February 8, it became clear that this was no ordinary shootout between rival gangs. As an elite police squad rumbled up a hill, suspected traffickers ran into a house. They took their shirts off — a gesture that they were surrendering, residents said. Among them was Felipe Guilherme Antunes, 21.
When the shooting stopped, nine men lay on the ground, and four others outside. Police officials at the time said they were acting in self-defense. But as relatives and human rights investigators pored over witness accounts, autopsy reports and photos of the bodies, many grew convinced the men had been executed.
“They didn’t come to take them into custody,” said Tatiana Antunes de Carvalho, the mother of Mr. Antunes. “They came to kill.”
Empowering the police to kill more easily has never reduced violence, said Roberto Sá, who oversaw security policy in the state from 2016 to 2018 and served in an elite police unit.
“Confrontation generates an unsafe environment, mental illness and stress for police officers and residents,” he said.