RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Twelve children were shot dead in 2020 in Rio de Janeiro State alone. This figure was reached last Friday, December 4h, with the double murder of Rebeca Beatriz Rodrigues dos Santos, 7, and Emilly Victoria Silva dos Santos, 4.
They were cousins and were playing at their doorstep in Barro Vermelho, a community in Duque de Caxias, a city in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro. All these children are black, live in suburbs and are victims of a public safety policy that directs police officers, particularly the Rio State Police, to engage in direct confrontation in poor and densely populated areas.
“It is a sequence of deaths, of a destruction that you can only describe as a genocidal project, a policy of death,” argues educator Monica Cunha, coordinator of the Human Rights Committee of the Rio de Janeiro Assembly (ALERJ), and mother of an adolescent named Rafael, who was murdered 14 years ago by security agents, she says.
Emilly was shot in the head and Rebeca in the thorax. Shots that once again pointed suspicions to the State Police, singled out by the girls’ grandmother and relatives as the perpetrators of the shots. The force said the officers were in the vicinity when they were attacked by criminals, but that they had not fired the shots. It then conceded to having opened an internal proceeding to investigate the case together with Rio’s Civil Police.
As in all cases where children and adolescents are fatal victims of gunshots, a whole safety policy and a cycle of impunity in police operations has been brought to the spotlight.
Studies and reports show that over 90% of resisting arrest reports -as deaths committed by state officers during an operation are known- are either shelved or never investigated. Of the 12 cases of children shot dead this year in Rio, only one investigation was completed -and this was possible because the perpetrator was arrested in the act.
Need for pressure
However, there are cases that spark unrest in society and become symbols of racist police violence and a failed safety policy, experts and human rights activists say. Such is the case of João Pedro Mattos Pinto, 14, murdered during a joint operation by the Civil and Federal Police in the Complexo do Salgueiro, São Gonçalo, Rio de Janeiro, on May 18th.
Or of eight-year-old Ágatha Félix, murdered in September last year with a rifle shot to the back during an operation by the Rio State Police (PM) in the Complexo do Alemão. “For a case to proceed, much pressure is needed. And the more we press, not allowing the media and public agencies to forget about the case, the faster it will be handled,” explains Cunha.
A pressure that Bruna da Silva, mother of Marcos Vinicius, a 14-year-old murdered during a police operation in Complexo da Maré on June 20th, 2018, never failed to exert. Whenever she talks about her son, she takes with her the bloodied school T-shirt he was wearing when he was shot.
Suspicions fall on the CORE (Special Resources Coordinator) officers, a special ops group of Rio’s Civil Police, who were conducting a raid at the time. “For us it is sad, we see these children being killed at the hands of those who should protect them. Those who kill these children are the ones who should shelter them,” laments Silva.
She says that in September she visited the Prosecutor’s Office and that the inquiry is proceeding towards the filing of a complaint. However, she points out that next year it will be three years since her son, who “was in a hurry to grow up and be a provider for the family,” was murdered. “There will be no peace for this mother until someone is held accountable. Someone must be held accountable. I want to see the CORE in the dock,” she says.
At the time, the Civil Police listed Marcos Vinícius and six other people killed in the operation as suspects. It also reported having seized guns, rifles and illicit substances.
An internal report that became public showed that the police force had considered the operation a success. However, since then, the capital’s Homicide Division has been investigating the death of Marcos Vinícius, together with the Prosecutor’s Office.
Sluggish by nature
Monica Cunha is the coordinator of the Human Rights Committee that receives the relatives of victims of police operations and directs them to both the Public Defender’s Office and the OAB (Brazilian Bar Association) Human Rights Committee.
These are the first steps for cases to be taken to court. According to public defender Fábio Amado, coordinator of the Human Rights Center of the Rio de Janeiro Defender’s Office, the body is working on over 400 cases involving victims of institutional violence – that is, when a police officer or any other public servant is involved in the death.
Amado points out that there are three possible areas of accountability: administrative, in which a police officer can be held accountable by disciplinary and institutional means, and can be expelled from the force; civil, in which the State is held accountable for the occurrence and, consequently, a guarantee of compensation, lifelong pension, psychological assistance, and reimbursement of funeral expenses, among other rights; and criminal, with greater visibility, in which an officer can be tried by a jury for murder and be sentenced to imprisonment.
“It is worth noting that the security agent’s chain of command or hierarchical superior has never been held accountable. Criminal accountability is restricted to the tip, to the officer who performed the action. But the safety policy is completely flawed and is deeply inefficient, leading to a high lethality rate of people and the death of many police officers,” argues the defender.
In Rio de Janeiro, the body responsible for investigating and lodging complaints in cases involving police officers is the Specialized Public Safety Action Group (GAESP), of the Rio Prosecutor’s Office. This branch is considered an achievement by the families of state victims and its performance is deemed positive.
According to Amado, an accountability of the chain of command and higher authorities – which could also occur from administrative improbity proceedings – should start specifically from a complaint by the Prosecutor’s Office – something that until now has never occurred, according to him.
“It is astonishing that we have over 1,800 deaths committed by security agents last year. It is almost five deaths per day [and more than 1/3 of the total violent deaths committed in the state]. It’s unacceptable, it’s shocking, and society itself becomes numbed by so many deaths,” he adds.
He also points out that an inquiry investigating a homicide is slow by nature. The justice system is slow, the Civil Police’s investigative means are precarious, and those under investigation have resources, among other factors.
An investigation that lasts two and a half years can be considered “fast,” he says. As an example, he mentions the Costa Barros massacre, which occurred on November 28th, 2015. Five young men inside a car were murdered with over a hundred shots by State Police officers, who were arrested the following year. The trials took place in 2019 and in September this year and the officers were ultimately convicted. An appeal is pending.
The Federal Supreme Court (STF) restricted operations in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas during the Coronavirus pandemic, which caused police lethality numbers, as well as other criminal indicators, to plummet in June, July and August. The indexes climbed again in September and mainly October.
“We are in a pandemic year and yet killings have not stopped. And this Supreme Court restriction is not being respected. Rebeca and Emilly were killed in a state with an STF ruling banning this type of operation,” laments Cunha, for whom the successive deaths of children and adolescents in the peripheries denounce racism in the country.
“Brazil has always been racist, but today, with all these leaders in power, they do all this with no problem at all. We keep demanding, but they are able to overwhelm our resistance. We have reached the point of racism in the first degree.”
Source: El Pais