RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Some make newspaper pages and headlines, like João Pedro Mattos, 14, killed inside his home in São Gonçalo, in Baixada Fluminense, in May; Ágatha Félix, 8, killed in Complexo do Alemão, in the northern part of Rio de Janeiro in September last year; or Kauan Alves, 16, shot in the face last Christmas morning during an operation by the São Paulo State Police to repress a funk dance in the Jabaquara neighborhood, in the southern part of the capital.
Between 2017 and 2019, police killed at least 2,215 children and adolescents in Brazil. The number of deaths is growing. In 2017, they represented 5% of the total violent deaths among this age group; last year it was 16%.
The exclusive survey was conducted by the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety at the request of Folha newspaper and considered only the governments that had data on the victims’ ages in the three years analyzed: Alagoas, Ceará, Federal District, Maranhão, Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso, Pará, Paraná, Rio de Janeiro, Rondônia, Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Sergipe and São Paulo.
Children and adolescents were classified as being aged between 0 and 19, following the UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) and World Health Organization guidelines.
Most of these deaths are not reported, although they increase the statistics. This was the case of Matheus, 19. A single close-range shot killed the teenager who dreamed of becoming a soccer player and providing a home for his aunt, who raised him as his mother. But since the reality was unemployment, he worked as a motorcycle taxi driver a few meters from his home in Pavuna, northern Rio.
He was standing still, sitting on the motorcycle, when he was shot in the chest that afternoon in June 2019. According to witnesses, there was no operation or gunfire and the police officers even said “damn, we killed the motorcycle taxi driver!”
At the police station, the sergeant said that he accidentally killed him and wanted to pay his respects to the adolescent’s father, who declined, saying: “How will I shake your hand when you killed my son?” “We couldn’t afford the funeral. We had to ask for donations,” says the aunt.
According to the family, there was no investigation at the site and the police officer was not brought to trial and continues patrolling the area. “I’m only sure of one thing: he’s fancy free and footloose, as if nothing has happened,” she says.
“I have children, it frightens me. I used to believe in the police, I even have relatives in the police, but now I don’t trust them. When I see them on the street, I start to shake,” she says. Until then, her main concern was that her nephew would suffer a motorcycle accident. “I never thought he would be shot.”
The officer is from the 41st State Police Battalion in Rio. Responsible for Pavuna and other nearby neighborhoods like Irajá, Anchieta, Costa Barros and Acari, it is one of the battalions that kills the most in the state.
Homicide is the violent crime that most victimizes children and adolescents in the state of Rio de Janeiro, as well as nationwide. Police violence comes immediately after.
Rio de Janeiro ranks first in police lethality in this age group, despite half of records lacking age data. There were 700 victims between 2017 and the first half of this year.
Not even the pandemic was capable of stopping the violence. In 2020, Rio was the only state to publish data from January to June, a period in which, despite social isolation, 99 children and adolescents were killed by police -27% in the capital and 73% in other municipalities.
The state accounts for almost 40% of children and adolescents’ deaths from police intervention in the country and this percentage has more than doubled over the past two years.
São Paulo is second on the list. Last year, 120 children and adolescents were killed by the police – 53 in the capital and 67 in other municipalities. This number, unlike in Rio, has been dropping, but in 28% of records there is no data on the victim’s age.
The third in the ranking of absolute death numbers is Pará, with 102 victims – the state does not register age in 26% of cases. It is followed by Paraná, where 58 children and adolescents were killed by police in 2019, Ceará (39) and Minas Gerais (19).
The number is even higher, but it is difficult to assess by how much because data is poor. Until 2018, Brazil lacked a unified system for criminal records. In that year, SUSP (Single System of Public Safety) was created, but has not yet been implemented.
Some states do not disclose the victims’ age, while others poorly fill out and organize data, hindering an adequate diagnosis of the volume and circumstance of deaths and the profile of victims. In Pará, for instance, 98% of cases have no information on race/color. In Ceará, it is 77%.
Inaccuracies aside, it is suspected that 69% of victims of police lethality among children and adolescents in the country are black or mixed-race and that cases are focused on the 15-19 age group.
According to Sofia Reinach, researcher of the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, the states of Goiás and Bahia, for instance, failed to join the survey because they insist on submitting data by age group rather than the precise age, disregarding the body’s requests.
“Each state has its own way of registering at the police stations and compiling the data. There is no national system that combines this,” she says, who holds a master’s degree in Public Administration and Government from FGV (Getulio Vargas Foundation).
Only Forum’s Public Safety Brazilian Yearbook prepares this compilation, requesting the numbers from each state through the Access to Information Law. “But it receives 27 databases with different features,” says Reinach.
In the case of police violence, state disorganization is blended with political concern with the disclosure of figures.
Reinach writes in this year’s Yearbook: “They are not just numbers, they are people and their relatives who spend their lives dealing with these marks. Newspapers, which print faces when a case draws greater attention, could dedicate complete pages daily with victims’ photos. It is a routine that has been normalized in Brazil and extends far beyond some emblematic cases.”
According to her, police violence exposes the vulnerability of these children and adolescents, the poor and black majority. “The interruption of such a young life is worrying. What kind of childhood is this? That they can’t even play on the streets? State agents, who should protect them, kill them,” she says. “It is the portrait of a generation with no prospects.”