Homicide Figures Drop in Brazil, According to the Ministry of Justice

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In the first four months of 2019, Brazil recorded 3,528 fewer homicides than during the same period last year.

According to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, in the first four months of this year, 13,142 people were killed knowingly or with intent. This figure is 21.2 percent lower than the 16,670 cases recorded between January and April of last year.

This improvement was also evidenced in the indicators of nine other types of crimes monitored by the National Information System for Public Security, Prisons, Traceability of Weapons and Ammunition, Genetic Material, Digital, and Drugs (SINESP).

The database is provided by the states and the Federal District, in charge of releasing the police records.

According to the partial results released by the Ministry on August 13th, the highest percentage variation (-38.5 percent) was noted in the reduction of the number of robberies of financial institutions, which fell from 325 to 200 occurrences when compared to the first quarter of 2018 and the fourth quarter of 2019.

The total of armed robbery cases was 23.8 percent less than the total in the previous year. Homicide attempts fell by 8.6 percent, while vehicle theft fell by 27.5 percent.

The SINESP data also point to a 13.6 percent reduction in rapes and a 5.3 percent drop in the number of crimes of bodily injury followed by death.

Further, according to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, vehicle theft fell by 11.1 percent and cargo theft by 27.3 percent.

For the executive director of the NGO “Sou da Paz”, Ivan Contente Marques, the results corroborate a trend that has already been observed for some time.

“In fact, we have been witnessing a reduction in crime rates since last year. Other indicators such as the Atlas of Violence, IPEA and the Brazilian Forum of Public Security already pointed to this downward trend in the main violence indicators, but we know that there is still great difficulty in obtaining reliable data”, said Marques to Agência Brasil, stressing on the importance of the ministry in organizing the information provided by state governments, systematizing and disclosing it.

The director of “Sou da Paz” ascribes the reduction in violence figures to a variety of factors, including measures taken by states.

“We also attribute these recent results to a sum of factors. Criminality, particularly homicide, is a multifactorial issue. In other words, there are several motivations. Therefore, confronting it requires medium and long-term policies”.

“And, recently, some states have invested more heavily in the implementation of governance and public security programs, through direct investments in their police forces and in-state programs that have begun to yield effective results. There are further national coordination and greater interstate cooperation,” he concluded.