Rio’s Mayor Eduardo Paes calls on police to investigate more and kill less

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Paes, called on Wednesday, June 9, for the police to “investigate more and kill less” as he lamented the death of a pregnant woman during an operation, which adds to other cases that reflect the seriousness of police violence in the city.

In statements he made to journalists, Paes defended adopting a new public security policy in Rio de Janeiro that would allow “more arrests, more convictions, more investigation, and less killing”.

According to official data, in the first three months of this year, 453 civilian deaths in police operations in Rio de Janeiro were recorded, 18% higher than in the first quarter of 2020.

Last year the number of victims of police violence in Rio de Janeiro was 1,245.

Paes defended changes in the public security policy, which is a responsibility of the state government and not of the municipal or federal government, while lamenting the death of Kathleen Romeu, a 24-year-old woman four months pregnant, hit by a stray bullet during a police operation registered on Tuesday in a favela of the Lins Complex, in the northern zone of the city.

“What we cannot allow is that people begin to believe that these tragedies are natural: that a bullet can hit a young pregnant woman if she goes for a walk in the street. We cannot lose our capacity for indignation in the face of these facts. We are talking about people and not numbers,” he said.

The mayor affirmed that public safety is the main challenge for tourism in Rio de Janeiro, long Brazil’s tourist mecca and one of the cities that most generates tourist interest in Latin America because of its natural beauty and famous Carnaval.

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“I think what most reduces the number of tourists we receive is violence. Although this is not the main problem for the people who do visit us, they end up seeing scenes of armed people on television,” he explained.

This May, in an operation harshly questioned by the UN and international human rights organizations, 27 civilians were killed, as was one policeman, in an exchange of gunfire between uniformed officers and members of a criminal gang in the Jacarezinho favela in Rio de Janeiro.

The action was considered the “biggest massacre” in Rio’s history and once again raised the alarm about the abuses of uniformed officers in the city, since most of the civilians killed were young, black, and favela residents, of which the authorities had warrants to arrest three.

Irregularities reported by witnesses to the events, who claim that several of the dead were executed inside their homes and that some of them were not even armed, have put the facts under the scrutiny of the competent authorities; however, the police have decreed total secrecy of their records for five years.