April 9, 1997
Police Brutality in Brazil Is Captured on Video
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- A week after police officers were shown kicking and shooting people stopped at a checkpoint in Sao Paulo, a second secretly made video of policemen battering residents in a poor neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro has outraged Brazilians and led to an unusual response: the arrest of the officers involved.
The second video, made in a neighborhood called City of God, filmed six policemen who forced 11 residents, including two teen-age girls, to face a wall, while the police rained blows, kicks, and slaps on them for an hour. One of the residents, whacked on the side of his head by a nightstick, suffered a broken eardrum. At the end of the beatings, no one was arrested.
That video appeared on national television on Monday night, shortly before an international report was released describing a pattern of police violence, and a system of rewarding police officers who, in many instances, had killed civilians. Brazilians, with a court system that enjoys little credibility, generally appear to allow their police officers wide latitude in battling crime. But the amateur videos, which showed policemen laughing, drinking beer, and snacking while they beat citizens who were never charged, appears to have breached a tacitly accepted limit.
The City of God video also suggested that the violence was not an aberration in the area. During the beatings, folk music from a nearby bar could be heard over the blows and screams of victims, and people walked by without comment.
In addition, a report released by Human Rights Watch/Americas on Tuesday, which examined police violence in several Brazilian cities, confirmed a pattern of casual, unrestrained violence among uniformed military police officers. In the state of Sao Paulo, it noted, a third of all homicides in 1992 were committed by the police, who killed 1,470 people.
The report attributed the practices to a general failure to investigate and punish abuse on the part of the police, including blatant executions in which bullets were fired at close range at suspects in cases in which police officers reported the suspects' fleeing or firing back.
In the state of Rio de Janeiro, a program to improve police "productivity" regularly promotes officers who have "eliminated dangerous outlaws" by killing suspects, rather than detaining them, the report said. It noted that 23 officers honored for bravery here last March had killed 16 suspects among them.
Gen. Nilton Cerqueira, the state security chief in Rio de Janeiro, declined to address the Human Rights Watch report. Instead, he attacked the organization, and called the director of its Rio office, James Cavallaro, a "space alien."
After the video appeared, the governor of Rio de Janeiro state, Marcelo Alencar, ordered the immediate arrest of the five police officers and the lieutenant involved in the beatings and torture in the City of God. Calling the incident an aberration, Alencar said he would not alter the training or other practices of the police as a result of the video.
In the Sao Paulo case, the 10 police officers shown shooting two people stopped at a routine checkpoint -- one of whom died -- have also been arrested. Two policemen face 102-year sentences if they are convicted of the murder of a 20-year-old shot sitting in his car, Mario Jose Josino, and the attempted murder of his companion.
Jorge Cordeiro, whose son was killed by the police in Rio last year, suggested that residents should film the actions of police regularly. "The video camera would end the impunity the police enjoy," Cordeiro told a Rio newspaper.