December 1, 2012
What’s Killing Brazil’s Police?
By GRAHAM DENYER WILLIS
SÃO PAULO, Brazil
ON the evening of Saturday, Nov. 3, Marta Umbelina da Silva, a military police officer here and a single mother of three, was shot in front of her 11-year-old daughter outside their house in Brasilândia, a poor community on the north side of the city. Records show that Ms. da Silva, 44, had never arrested anyone in her 15-year career. Instead, she was one of hundreds of low-level staffers, who mostly handled internal paperwork.
São Paulo, Latin America’s largest city, continues to descend into a violent blood feud between the police and an organized crime group, the First Command of the Capital, known by its Portuguese initials P.C.C. In 2012, 94 police officers have been killed in the city — twice as many as in all of 2011. Between July and September, on-duty police officers killed 119 people in the metropolitan area.
In the first three days of November, 31 people were murdered in the city. These statistics conceal a deeper story about Latin American cities, their police forces and the war on drugs.
In the first three days of November, 31 people were murdered in the city. These statistics conceal a deeper story about Latin American cities, their police forces and the war on drugs.
Ms. da Silva’s only mistake was that she lived in a poor community. And as a police officer, she was not alone. Almost all killings of São Paulo police officers in 2012 happened while they were off duty. The killings have been concentrated in poorer parts of the city, often occurring on officers’ doorsteps. The dead tended to be known in their communities and lived in neighborhoods controlled by organized crime, far from the protection afforded in wealthy parts of the city.
In cities like São Paulo, poorly paid police officers often live cheek by jowl with members of organized crime in sprawling urban peripheries that have been neglected by the government. They are often assigned to work in areas far from their homes. While on duty, they are well protected, but when off duty, they have virtually no security.
In the 1990s, criminal groups like the P.C.C. emerged from violent prisons and began competing for urban turf. Lax control of firearms, porous borders and a lucrative drug trade made the situation worse.
“We played soccer together growing up,” a police officer named Andre recently told me of local drug dealers, “but I managed to go down the right path.” Andre grew up in Jardim Ângela, a neighborhood in São Paulo that was once named the most dangerous on earth by the United Nations.
His childhood resembled that of many poor kids. He lived in a house built by his migrant grandparents and went to a public school. As a teenager, he evaded rival drug gangs as well as the roving extermination squads of off-duty police officers. Common in many Brazilian cities, these anti-crime squads range from local vigilantes to paramilitary groups known as militias.
Andre recently had to flee Jardim Ângela after gang members thought he had ratted them out. Now, in order to live in relative anonymity in another part of the city, he must moonlight working three or four other jobs.
Many current police officers were childhood friends and schoolmates of today’s organized crime members. Officers often have family members who are married to criminals and sometimes they still live next door or across the street from one another. Brazil’s police entry exams sort recruits by levels of education, and create barriers to career advancement and economic mobility. Without leaving work to study for several years there is no way to climb the professional ladder in Brazil’s police force.
WITH few ways out of poor communities, police officers find other ways to get by. Some leave their guns and badges at the station to avoid being identified as police. Others assume different identities in their neighborhoods — as history teachers, taxi drivers or private security guards — or fly under the radar of criminal groups by not socializing at all. And there are corrupt officers on the payroll of organized crime groups as well as those who choose to become vigilantes.
In June, before the current crisis, one police officer told me that coexisting with the P.C.C. had the deterrence dynamics of a cold war and the real-life consequences of mutually assured destruction.
Although they try, political leaders cannot avoid responsibility. The state’s governor, Geraldo Alckmin, has seen such violence before. Mr. Alckmin ruled the state before a series of P.C.C. attacks in 2006. And while he has raised police wages modestly in recent years, he has done little to alleviate the exposure of low-level officers.
There is a huge gulf between what policy makers think should happen and the consequences of their actions for police officers in poor areas. Indeed, vowing to beat gangs into submission, as Mr. Alckmin has promised, stokes the fires of retaliation. His recent claim that “Anyone that hasn’t resisted arrest is alive,” a phrase also used by a former governor to describe the 1992 massacre of 111 inmates at Carandiru prison, has inflamed the P.C.C., sent the body count soaring and returned São Paulo to an era of repressive policing. And the victims are often the closest and easiest targets — people like Ms. da Silva.
Police officers cannot live up to the public’s expectations when they are preoccupied with hiding their own identities. Approaches to public security need to reflect this reality. Increasing wages and removing career barriers would be helpful. Ultimately though, Brazil and other Latin American governments must find ways to make police officers more valued and respected in their own communities by presenting a more sympathetic image of the police force. One possible way is to have them deliver other respected community services as a second or third job.
Last week’s announcement that the São Paulo public security secretary and the region’s two police chiefs had been fired is promising. Openness to new ideas and a cold reckoning with the system’s shortcomings are desperately needed.
Indeed, without a new outlook, the violence may never truly subside.
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