MOTHERS find their children shot dead on the streets by cops and suspects are chucked off bridges instead of arrest.
This is the tormenting reality of life under a rogue police force and a trigger-happy chief in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Beatriz da Silva Rosa, a dinner lady, had her world shattered when her four-year-old son and husband were killed by police bullets in separate incidents months apart.
Ryan, her toddler, tried to escape when gunfire cracked through his street – but then Beatriz found him on the ground, purple, with a hole in his stomach in November.
Ryan’s dad, Leonel, was also shot dead in February last year by cops who ordered him to drop the two crutches he used and run away – before mowing him down, according to Deutsche Welle Brasil.
The only good bandit is a dead bandit.
Guilherme Muraro Derrite, Public Security Secretary
The alarming spike in killings at the hands of police has rocked Sao Paulo, with fears the state is slipping back into its old ways.
Many residents – including Camila Asano, director of Sao Paulo human rights group Conectas – blame the governor Tarcísio de Freitas, who took power in January 2023.
Since his arrival, cops have unleashed brazen violence on the streets – which were already riddled with social issues.
Camila told The Sun: “When de Freitas was elected, he began vocally defending a very violent police force. He disregarded measures to control police lethality, like the use of body cams.”
CAUGHT RED-HANDED
Another appalling incident – this time caught on camera – saw an off-duty cop fired 11 fatal rounds into the back of Gabriel Renan da Silva Soares as he tried to make off with some stolen soap.
Gabriel slipped on a piece of cardboard as he ran out of the OXXO store – and the cop decided that he should die.
CCTV footage of the cold-blooded murder was released to social media weeks later, leading to the policeman’s arrest.
The world watched again, open-mouthed, as a Sao Paulo cop casually tossed a man off a bridge in December.
Video emerged of Marcelo Amaral, 25, a delivery driver, being stopped on his motorbike and marched to the edge of a bridge.
For no obvious reason, the policeman scooped up Marcelo by his legs and chucked him over the edge into a shallow, polluted river.
Marcelo thankfully survived the plunge after treatment in hospital.
The military cop who lobbed him off, 29-year-old Luan Pereira, was removed from duty after the incident gained global attention.
Another appalling incident saw a 22-year-old medical student, Marco Aurélio Cardenas Acosta, blasted point-black in the chest by a policeman with a pistol.
Two cops had Marco after he apparently slapped the rear-view mirror of their car, and shot him after a short struggle.
Marco slumped in his hotel lobby and was rushed to hospital where he died hours later, on November 20.
ORDERS FROM THE TOP
Tarcísio de Freitas is the hard-line, populist ex-soldier elected as Sao Paulo’s governor in January 2023 – and widely touted as a presidential candidate for 2026.
His election campaign boiled with violent rhetoric, and he took a strong stance against the use of police body cams.
Camila said body cams reduced police killings by two thirds between 2019 and 2022, before de Freitas defunded them.
The human rights activist also points to one very dangerous appointment de Frietas made.
The attacks come precisely from those who should defend the people.
Father Julio Lancellotti
He promoted a man called Guilherme Derrite to the head of Public Security.
Camila said: “When Derrite was a police officer, he gave an interview – and you can watch it. He said that a good cop had to have at least three murders on his CV.”
Derrite has a fearsome reputation, and used to be part of ROTA – a military police battalion in the city infamous for its trail of death.
He was previously investigated for 16 deaths during ROTA operations he was involved in, according to the magazine Piauí.
And he also once bragged to a podcaster that he was booted out of the force for “killing too many bandits”.
Camila explained that the language spewed by the leaders would have been “understood as an order” by officers on the ground – even if they were not directly instructed to shoot on sight.
She said: “There’s a lot of interviews of police officers, who don’t want to be identified, saying: ‘Yes, we understood that as an order.’ It’s really about the leaders and the authorities that are in charge at the moment.”
BACKWARDS STEP
From 2019 to 2022, Sao Paulo seemed to have turned a corner as the number of people killed by police was slashed by two thirds.
So for Camila, who is committed to protecting Sao Paulo’s downtrodden, the regression to blood-bath streets is unbearable.
She said: “This is my state. I was finally seeing Sao Paulo deal with its lethal police force. To see all that work thrown into the garbage by the new governor is really desperate.”
And she doesn’t believe that the words of leaders promising to change are genuine – but rather driven by a need to protect their public image.
So far we have got just empty words and empty promises – because nothing changed.
Camila Asano, Connectas
On the arrest of the cop who threw Marcelo off the bridge, Camila said: “This case was very visible, and the governor and the secretary said: ‘There’s going to be an example of punishment and holding this officer accountable.’
“But we’re not talking about only the officer who did the throwing. That kind of action would have come down as an order. If you really want to solve this case, you have to go up the whole chain of command.
“There are so many other cases that don’t get visibility,” she said.
She also said that the killing is not random: “We are operating here in Brazil in a very racist context. For every three people that are killed, two of them are black.
“The people dying are black people in poor areas.”
Sao Paulo is important because the attitude there has the potential to spread nationwide, she said.
THE STATS
Between January and September 2024, police killed 496 people in São Paulo, according to data from the State Department of Public Security (SSP).
That’s 75 per cent up on the same period the previous year.
Some 130 of those victims died in the state’s capital, Sao Paulo city, and 109 in the Baixada Santista coastal area – staggeringly high for a population of just 1.7million.
For comparison, just one person was killed by police in London during that time.
The run of eye-catching violence late last year grabbed the world’s attention – but did not appear out of the blue.
It came in the wake of two of Sao Paulo’s most lethal ever police operations – dubbed Escudo [Shield] and Verão [Summer] – that killed 28 and 56 civilians respectively between July 2023 and March 2024.
Both of these were as “revenge” for ROTA cops being killed.
And there is no mystery surrounding why more people are dying.
Camila said: “Not only did de Frietas say in public that body cams were useless, but there was a 37% reduction in investment in them in 2023.”
These “useless” cameras – alongside other measures – had overseen a 63 per cent reduction in police killings between 2019 and 2022.
EMPTY PROMISES
The above cases were reported across the globe, and piled serious pressure on de Frietas to promise change.
Camila said: “After the cases of the medical student, the bridge and the little boy – he had to give a response to Sao Paulo’s society.
“It was really damaging his image, so he was forced to recognise some mistakes, but so far we have got just empty words and empty promises – because nothing changed.”
One step Camila and others want to see is the scrapping of a dud police regulator de Freitas set up.
The original regulator was doing too good a job of holding police abuses to account, so “de Frietas decided to set up another one”, Camila said.
She continued: “He created a parallel ombudsman for the police, linked directly to Derrite, without any kind of independence. This reassures police they will not be held accountable over abuses and illegal killings.
“But even after all the pressure, even after he recognised there were mistakes, he hasn’t revoked that yet.”
Camila also says that, if de Freitas was serious about changing Sao Paulo’s path, he would sack trigger-happy Derrite and commit to properly enforcing body cams.
But instead, de Frietas is reaffirmed his support for the brutal secretary, and is replacing all the body cams with new ones that do not run all the time.
FIGHT BACK
Organisations like Conectas are committed to shining a light onto the streets and chasing up on promise of change.
The group took the case for mandatory police body cams to the Supreme Court in December and won, meaning cops must wear one.
In December, over 80 NGOs signed a letter to the Organization of American States to sound the alarm about the growing brutality under de Freitas.
The church joined the chorus – and warned that police were adopting a motto that has lurked within Brazilian politics for years: “The only good bandit is a dead bandit.”
Father Julio Lancellotti said: “There’s an institutionalised kind of violence against the poor, against those who don’t have any protection.”
He added that the attacks “come precisely from those who should defend the people.
“It looks like that form of managing violence is planned, justified and deliberately implanted.”
Franciscan Father David Santos, an activist in Sao Paulo, told Catholic news site Crux: “Derrite and Tarcisio have been winning elections with the support of uninformed people.
“The inhumane solution is to kill the Blacks and the poor, who disturb the rich. That’s a strong cause of the rise in police lethality.”
