When George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020, the whole world started to talk. His murder sparked outrage, investigations and conversations about the structural racism still so present in many western societies. The killing also put a spotlight on the police and the way officers use and, so often, abuse their power.
Like the United States, Brazil faces a huge problem with police violence. In the last five years in the US, police have killed around 5,900 people. In Brazil, the numbers for the same period are nearly four times that. Even when taking into account that Brazil’s population is around 36 per cent smaller than that of the US, the death rate is almost six times higher. Not to mention, just like Floyd, most of the victims in Brazil are black. And yet they have never received a global reaction like the one in the US in 2020.
Julia Blunck, a freelance translator and writer who has covered Brazil for Prospect, says the high numbers mean the cases get lost. “In Brazil, events like these happen every day,” she tells me. “It’s so overwhelming, there isn’t enough time for the news to sit and breathe.”
I ask her about Brazil’s reaction to Floyd’s death. “For many Brazilians, what they thought was: ‘If this happened here, nobody would care… this only mattered because it happened abroad’.”
The military police—Polícia Militar, or PM—are the state police forces that currently maintain public order in Brazil. Since 1985, after the fall of the 21-year military dictatorship, their role has become increasingly blurred. Between 2014 and 2020, police brutality surged nationwide. For a long time this was viewed internationally as simply part of a wider human rights issue. But that doesn’t explain how one group in particular continues to be disproportionately affected. In 2021 alone, nearly 80 per cent of police murder victims were black, in a country where black people make up just over half the population.
Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, making it one of the last countries to do so. As a result, the legacy of racism still looms heavily over the country today, and particularly within the police. “The PM was created primarily to persecute slaves who escaped,” Delay de Acari, a 68-year-old human rights and black movement activist in the Acari favela in Rio de Janeiro, tells me. “There were many slave revolts in Brazil, and the military police was cruel in its persecution.”
He says the Black Lives Matter movement in the US helped mobilise black Brazilians to recognise their oppression as being a race struggle, too: “It influenced us. It brought the issue of racialisation to the movement.”
The case for change is a strong one, but Brazilian resentment towards the police could be hindering it. According to de Acari a lot of those who live in the favelas, or urban slum housing, don’t trust the current police. But they still want protection.
Blunck calls it a “revenge fantasy”. “It’s a resentment of the fact that they’re doing everything right,” she says, “but the police are punishing them rather than protecting them.” Many feel the police are not going after the real criminals. “There’s a deeper layer of Brazilian society who don’t want these things to change, they just want the police to hurt the people they want them to hurt.”
And it’s no wonder, when their own president openly defends the right of police to kill criminals. Last year, Jair Bolsonaro upheld that police officers who kill in the line of duty should be given legal protection, something he has been trying to pass through Congress since assuming office. “It’s not just a matter of changing structures and guns and armour. We need to demilitarise minds,” de Acari says.
The Sou da Paz Institute, a non-government organisation working to reduce crime and fear in Brazil, argues the country is in desperate need of police reform. Carolina Ricardo, its executive director, says change is possible but will be slow. Brazil is a federal republic, made up of 26 autonomous states, each governed by their own constitution and governor. Because of this, achieving nationwide change is difficult. At present the issue of addressing law enforcement seems to be happening one state at a time.
“We need to start by changing procedures,” Ricardo says, citing São Paulo as an example of a region where, historically, police brutality was particularly high. Over the last two years, new rules have been introduced that have increased the use of bodycams and tasers—“when they have these, [the PM] are more prepared to use less lethal force”—as well as implementing individual commissions to scrutinise each case where lethal force was used. Thanks to these measures, Ricardo says, “the brutality in São Paulo has begun to decrease, and it’s still decreasing. It’s a kind of incremental reform that I believe can work in Brazil as a whole.”
Later this month, Brazil will be gearing up for a tense second-round runoff in its presidential elections between the incumbent Bolsonaro and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. What could it mean for the future of police reform? Lula has already promised to “modernise law enforcement institutions” if he wins. But will that be enough? If it’s anything like Ricardo describes, it might not be such a monumental change as many are hoping for.
