Victims of police violence and racism on the rise

The problem is structural: anti-black racism in Brazil cuts across different areas such as education, health, labour market, but has its most critical face in public security.

This is what the social scientist and coordinator of the network, Silvia Ramos, says, who finds the figures scandalous, reinforcing a worrying picture.

Some 4,025 people were killed by police officers in Brazil in 2023. According to disproportionate ethnic data, in 3,169 cases, 2,782 of the victims were black, representing 87.8%.

Published by the network of security observatories, the research contains factsheets from the bulletin Target Skin: Deaths Revealing a Pattern, which is in its fifth edition and was obtained through the Access to Information Act in nine states. In all of them, the pattern is of a very high proportion of black people killed by police intervention: Amazonas (92.6%), Bahia (94.6), Ceará (88.7%), Maranhão (80%), Pará (91.7%), Pernambuco (95.7%), Piauí (74.1), Rio de Janeiro (86.9%) and Sao Paulo (66.3%).

‘The profile of the police suspect is reinforced in the corporations. The officer learns that he must treat a young white man in a suit in the city differently from a young black man in shorts and trainers in a favela (a group of irregularly and precariously built low-income dwellings),’ says Silvia Ramos.

According to Ramos, 99.9 per cent of young black men in the favelas and peripheries are in shorts and slippers, and all come to be seen as dangerous and as potential targets for the police to kill if they need to.

Bahia is the federal unit with the most lethal police, with 1,702 deaths, in the state-by-state analysis. This was the second highest number recorded since 2019 among all territorial divisions monitored.

This was followed by Rio (871), Pará (530), Sao Paulo (510), Ceará (147), Pernambuco (117), Maranhão (62), Amazonas (59) and Piauí (27).

‘What we see in Bahia is an escalation. Since the network started monitoring the state, there has been a 161% increase in deaths. From 2019 to 2023, the following happened within the Bahia police: instead of curbing the use of lethal force, there was encouragement,’ said the social scientist.

He pointed out that if police officers kill a lot, receive congratulations from commanders and institutional incentives, the tendency is for this type of action to be increasingly encouraged.

The study also highlights that youth is the part of the population most victimised by the police, mainly in the 18-29 age group. The state of Ceará is an example of this, as this group represents 69.4% of the total number of deaths. Even more serious is the fact that, in all the territories analysed, 243 of the victims were children and adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17. PL