Rio Grapples With Violence Against Police Officers as World Cup Nears
By SIMON ROMERO and TAYLOR BARNES
At least 110 officers have been shot in Rio so far this year, an increase of nearly 40 percent from the same period last year.
Rio Violence Spikes Ahead of World Cup
In the months before the World Cup, violence
in Rio has spiked despite pacification tactics that have drawn criticism
from some who live in the favelas.
Credit Ana Carolina Fernandes for The New York Times; Video by Nadia Sussman
RIO
DE JANEIRO — Alda Rafael Castilho dreamed of being a psychologist, and
joined the police force to pay for her studies. Her dream ended at age
27 when gunmen stormed the outpost where she was on duty in Complexo do Alemão, a sprawling patchwork of slums. A bullet pierced her abdomen, and she bled to death.
“They
left her there to squirm on the ground like some sort of animal,” said
her mother, Maria Rosalina Rafael Castilho, 59, a maid who lives in the
gritty outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. “The politicians talk about the
pride of hosting the World Cup, but that is an insult,” she said. “They
can’t even protect their own police, much less the visitors to Rio.”
With the start of the global soccer tournament in Brazil less than two weeks away, a crime wave
is setting nerves on edge across Rio de Janeiro, which is expecting
nearly 900,000 visitors. A security overhaul was supposed to showcase a
safer Rio on the global stage, but muggings are surging, homicides are climbing, and there has been a spike in shootings of police officers.
At
least 110 officers have been shot in Rio so far this year, an increase
of nearly 40 percent from the same period last year, according to
figures compiled independently by the Brazilian journalist Roberta
Trindade with the help of police officers. Most of the episodes involved
on-duty officers, but in some cases, off-duty officers were shot in
assaults when they were identified as police.
In
one bloody 16-day stretch in May, Ms. Trindade recorded 14 shootings of
police officers, including two who were killed. Altogether, at least 30
on-duty and off-duty police officers have been shot dead this year, she
said, including Ms. Castilho, the aspiring psychologist.
The
security forces have been trying to reclaim territory in the city from
the control of heavily armed drug gangs, and until recently, the
deployment of special teams called Pacifying Police Units in dozens of
favelas was viewed as a major achievement. But the officers have come
under increasing attack in these “pacified” favelas, and the security
gains are eroding.
Effectively
acknowledging that Rio’s stretched police force cannot guarantee
security for the World Cup, state officials have turned to the national
government for help, asking for 5,300 troops from the armed forces to
help patrol city streets, the way troops did for the United Nations
Conference on Sustainable Development in 2012.
Officials
contend that Rio is still safer than it used to be, despite the
setbacks and the request for troops, and they point out that other Latin
American cities like Caracas, Venezuela, or Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and
even some Brazilian cities like Salvador, have higher homicide rates. In
Rio, the rate was 20.5 per 100,000 residents last year, well below the
rate of 37.8 per 100,000 recorded in 2007 before the security push into
the favelas. During that time, the number of police officers in the city
and the surrounding state rose to 47,710 from 37,950.
Guanabara
Bay
3 Miles
BRAZIL
Rio de
Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro
Olympic Village site
Copacabana
Rocinha
Ipanema
Atlantic Ocean
Barra da Tijuca
“We’re
still distant from the earlier levels of criminality,” said Roberto Sá,
a senior security official of the state government. “There are areas
where an actual war had to be waged just for the police to enter. Now
the police can do so without so many personnel because drug traffickers
are losing their territorial bases.”
Contending
that the new crime wave is an anomaly, Mr. Sá pointed to the state’s
measure of armed attacks on the police, which is limited to officers
killed on duty: seven so far this year. While that figure was
regrettable, he said, the killings often get little notice in the
Brazilian news media, while in many other countries, “the people who die
become heroes.”
“I
know it is undesirable, but we live in this kind of culture in Latin
America, one of violence and criminality,” he said. “We have to
understand that this is the reality.”
The
challenge facing the police here was thrown into sharp relief in
February when the commander of Rio’s “pacification” police forces, Col.
Frederico Caldas, was caught in a gun battle
in Rocinha, one of Rio’s largest slums. He dove to the ground to avoid a
spray of bullets, and wound up having to undergo surgery to remove
fragments of rock and plastic from one of his eyes.
Homicides
rose 17 percent last year in Rio de Janeiro State, the first increase
since 2010. The state recorded 4,761 homicides, with 1,323 of them in
the city; by contrast, New York City, with a larger population than Rio,
recorded 333 homicides in the same period.
A surge in street crime is also jolting residents. Street robberies and vehicle thefts increased sharply this year
to levels higher than when the favela pacification program began in
2008, according to official figures. There were 20,252 reported muggings
of pedestrians in the first quarter this year, up 46.5 percent from a
year earlier.
On
Rio’s streets, on television and across social media in Brazil, the
crime wave is playing out in ways that are at once surreal and horrific.
A crew from the television network Globo recently interviewed a woman near Rio’s old center on the subject of crime, and in the middle of the interview, an assailant tried to rip a necklace from her neck.
In
another episode that tested some residents’ faith in the Rio police, a
driver recorded video footage on his smartphone showing the body of a
woman hanging out of a police vehicle and being dragged along the pavement through traffic.
The
police officers in the vehicle claimed they were taking the woman, a
38-year-old favela resident from the northern part of the city, to a
hospital after she suffered gunshot wounds. They said they had not
noticed that her body was dangling from the rear of their vehicle.
However, an investigation concluded that the woman had been shot and killed by two of the officers, though not intentionally.
“The
legitimacy of the police is at a disturbingly low point,” said Luiz
Eduardo Soares, a former top security official in Rio. “The pacification
process simply shifted crime to other parts of Rio’s metropolitan area.
Now we’re seeing the police coming under attack even in the favelas,
which they are calling pacified.”
Security
experts attribute some of the animosity toward the police to the
resilience of drug gangs like Comando Vermelho, which originated in a
Rio prison in the 1970s, and the growth of smaller criminal groups like
Terceiro Comando Puro, formed after a split from Comando Vermelho in the
1980s.
Police
officers say their jobs are made harder by inadequate training and low
pay. But at the same time, the persistence of brutal police tactics,
involving the abduction and torture of some residents, contributes to
the anger against the police in some communities.
In
Rocinha, the hillside favela overlooking some of Rio’s most exclusive
residential districts, the disappearance last year of Amarildo de Souza,
a 42-year-old construction worker, set off street protests.
Investigators found that he was given electric shocks and asphyxiated with a plastic bag after police officers detained him in during a sweep of drug-trafficking suspects.
To
the further outrage of many here, investigators said Maj. Edson Santos,
the police commander in Rocinha at the time, bribed two witnesses in
the case to say that drug traffickers were to blame for what happened to
Mr. de Souza.
“This
honeymoon within a large part of Rio’s population and the media was
deeply shaken,” said Julita Lemgruber, a former director of Rio’s
penitentiary system, referring to the hopes raised by security gains in
recent years. “The case of Amarildo was a turning point.”
Catherine Osborn and Nadia Sussman contributed reporting.COPY http://www.nytimes.com/
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