Human rights group charges Brazil police with illegal killings

Sao Paulo - Police in the Brazilian cities of Sao Paulo and Rai de Janeiro regularly use excessive violence and resort to extra- judicial executions, a human rights group said in a report released Tuesday. "Police officers in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo routinely resort to lethal force, often committing extra-judicial executions and exacerbating violence in both states," the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a 122-page report.

Every year, police in the two cities kill more than 1,000 people in such conditions, the report said, adding that there are several cases of legitimate self-defense by police officers but there are also many cases of excessive use of force.

"Extra-judicial killing of criminal suspects is not the answer to violent crime," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, HRW's director for the Americas. "The residents of Rio and Sao Paulo need more effective policing, not more violence from the police."

These unlawful killings obliterate legitimate efforts to curb violence, largely by armed gangs. In Rio, these gangs are responsible for one of the highest homicide rates in the hemisphere, HRW said.

The report cited official government statistics, according to which police in Rio and Sao Paulo have killed more than 11,000 people since 2003.

The number of police killings in the state of Rio de Janeiro in a single year peaked at 1,330 in 2007. In 2008, the number of deaths was 1,137.

"The high number of police killings is all the more dramatic when viewed alongside the comparatively low numbers of non-fatal injuries of civilians by police and of police fatalities," HRW said.

The low number of non-fatal injuries appears to indicate that police seek to kill suspects rather than just disarm them.

"Police officers are permitted to use lethal force as a last resort to protect themselves or others," Vivanco said. "But the notion that these police killings are committed in self-defense, or justified by high crime rates, does not hold up under scrutiny."

HRW also claimed that police officers responsible for unlawful killings in the two cities are "rarely brought to justice," mostly because police investigators remain in charge of investigating these cases.