High levels of violence in Brazil’s urban centres, exacerbated by a lack of long-term security policy making, continues to put both citizens and security forces at risk. This report, published by Amnesty International (AI), updates its campaign to focus attention on and generate action to improve Brazil’s response to widespread corruption, organised crime and street violence. Brazil’s federal and state authorities must put forward detailed, long-term plans to stop urban bloodshed and reverse the country’s slide into further lawlessness.
In a 2005 report, AI expressed concerns about high levels of violence in Brazil’s largest cities. Six months later, the city of São Paulo suffered a wave of violence resulting in hundreds of deaths, attacks on police, bus torching and revolts and hostage-takings in many state prisons. More recently, a night of gang violence left 19 people dead in Rio de Janeiro.
Since emerging from dictatorship in 1985, Brazil has attempted some security reforms, including limited oversight mechanisms, community-based policing pilot projects and public involvement in policing decisions. However, over the years, public security policy has continually been chopped and changed; there is little or no coordination across the criminal justice system.
Weaknesses in Brazil’s public security sector approach include deep-seated and pervasive corruption that has allowed organised crime to set down roots and undermine society’s trust in the justice system and police. Other weaknesses include:
- the lack of a coherent, long-term public security policy that focuses on the root causes of violence and social exclusion across Brazil’s state system;
- reactive, ad hoc public security policies in many states, including responding to criminal violence with repressive law and order approaches;
- poorly trained and resourced police forces with little intelligence-gathering capacity, making them inefficient and vulnerable to attack;
- entrenched criminal gangs that create neighbourhood fiefdoms and attack both civilians and police; para-policing militia fill the security vacuum left by inadequate policing. In response, police have increasingly militarised their approaches and treat civilians in a heavy-handed, often violent manner;
- poorer communities comprised of lawless zones that suffer disproportionately from both criminal and police violence.
- the prisons systems are on the verge of collapse. They are overcrowded, under-funded and ill-equipped and suffer from woeful training of guards and staff. Torturing of inmates, corruption and organised crime have become the norm in many prison systems.
AI calls on all levels of Brazil’s government to adopt a National Action Plan aimed at breaking the links between violence and social exclusion and reducing levels of criminal and police violence. This plan, inter alia, should:
- introduce human rights-based police codes of ethics and procedures and improve data collection and analysis of patterns of violence;
- train police in the legitimate use of force and alternatives to firearms’ use. Create external investigation mechanisms to respond to citizen complaints involving police;
- increase prison resources/staffing, improve facilities and train guards; categorise prisoners according to severity of crimes and end division of prisoners by gang membership; review the use of extreme forms of solitary confinement immediately.
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Author: www.amnesty.org
Source: Amnesty International, 2007, âBrazil: From Burning Buses to Caveirõesâ: the Search for Human Securityâ, Amnesty International, London
Size: 30 pages (1.2 MB)
