Race in Another America by Telles Edward E

Author:Telles, Edward E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

POLICE ABUSE AND RACE

Finally, the historically powerful Brazilian justice system continues to wield its influence in discriminatory ways. Despite democratization, police violence increased in the 1990s. While official respect for political rights has expanded, torture continues to be widely employed in Brazil as a method of investigation, particularly in the extraction of confessions.45 In the State of São Paulo, where the best statistics on police actions are collected, the state’s military police have killed hundreds of civilians each year since they began keeping records in 1981, as Caldeira (2000) describes. In one year, 1992, police killed 1,470 civilians.46 Comparatively, New York City police kill about 20 civilians each year. In 1987, the most brutal year of the apartheid regime, police in all of South Africa killed 172 people.

Piovesan and her colleagues (2001) estimate that roughly 50 percent of all police killings can be classified as summary, arbitrary, or extrajudicial executions. The ratio of killed to wounded civilians, also known as the lethality index by criminologists, has been on the order of two or three to one in Brazil, which suggests large numbers of summary executions. Also, an investigation by the São Paulo State Ombudsman in 1999 found that 52.6 percent of police killings involved shots in the back, 23 percent of the victims received five or more bullet wounds, and 36 percent suffered shots to the head. The victims of these police killings are disproportionately black or brown. The National Movement for Human Rights NGO created a database on homicides with information collected from daily newspapers in the twenty-seven states of Brazil. For the 16 percent of cases in 1999 that had information on the color of the victim, 85 percent of the victims of police and death squads were nonwhite.47 Specifically, 61 percent were listed as negro, 18 percent as moreno, 6 percent as pardo, and 15 percent as white.48

Using various documents from jury-trial courts49 in the City of São Paulo, I. Cano (2002) found that 33.0 percent of civilians intentionally killed by the police were brown and another 13.3 percent were black, while the general population was 24 percent brown and 4 percent black. Cano’s study paid careful attention to potential racial-classification problems. In the documents he used, racial-classification is based on the initial police incident report using census categories and it is generally maintained throughout the judicial process.50 Also, because there is relatively little ambiguity about racial classifications in São Paulo, Cano’s findings are especially strong evidence that the police target nonwhites for execution, especially those at the dark end of the color continuum.

Based on civil police incident reports, Cano also examined police killings in the state of Rio de Janeiro and found that in the period 1993 to 1996, police killed 2.7 times more white civilians than they wounded. By contrast, the lethality index was 5.1 for browns and 4.3 for blacks. Skeptical that most of these differences by race were due to the disproportionate residence of nonwhites in favelas, where police are more likely to

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