Rio de Janeiro’s police killed a record number of people in three months

Ironically, Rio de Janeiro is considered one of the safest capitals in Brazil [1]. The absolute numbers are high, but that's a huge city with millions of habitants.

I lived there for 27 years in favelas like Rocinha and Santa Marta (when I didn't have money), and in apartments in Botafogo and Flamengo (after making money). I walked on the streets midnight and later. Nothing has ever happened to me. I've never even witnessed anything.

Of course, it's my own experience and I have some privileges.

The only time I was robbed in my life I was in the US. My computer has been stolen in the Houston International Airport (thankfully, it was recovered by a super professional Mexican police officer).

[1] https://thebrazilbusiness.com/article/the-10-safest-state-ca...

This is what the Brazilian people asked for. And I’m willing to bet if anyone who disagrees spends some time living in the hard areas of Brazil, they will agree with it too.

In the short term, “judge, jury and executioner” can be a perfectly fine policy because criminals tend to be very obvious in places where law has broken down, at least the violent ones.

Reply to the grandparent, now dead/flagged:

Criminals are people too. Your distinction would apply if the headline had "non-criminals" (a rare construct, but for sake of comparison, akin to "civilians" or noncombatants) instead of "criminals".

The geography of Rio's slums makes killing innocent people rather easy even if you don't set out to kill them; however, there's significant paramilitary activity in the area, both as the drug trade groups you mention, made up of civilians, and groups of officers and ex-officers who initially ran protection rackets, but now run drug operations too. These officers are often high up on the police hierarchy, and use the police structure for their own goals.

(As a reply to another comment: fascism and various genocides have been asked for by citizens throughout history; public approval doesn't make a policy good or moral per se.)

An example of what their "judge, jury and executioner" mandate can bring, aside from direct executions: https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-brazil-rio-militias-2019...

Nearly every news website's comment section for a serious crime has someone saying "we should just line them up and shoot thm, save everyone the time and money". As if this hasn't been said a million times and wasn't a terrible idea each of those million times.

Anyone can spend 2min googling "wrongful convictions" and the number of people found innocent by the judicial process to see why.

Not to mention the whole reason why "lynch mob" style justice is a terrible idea (it's a highly emotional process which gets it wrong wayyy more often than courts/police, the punishments are often way out of proportion to the crimes, no due process, etc, etc).

edit: didn't know people downvoted statistics in HN.

Conversely homicides in Brazil registered the sharpest decline in its history.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/22/brazils-murder-rate-fin...

> One of the world’s most homicidal countries just registered the sharpest overall decline of lethal violence in its history. Brazil’s murder rate dropped by a whopping 13 percent between 2017 and 2018, from more than 59,000 people killed to just over 51,000. And homicides fell by 25 percent in the first two months of 2019 compared with the same period last year.