This is the Rio de Janeiro that authorities do NOT want you to see during the World Cup games: Crushing poverty, crime, violence, military occupation and extrajudicial killings. Officials in Rio deployed the military police officers in 2008 to curb escalating gang violence among drug traffickers through the pacification of the citys favelas, or shantytown areas. The programme dramatically drove down homicide rates by nearly half. Police killings also plummeted from 1,330 cases in 2007 to 405 in 2013, according to government figures. Researchers are closely watching government reports that cite a spike in violence for the first few months of 2014, including killings by police, of nearly 60 percent. Violence against police officers is also on the rise. Misse said more than 10,000 people were killed under suspicion of confrontation with Rio de Janeiro police between 2001-2011, a period when the number of deaths from street violence was at its highest. As long as a victim is killed by a police officer during a confrontation, or killed while resisting arrest, the murder is considered legal and rarely ever questioned by investigators. Ten thousand people killed by police over ten years is about three people killed per day. These are only the official statistics, btw. aljazeera/indepth/features/2014/06/drug-wars-police-killings-brazil-2014625104155805323.html
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 23:04:25 +0000
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