More than 10,000 people have been killed in clashes with Rio de Janeiro police over the past 11 years, many of them in the city's lawless slums, according to a study published on Monday. Between January 1998 and September 2008, a total of 10,216 people were killed, according to the report printed in the daily Estado de Sao Paulo.
Most of those killed were classified as suspected drug traffickers who were "resisting police." But the study's author, sociologist Ignacio Cano, said that the charge of "resisting police" dated from Brazil's 1964-1985 military dictatorship, and that Rio police who claimed to confront such behaviour received a bonus for bravery up until 1998, when the payment was scrapped. "This 'Far West bounty' reinforced the policy of armed clashes as the policy of the security forces," Cano told the newspaper.
The number of killings linked to police action in Rio were 40 percent higher than in Sao Paulo, a city with a population more than two and half times greater. Over the same period of the study, 6,195 people were killed in Sao Paulo during clashes with police.
Rio's statistics are "higher than those of many wars," Cano said, condemning the "barbarity" they exposed. He conducted the analysis for the Institute of Religion Studies at the request of Rio de Janeiro's state legislature. Rio's governor, Sergio Cabral, in 2007 launched a security force offensive against the drug gangs that rule around half of the city of Rio's 1,000 slums.
In the first year, 1,330 people were killed in police operations. While the violence has been raging on a near-daily basis, the confrontations caught international attention last month when, just two weeks after Rio won the right to host the 2016 Olympics, slum criminals shot down a police helicopter, killing three officers. Rio's security secretariat issued a statement saying it would maintain its stern anti-crime campaign.