Authorities in Brazil have called for an investigation after a police operation on the coast of São Paulo state left at least eight people dead, in an apparent act of retaliation.
About 600 police officers have been deployed across the Baixada Santista region in response to the killing of an officer by drug traffickers in the city of Guarujá last Thursday.
Terrified residents have since reported threats and cases of torture, and late on Sunday the police ombudsman for São Paulo state said that at least 10 people had died, according to police reports.
“We’ve received lots of audio messages from residents, community leaders […] which present a series of reports of abuses committed by the police,” Claudio Aparecido da Silva told the TV channel GloboNews.
The state governor, Tarcísio de Freitas, disputed that figure, saying that eight people had been killed.
One of the victims was a street vendor who was shot nine times and whose body showed signs of torture, the newspaper Folha de S Paulo reported.
“These cases of ‘revenge’ operations are quite frequent,” said David Marques, project coordinator at the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety.
Officer Patrick Bastos Reis, a member of the military police’s Rota tactical unit, was killed while on patrol last week. Three suspects have been arrested and one died in confrontation with the police, the state security secretary, Guilherme Derrite, said.
“In no way do we desire confrontation, but we are not going to tolerate aggression,” Freitas said in a press conference on Monday. The governor said he was “extremely satisfied with the police’s actions” in detaining Reis’s killer on Sunday.
An ally of former president Jair Bolsonaro, Freitas served as infrastructure minister in the previous far-right government and shares his former boss’s admiration for violent policing.
Freitas notoriously defended getting rid of police body cameras during his campaign, a policy introduced by his predecessor João Doria that has been associated with a dramatic drop in killings by the police.
São Paulo’s military and civilian state police forces killed 419 people last year, down from 814 in 2020, the last year before body cams were brought in for military police.
Freitas later backtracked, saying shortly after taking office as governor in January that he would not alter the body-cam policy for now. But recent figures show the police have become more deadly since the start of his term: officers killed 221 people in São Paulo state between January and June, 9.4% more than last year.
“In practice, Freitas has put the [body-cam] programme on hold. Since he took office, no new cameras have been introduced,” said Bruno Langeani, project manager at the Instituto Sou da Paz, an NGO.
Officers in Guarujá were wearing body cams and the footage will be requested for analysis, police ombudsman Silva said. “We will request and demand a rigorous investigation so that any [violations] that may have occurred be duly punished,” he said.
The state public security secretariat said it is still looking into whether the reports of police abuses warrant an investigation.
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