Widespread violence eased on Tuesday after five days of attacks on police headquarters, buses and public buildings that paralyzed South America's largest city and left 115 people dead.
But recriminations against the police and the way they handled the attacks are intensifying, fed by indications that irate officers may have sought revenge with a killing rampage that swept up lawbreakers and innocent civilians alike.
"It is barbarity against barbarity, truculence against truculence, firepower against firepower," a group of 10 prominent lawyers, law professors and bar association leaders complained in a recent statement. "Down this path, only chaos can be sowed."
The underlying cause of the outbreak is what political leaders, lawyers and human rights groups describe as endemic corruption and brutality in law enforcement agencies and prisons.
Gangs depend, for example, on cellphones, which are banned in prisons. But the authorities estimate that more than 1,200 of them are circulating in the Sao Paulo prisons, smuggled in by relatives and lawyers, with the complicity of poorly paid prison guards willing to accept bribes.
The news media here said the violence had ceased after the overwhelmed police met on Sunday with the leader of the powerful organized crime group that orchestrated the onslaught, who was reported to have ordered a truce by cellphone from his prison cell.
But both sides later denied striking any deal.
"The government did not submit to any demands of requests," Marco Antonio Desgualdo, director general of the state's civil police force, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Government officials also dismissed local press reports that the police had used the crisis to kill suspects they had previously singled out as gang members.
A police crackdown during the battles led to the arrest of more than 100 suspected gang members and the killing of 71.
While most of the dead were suspected of being criminals, some 40 police officers were also killed and the scale of the fighting has prompted many to question an already shaky faith in the public security forces.
Residents and security experts also criticized police and Sao Paulo's state government, which, they say, was unprepared to manage the crisis and turned away help to avoid political embarrassment.
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