A total of 58,559 people died violent deaths in Brazil last year, or about 160 every day — and police actions were the second-biggest cause, new statistics showed on Thursday.
The Brazilian Public Security Forum’s annual study, considered a key reference, said the total number of such deaths — mostly murders — last year, the year Brazil hosted the World Cup, was 4.8 percent higher than in 2013.
The toll includes murder, assaults resulting in death and crimes committed during robberies. It also includes 3,022 deaths at the hands of police during operations and 398 slain police officers.
The leading category of violent death was intentional homicide at 89.3 percent, but the distant second cause was killings by the security forces, amounting to 5.2 percent, the study said.
“If we want to talk about reducing violent death in Brazil, we have to consider those eight deaths a day at the hands of the police. The Brazilian police probably kill more than any other force in the world. This is inadmissible,” said Renato Sergio de Lima, vice president of the security forum, a non-governmental organization in Sao Paulo.
If anything, researchers say, the police-related death tolls could be too low, due to under-reporting.
Another complication is that statistics refer to “confrontations” between police and criminal suspects, whereas an important proportion of those deaths is believed by human rights groups to result purely from excessive use of police force.
Topping the violence charts is Brazil’s impoverished northeast.
In absolute numbers, the worst state was Bahia, which had 6,265 murders, a rate of 41.4 for every 100,000 people. However, the smaller Alagoas State, in the same region, had a rate of 66.5 violent killings for every 100,000.
Rio de Janeiro State — including next year’s Olympic host Rio, a city that has long led in urban crime — saw 5,719 killings, a rate of 34.7 per 100,000, which is 13.3 percent less than in 2013.
That drop is seen as a result of the intense policing of Rio slums, with so-called Police Pacification Units, which have worked to squeeze out drug traffickers.
However, Amnesty International said that near-war-like campaign against gangs has seen heavily armed police often breaking the law and executing suspects.
“We cannot keep responding to violence with violence,” De Lima said. “That must change. We need to solve crimes, improve investigations and punish criminals with use of better technology and human resources.”
The rich state of Sao Paulo, which has a population of 40 million, saw 5,612 violent deaths last year, but a rate of just 12.7 percent for every 100,000, the lowest in the nation.
The national rate of violent deaths for 100,000 people was 28.9 last year.
Among cities, the most violent was Fortaleza in the northeastern state of Ceara, with 1,989 killings, a rate of 77 for every 100,000 people.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of