A survey of Rio's military police officers found roughly 18% of respondents witnessed a homicide as a child From January to May, 322 civilians were killed as a result of police interventions in the state of Rio de Janeiro, a 13% increase over the same period last year according to the state’s Institute for Public Security. So far in 2016, this upward trend continues. In 2014 there were 584 people killed during the course of arrest in 2015, the number rose again to 645. Starting in 2014, the numbers started creeping up. Unfortunately, these improvements were short lived. Residents appear unconcerned during a police operation against drug traffickers in the ‘pacified’ Jacarezinho slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A key ingredient of the programme’s early success was the emphasis on rewarding reductions in violent crime. The initiative consisted of newly trained pacification police units who were permanently deployed to many parts of the city, often for the first time. Auto-resistance killings dropped by more than 85% in areas where the approach was introduced. So what explains the long-term drop in police killings? Researchers first detected sizeable improvements after 2009 in the wake of a new police strategy in Rio de Janeiro. This is not to excuse the police – violence is intolerably high – but to put the statistics in historical perspective. In 2013, for example, there were just 416 civilians killed. Between 20 they actually fell by 46% across the entire state of Rio de Janeiro, and 62% in the capital. In fact, although the situation is dire, overall numbers of killings involving police – “auto-resistance deaths” in the sanitised language of law enforcement – have declined over the past decade. But those numbers don’t tell the whole story.
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