While leaving his girlfriend at home, Renan Loureiro, 20, was approached by a fake pizza delivery boy who stopped him from stealing his cell phone. Responding to the robbery, Renan was shot five times and died. The shocking scene, which took place in May in the southern zone of the city of São Paulo, was filmed by security cameras and repeated on the news and on programs specializing in crime. In a TV Globo report on the same day, witnesses preferred not to identify themselves out of fear. Out of fear, one of them said she won’t even go out on the street anymore. When will Brazilians, who live in one of the most unequal countries in the world, stop being afraid to take to the streets, is the question that no one has a simple answer to.
The same report showed a scenario common in São Paulo and other major cities in the crime region: “In the street where Renan died, the residents seem to live locked up behind fences, gates and high walls. Always afraid, they are alert. on any strange movement. Still, robberies are common,” said the reporter. An investigation by the Brazilian Public Security Forum into the case found that in the first two months of 2022 alone, more than 17,000 mobile phones were stolen in Brazil’s largest city — one every five minutes. There is no data on the number of robberies that resulted in deaths.
“Mobile phones, once stolen, can be disassembled into parts for the parallel market,” explains professor and researcher Rafael Alcadipani [ver entrevista ao lado]which also highlights that in addition to the device, criminals also want what’s inside: “The cell phone brings people’s lives into it. It’s banking, investment, relationship, work information. This information, in the hands of criminals, can be worth a lot of money.”
Cases like this make no one in the world feel more insecure than Brazilians, as shown by the 2021 Global Peace Index study, which measures the level of peace in 163 countries. Even conducted during a pandemic that has already stolen 681,000 lives in the country, the survey showed that 64% of Brazil’s population consider insecurity their number one fear, even above the virus.
O thinktank The Australian Institute for Economics and Peace, which led the work, noted that 58% of Brazilians feel less safe than they did five years ago, an indicator that goes against the global trend of 75% of people saying they live safer lives.
Another concern is the homicide rate: while 116 countries have cut their rates since 2008, in Brazil they rose in the first half of 2020; 25,712 people were killed, a figure that is 7% higher than in the same period of 2019, according to the Brazilian Public Security Forum. These were factors that led Brazil to remain at a peace level considered “low”, at the 128th position of a table where it is only above the records of countries at war or in the post-war period.
“The background”
Another study, by the Laboratory of World Inequalities at the Paris School of Economics, identifies Brazil as one of the most unequal countries in the world. The text states that pay differentials narrowed at the beginning of the year 2000, mainly thanks to the Bolsa Família income transfer policy and the increase in the minimum wage, but that today only South Africa is more unequal among G20 members. The richest 10% in Brazil earn 59% of the total national income.
“Social inequality is one of the biggest causes of violence among young people in Brazil. It is the great context, the backdrop, where the population lives that are most affected by this problem: people between the ages of 15 and 24,” said researcher Luseni Aquino in the article “Social inequality, violence and youth in Brazil”, by the Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA).
One of the factors highlighting social inequality and exposing the young population to violence is extreme poverty, which already affects 12.2% of the 34 million young Brazilians living in families with a per capita income of a quarter of the minimum wage. , he adds to the IPEA survey. In total there are 4.2 million extremely poor young people.
Bolsonaro aggravated
During the election campaign that elected Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, the electorate said in polls that they feared the future elected, an unimpressive deputy, would not have a positive performance in areas he himself admitted he did not dominate – such as economics, health, education. and other public policy – but that he was confident in the candidate’s crime-fighting ability, given his past devoted to security-related issues. After all, under his administration, the indicators got worse.
The policy to facilitate the use of weapons, one of Bolsonaro’s campaign promises, has, as experts warned at the time, had a negative effect.
Vitor Furtado, a criminal known as Bala 40, was taken by surprise by the Rio de Janeiro police who sold weapons to other criminals, according to a newspaper report. State of Sao Paulo. It had an arsenal of 26 rifles and other weapons worth about 350,000 euros. The report adds that agents of the Department of Narcotics in São Paulo found a shotgun, a carbine, two pistols and two revolvers with Diego Izidoro, 35, accused of participating in a money laundering program by the First Command of the Capital (PCC) . ).), the largest criminal organization in Brazil and South America. In Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, police seized two carbines, a machine gun, two pistols, a shotgun and a revolver from another PCC member.
The arrests are taking place in three different states and, according to police, point to a new form of organized crime: all of these weapons have been legally purchased by criminals registered as “collectors, shooters and hunters”, a group that is free to acquire high-powered firearms and ammunitionafter decrees and regulations that Jair Bolsonaro edited in 2019 and 2020 to that effect.
Interview with Rafael Alcadipani (Professor Fundação Getúlio Vargas and affiliated with the Brazilian Forum of Public Security): “The future of security in this country is bleak”
The so-called “new cangaço” [crime em que uma quadrilha toma controle de uma cidade inteira] and “organized crime” are the biggest security problems in Brazil today?
Organized crime is the main problem today as factions such as the First Command of the capital or the Red Command dominate entire regions of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and many other cities. It is the organized crime that provides and regulates the sociability in these areas, it is no longer the state, so the fight against these factions is fundamental. The practice of the new cangaço, which stems from organized crime, is another major problem.
Do the police lack organisation, coordination and intelligence?
Coordination and intelligence is what the Brazilian police lack the most: there is not enough articulation or organization for the police to act synergistically, to see what the civilian police can do best, what the military police can do best, there is no such thing. Every police force acts in isolation, as if it were an island that is not an archipelago, and that often causes a lot of problems.
Would decriminalizing soft drugs and tackling the problem of prison overcrowding help in the short term?
I absolutely agree that the decriminalization of soft drugs can help reduce prison overcrowding and ensure that not so many people are unjustly incarcerated, people who would not be in prison in another country. Not only is it necessary to decriminalize soft drugs – which have already been decriminalized even with regard to marijuana – but it is especially important to quantify the difference between the user and the dealer in law, because often a white person’s amount of drugs in a noble neighborhood is not enough to take him to prison for drug trafficking, but in a favela or community the same amount will cost in the possession of a black person.
It has been four years since Juiz de Fora’s attack on Bolsonaro, and this year there have already been horrific cases, such as the death of a Lula at the hands of a Bolsonarista when he was celebrating his birthday. Will Politically Motivated Crime Increase?
Political crime is on the rise, the climate is very bellicose, with on the one hand that of the current president, armed, as was seen recently in Paraná, when a citizen of the other party was murdered for political reasons by a supporter of Jair Bolsonaro. “I quickly imagine that these problems will increase with the intensification of disputes.
When will Brazilians stop being afraid to walk the streets?
I think it will take a long time for Brazil to become a decent country in terms of crime. We are wrong to bet on a policy that uses violence to combat violence, that uses punches and bombs and not intelligence – and it is intelligence that fights crime. In addition, the country is very unequal, which is harmful, and it has many criminal organizations. In view of this, I think we will maintain the current state of affairs for a long time to come.
How do you see the long-term future of security in Brazil?
The future? It is dark. I’m not optimistic about the future of public safety in Brazil, because I don’t see anything being done to improve it. Certainly with the increase in the legalization of weapons, which is almost a distribution of weapons to the CAC, ie to “hunters, shooters and gatherers”, there is therefore no reason to be optimistic.
Source: DN
