Brazil priests condemn ‘institutionalized violence against the poor’ by police

SÃO PAULO – Amid a wave of growing police violence in São Paulo state, Catholic clergy are voicing criticism of public security policies, which, they claim, appear to be based on an old Brazilian saying: “The only good bandit is a dead bandit.”

Over the past few weeks, cases of police brutality gained media attention and spurred outrage among many in São Paulo, Brazil’s richest and most populous state.

The most recent occurred Dec. 2 before dawn, and involved a group of police agents who were caught on video as they threw a man off the top of a bridge into a polluted river in the city of São Paulo.

The 25-year-old victim was identified as Marcelo Amaral and works as a valet. The officers reported that they were patrolling an impoverished district in a neighboring city, Diadema, when they spotted a suspect riding a motorcycle. They supposedly pursued the man into southern part of São Paulo, and then intercepted him.

According to Amaral, he was coming back from his wife’s house when he saw a large group of policemen. He said he was scared and stopped his bike, being approached by the agents. The police officers allegedly hit him with batons and accused him of being a criminal. He says he insisted he was the legitimate owner of the motorcycle, but they didn’t hear him and dragged him to the bridge.

The video shows some of the policemen holding the man’s motorcycle while another one approaches him. According to the victim, the officer told him to jump in the river, otherwise he would throw him and his motorbike off the bridge. The agent quickly grabbed the man and launched him over the guardrail, which was a fall of 10 feet.

Policeman Luan Alves Pereira was recognized by Amaral as the agent who threw him. Another twelve policemen have been suspended amid an internal inquiry that’s still underway. Pereira was detained on Dec. 4, while Amaral is now living in the countryside, saying he fears retaliation.

Another case that shocked the country happened in November, but only now has a video of the incident surfaced.

Twenty-six-year-old Gabriel Soares entered a convenience store in the southern part of São Paulo, not far from the bridge from which Amaral was thrown, on the night of Nov. 3. Soares grabbed a few units of a detergent and tried to run away without paying, but slipped on a piece of cardboard and fell on the floor.

On the video, an off-duty policeman in plain clothes is seen paying for his purchases near the door when Soares fell. He then drew his gun and followed the man, shooting several times at his back. Soares is seen falling again, this time on the sidewalk.

Policeman Vinicius Lima Britto, 24, was identified as the agent who killed Soares. He claimed he was only defending himself. After Soares’s uncle, rapper Eduardo Taddeo, obtained CCTV footage of the store and released it online, on Dec. 2, Britto was suspended by the police. On Dec. 5, he was incarcerated awaiting trial.

Both Britto and Pereira had already been investigated for alleged police brutality. Britto is facing an inquiry for the killing two men in São Vicente, on the coast of the state. Pereira, a YouTuber who kept a channel in which he showed videos of himself roughing up suspects, was indicted for the killing of a man with 11 gunshots last year. The process ended up being shelved.

Several other episodes involving members of São Paulo’s police allegedly attacking or killing innocents have gained attention. On Nov. 5, a 4-year-old boy named Ryan Santos was shot dead by a policeman during a raid in the coastal city of Santos. He was playing with his siblings on the street as a group of officers arrived and began a shootout with two suspects, aged 15 and 17.

Only a few days later, Father Julio Lancellotti, famous in Brazil for his activism in defense of human rights and the poor, celebrated a Mass with the presence of the boy’s family members. The priest criticized the government for Ryan’s death.

“There’s an institutionalized kind of violence against the poor, against those who don’t have any protection,” he said at the beginning of the ceremony, adding that the attacks “come precisely from those who should defend the people.”

“It looks like that form of managing violence is planned, justified and deliberately implanted,” he said.

Such a sequence of scandals caused by police actions has generated fierce criticism against Governor Tarcisio de Freitas, formerly a minister in President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration (2019-2022) and a political ally of the ex-president.

One target of critics of the governor’s public security policy is Guilherme Derrite, the state secretary in charge of the police forces. Members of the opposition parties in São Paulo filed an impeachment request against Derrite Dec. 6.

Formerly a captain of the military police, Derrite gained the reputation of being a tough policeman. He used to be a member of an elite battalion in the state, known by the acronym ROTA, famous for its high lethality, but was expelled even from it for “killing too many bandits,” as he once told a podcaster.

In 2018 he was elected for Brazil’s Congress. There, he was the vice leader of the Bolsonaro administration.

As São Paulo’s public security secretary, Derrite oversaw a 98 percent increase in the number of deaths caused by the police. Between January and November of 2022, at least 355 people were killed by the police, while during the same period of 2024, the total jumped to 702.

On several occasions, Derrite has defended the idea that “the only good bandit is a dead bandit,” a saying that gained notoriety in Brazil decades ago, when a former policeman, who was also a member of a death squad, used it as the slogan of his victorious electoral campaign in Rio de Janeiro.

De Freitas has faced criticism from human rights activists since the 2022 campaign, when he declared he was against mandatory personal cameras for policemen.

Under strong political pressure, de Freitas said Dec. 6 he’s changed his mind, calling cameras “an instrument for the protection of the society and of the policemen.”

However, human rights activists, including those in the Church, don’t expect that he will substantially change his stance on public security.

“The right-wing doesn’t have, and doesn’t want to have, a responsible understanding of poverty and the poor. For many uninformed people, poverty seems to be a personal decision. For them, all poor people and all Black people are robbers,” Franciscan Father David Santos told Crux.

A long-time activist for Black rights in Brazil, Santos is the founder of Educafro, a nongovernmental organization that promotes the right to education for Blacks and the poor. Educafro will release Dec. 9 a public letter about police brutality in São Paulo.

“Derrite and Tarcisio have been winning elections with the support of those uninformed people. The inhumane solution is to kill the Blacks and the poor, who disturb the rich. That’s a strong cause of the rise in police lethality,” he said.

Santos said most police officers lack adequate training and education and end up forgetting that they are also poor.

“Many want to please their ‘masters’, like the slave catchers during the time of slavery [1500-1888],” he said. Santos used the term capitão do mato (“field captain,” in Portuguese), as the men in charge of capturing escaped slaves were called. Many capitães do mato were Black.

Santos said the support of Christians and Catholics for policies that increase police lethality are a signal of a “regressive interpretation of the Gospel that we see in many churches nowadays.”

“Only when society matures it will understand that white-collar crimes are incomparably more perverse than crimes committed by starving people who steal food from a supermarket,” he said.