RIO DE JANEIRO One quote could have told you that Jair Bolsonaro was going to win.
A good criminal is a dead criminal, the authoritarian former army captain proclaimed again and again during his campaign for president of Brazil last year.
Bolsonaros words were harsh. But in a country plagued by rising levels of violent crime, the sentiment is widely popular with voters and reflected in government policy. Brazils experience offers a warning to others: As police tactics get more extreme and cops kill more people, support for the killing doesnt necessarily fall. Instead, as violence increases, so does the desire for even more aggressive solutions.
For decades, Brazil has given its police nearly free rein to shoot and kill people suspected of crimes. As Bolsonaro made his pitch for the presidency, the numbers were only getting worse. Cops in the country killed more than 5,000 people in 2017, a 20 percent increase from the year prior.
Five thousand police killings is a staggering number. There were roughly 17,000 homicides reported in the United States two years ago. Police in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazils second-most populous, killed more people last year than their counterparts across the entire United States , even though the U.S. population is 20 times larger than that of Rio.
As in the United States, the victims of police killings in Brazil are disproportionately black. And as in the U.S., aggressive policing is popular. As many as 60 percent of Brazilians have said they support Bolsonaros favorite phrase; half have said they support police torture, according to polls.
The start of Bolsonaros presidency has been accompanied by a chorus of warnings that he is the most dangerous of the new wave of right-wing authoritarians to rise to power, that he poses a threat to the worlds fourth-largest democracy. But the most visible and immediate risk of his presidency is the increased power he wants to give Brazils already deadly police forces: He has promised to give officers carte blanche to kill and has said he would award medals to police who gunned down alleged criminals.
Policing is the blind spot of democracy, because even as other areas of democracy can develop in quite extensive ways, policing will be an enclave of authoritarianism, said Yanilda Mara Gonzlez, a University of Chicago professor who has studied policing policies across Latin America.
Its an area ripe for exploitation by strongmen who pitch themselves as law-and-order candidates but whose policy prescriptions, as researcher Ronald Ahren wrote in 2007 , are often very heavy on order and very light on law.
Brazils road to authoritarianism an authoritarianism under which its most marginalized communities will suffer most was paved in part by the countrys explicitly authoritarian approach to policing.
_(720p).jpg)
 OFFICIAL HD MUSIC VIDEO.jpg)
.jpg)
