Shock figures show Brazilian police kill six people every day

Police in Brazil have been killing an average of six people every day, new figures show. Research by the NGO Brazilian Forum on Public Safety found that 11,197 were killed by law enforcement officers between 2009 and 2013. That is an average of around 2,240 a year for those five years. In contrast, it has taken police in the United States 30 years to kill more than 11,000 members of the public. Most of those who have been killed by police in Brazil have died while they have been apparently resisting arrest, according to The Economist magazine.

A practice rarely investigated.

Bruno Paes Manso, from the University of Sao Paulo’s Center for the Study on Violence, on Brazilian police executing suspects

The NGO discovered that the Brazilian city where the most people were killed by police in 2013 was Rio de Janeiro, with 416 people killed there in that year. The city is notorious for its crime-ridden favelas, which were subject to considerable police action before the World Cup. The figures come just over a year before the 2016 Olympics are due to be held in the city. Rio de Janeiro took over as the police killing capital from Sao Paulo, where 546 were killed by police in 2012, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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