And yet I can shut down the computer and forget all about it right away, if I want to. Residents can’t. In 2019, according to a report by the nonprofit group Redes da Maré, there were 39 police operations in the complex — one every 9.4 days — that lasted almost 300 hours and left 34 people dead. (None of them were white.) Twenty-four school days have been lost. (School is canceled when there’s a police raid.)

The raids are part of a disastrous policy to combat drug trafficking in Rio de Janeiro. The state’s security forces have always been violent and unaccountable for their actions in the favelas, but things have gotten even worse under the country’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and an ally, Rio de Janeiro’s governor Wilson Witzel.

Mr. Witzel has promised to “slaughter” criminals in the communities, saying that the military police should “aim at their little heads.” This is at the core of his public security policy, which consists of tough-on-crime rhetoric, giving carte blanche to the police and nothing else. Last year, he claimed he should have the right to send a missile into a favela in order to “blow up these people.” He encourages incessant and deadly police invasions into poor communities in pursuit of drug gangs, failing to recognize that most of the residents are law-abiding, working citizens.

As a result, police killings in the state of Rio de Janeiro reached a 20-year high last year, with 1,810 people murdered by security forces — almost five deaths per day. (Twenty-two police officers were killed in the same period.) Police forces are now responsible for 43 percent of all the violent deaths in the state, an astonishingly high number even by Brazilian standards.

While the authorities claim that most of the victims are gang members who engaged in confrontations with the police, many cases show signs of being extrajudicial killings. Other times, victims are innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire: Six children died last year during police raids in Rio de Janeiro’s poorest communities. (Most of these murders are still unsolved.) Other victims were wrongfully targeted; if you are black and live in a favela, anything can be mistaken for a gun. People have been killed for carrying an umbrella, an hydraulic jack, a cellphone, a backpack. Four years ago, a 16-year-old boy was killed when his bag of popcorn was mistaken for drugs.