The report also finds that the problem goes far beyond these cases; local officials interviewed by HRW told the organization that many of the “shootouts” logged by police in recent years were, in fact, executions.

Human Rights Watch

From the report:

In a majority of the 64 cases we examined, the officers’ accounts of the shootings appeared incompatible with the autopsies or other forensic reports. In at least 20 cases, the autopsy reports detailed gunshot residue patterns consistent with the victim having been shot at point blank range. In other cases, witness testimony or other evidence indicated there was no shootout. In June 2015, for example, military police reported that they had injured a man in a shootout in the Morro da Coroa favela. The police took the man to the hospital, where he died. Yet an autopsy showed he had been shot seven times, at least once at point-blank range. And a witness at the scene of the shooting reported having seen the victim injured but alive on the ground, hearing a single burst of gunfire shortly after the police arrived, and three hours later seeing police take the victim’s lifeless body away.

The personal accounts of officers tell a similar story. Several of the 30 police officers interviewed admitted to being complicit in or directly participating in extrajudicial killings. One officer described how he and his fellow officers set up an ambush for gang members, gunning them down as they fled and then planting weapons on them as they lay on the ground, injured or dying. “The objective from the beginning of that ambush was to kill, not to arrest,” says Muñoz, who conducted interviews for this report. That officer also described participating in torture and an abduction, as well as taking bribes from criminals.

Race, and the history of race relations in Brazil, play a critical role in determining who suffers the brunt of this violence. Like the United States, Brazil continues to grapple with its long history of slavery, which wasn’t abolished until 1888, later than any other country in the Americas. Many black people in the country live in concentrated pockets of poverty, making up the majority of the population in the unincorporated, informal, and often crime-ridden neighborhoods known as favelas. Those neighborhoods are often the focus of brutal policing tactics.

“I think there are echoes, in Rio, of the situation you see in lots of inner cities in the U.S.,” says Robert Muggah, an expert in security, violence, and development, at the Igarapé Institute in Brazil. “If you look at the statistics, it’s absolutely the case that young, black, unemployed men are highly disproportionately represented in any encounters with police, including police killings.”

Just before the World Cup in 2014, in one of several cases that has since become a major news story in Brazil, three black teenagers in Rio were abducted by military police. They were taken to a remote area above the city where two of them were fatally shot, one in the head, the other in the leg and back. One of the three managed to escape. The police left their patrol cameras on, and can be heard on video berating the boys before murdering two of them. All three were 14 years old.