In 2020, Police Killed One Black Every 4 Hours

Police in six Brazilian states killed an average of six black people a day in 2020 — one victim every four hours. The number drops to one death a day when the target of police action is a white person. The numbers refer to the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The data were sent by the governments of Bahia, Ceará, Piauí, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo via LAI (Access to Information Law) in response to a request made by the Network of Security Observatories, Cesec (Center for Security and Citizenship Studies), which today releases the study A Cor da Violência.

In 2019, 82% of those killed by the police were black, while 18% were white. In 2020, the proportion remained: 83% and 17%, respectively. The data excludes cases where the victim’s color was not checked.

In Brazil, white people make up 43.2% of the population and black people —the sum of blacks and browns— make up 55.7%, according to the most updated data from the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics).< /p>

Pernambuco registers the biggest difference —61.9% of the population is black and 97.3% of those killed by the police are black. Piauí registers the smallest difference —17 percentage points, with 86% of those killed by the police being black.

The data request was also made to Maranhão, but the state does not classify victims by color or race.

The data show that the greatest enemy of blacks in Brazil is the police and not identity guidelines such as changing language.

It is necessary todissolvethe police. End the permanent police.

Since a police controlled by the state bureaucracy has never worked for the protection of the people, for this to happen it is necessary to remove the police from state control. It is necessary that they be created in place of the police that we know today, citizen, community police. Or, in other words, popular militias.

The true civil police should be formed by ordinary citizens, elected by the community where they live to provide security for that community. Rather than being a career in the state, as it is today, the job of security officer would be temporary. For example, residents of a particular locality would be elected for a certain period of service in the militia, just as councilors or deputies are. And citizens should, in addition to electing, depose agents from their positions if they do not fulfill their obligations. Their “mandates” as militiamen could be revoked at any time as per the popular will.

In the hands of the State, any police created or reformulated will inevitably follow the same script as the others. Because that’s your nature. Only under strictly popular control, completely destroying its current structure, will what we now call the police will be able to serve the population.

The police today belong to a very well-defined system of class domination. It serves to control popular revolt, to ensure that exploitation is maintained, through the most violent repression against the oppressed classes. The bourgeoisie knows that it is impossible for the people to put up with all the exploitation they suffer, and that they will always rebel. Hence the need for police existence. To prevent, on the basis of brute force, this rebellion.

Poor people thus spend their whole lives being mistreated, humiliated, tortured by the State personified in the police. The State arrives in the favelas and working-class neighborhoods in the form of the police or the army to massacre the population, and not in the form of social programs to distribute income and promote public policies that at least mitigate this suffering.

It is necessary to extinguish this body of extermination and in its place form popular militias that really meet the needs of the people.

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