Jair Bolsonaro thinks the way to tackle violence is with more violence. That is clueless
, Brazil’s president, was elected last year on a promise to rid his country of a trio of plagues: economic stagnation, corruption and sickening violence. For residents of Rio de Janeiro, the last of these is most urgent. The number of murders in Rio state reached 40 per 100,000 in 2017, 14 times the rate in New York state. The government felt compelled to send in the army, temporarily, to quell the mayhem.
Instead of bolstering the institutions of law and order so that they can restore calm and prosecute gang bosses, Mr Bolsonaro thinks the way to tackle violence is with more violence. He has allowed more Brazilians to own and carry guns, encouraging them to confront criminals themselves. He also wants to make it harder to punish police officers who kill suspects.
Mr Bolsonaro has done nothing to stop the militias. He has argued, ludicrously, that they prevent violence. Until last year his eldest son, Flávio, now a federal senator from Rio, employed the wife and mother of a fugitive police officer accused of leading a militia called the “Crime Office”. Two of its members are accused of the murder of an opposition city councilwoman. Polling suggests most residents fear the militias, perhaps even more than drug gangs.
This should not need spelling out, but if Mr Bolsonaro wants to reduce crime, he should not allow police officers to run their own mafia. It is hard to foster respect for the law if cops can gun people down and run extortion rackets with impunity. It is also hard to instil in the cops themselves the necessary habits of patient detective work and the impartial gathering of evidence if they can close a case simply by pulling a trigger.
In the past, Rio had started to do a better job of curbing gang violence. Before the football World Cup in 2014, the state government cracked down on revenge killings by cops and tried community policing. It also promised better infrastructure and better services . The death toll declined. But then a fiscal crisis hit, the money dried up and the campaign to restore the rule of law fizzled. Now Rio has a governor who urges police to shoot criminals in their “little heads”.
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