Police Special Operations and Armed Criminal Groups in Rio de Janeiro

Daniel Veloso Hirata, Fluminense Federal University, Brazil

Carolina Christoph Grillo, Fluminense Federal University, Brazil

Research Grant, 2020

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The territorial control exerted by drug-trafficking “factions” and racketeering groups called “milícias” over poor neighborhoods has been a crucial public problem in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. For more than three decades, police special operations forces in poor neighborhoods (mostly favelas) have been the main instrument of public action aimed at deterring violent crimes.

Financial, technological, and human resources of the government of the state of Rio de Janeiro are used to carry out armed incursions into favelas, based on the presumption that this is an effective and unavoidable means of law enforcement.

Police raids in favelas are known to be the cause of thousands of civilian casualties, the disruption of the routine of favela residents, and the interruption of public services that operate in these territories. However, it is taken as self-evident that police operations reduce crime rates and that, therefore, restrictions on carrying out these operations would prevent the police from fighting crime. Such assumptions are not based on evidence, because local state authorities don’t maintain a record of police raids.

Our research shows that, besides the inefficiency of police raids in lowering crime rates, the lack of democratic controls over police use of lethal force contributes to corruption and violence.

Moved by the perspective of data activism and aimed at filling this gap of information, since 2018, our research team, the Group of Studies of New Illegalisms from the Fluminense Federal University (GENI/UFF), has engaged in producing a database on police special operations.

The research project, supported by The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, aimed to conduct a scientific investigation into the impact of police special operations on crime rates and disputes among criminal armed groups of drug traffickers and racketeers in Rio de Janeiro. Our objective was to produce evidence-based knowledge to support the public debate about the use of lethal force during police special operations, in support of initiatives aimed at promoting democracy, human rights, and peace.

Two fundamental sets of research questions guided the research project. First, to assess if there is a statistical correlation between police special operations and the incidence of criminal offenses. Second, to describe how police raids are distributed in Rio de Janeiro and verify if the police equally target all territories controlled by different armed criminal groups.

We analyzed data drawn from the following three sources: (1) official data on occurrence of crimes against life and crimes against property in the interval between 2007 and 2019, produced by the Instituto de Segurança Pública (ISP-RJ); 2) data on police special operations from 2007 to 2019 in favelas of the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro (MRRJ) from the GENI/UFF database, which gathers information from press sources; 3) the Map of Armed Groups in Rio de Janeiro, jointly elaborated by GENI/UFF, the Fogo Cruzado-RJ, Disque-Denúncia, NEV/USP, and Pista News from complaints about criminal activity registered at the Disque-Denúncia database for the year 2019.

Our research results indicated that increases in police operations are not accompanied by decreases in criminal occurrences, but rather the opposite: a greater number of police operations seems to be associated with an increase in crimes against life and does not impact the reduction of property crimes. Our findings also showed that the frequency of police raids is higher in territories controlled by drug factions, particularly Comando Vermelho, and lower in territories controlled by milícias, suggesting that police favor milícias over drug factions.

Our hypothesis for interpreting these results is that police incursions in conflagrated territories intensify conflicts between armed groups that dispute these territories, as state action weakens some groups and favors the expansion of others. This problem seems to be compounded by the discretion granted to police teams to conduct special operations without legal authorization, allowing police raids to become a means for imposing the payment of bribes and for facilitating invasions from rival armed groups.

Our research shows that, besides the inefficiency of police raids in lowering crime rates, the lack of democratic controls over police use of lethal force contributes to corruption and violence.  By allowing police to conduct raids outside of any regulation, the Rio de Janeiro state authorities facilitate the use of the state apparatus for obtaining private gains at the cost of thousands of lives.

Bibliography

1. Hirata et al. Operaciones Policiales en Rio de Janeiro (2006-2020) De la brecha estadística al activismo de datos. http://revistascientificas.filo.uba.ar/index.php/runa/article/view/8396

2. HIRATA et al. Operações policiais no Rio de Janeiro: ativismo de dados e detectabilidade da violência de estado. https://www.unifesp.br/reitoria/caaf/images/CAAF/livro/TELES-CALAZANS_GestaoMortes-Mortos_CAAF2021.pdf

3. Hirata et al. “The Expansion of Milícias in Rio de Janeiro: Political and economic advantages.” Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 4(3), p.257–271. https://jied.lse.ac.uk/articles/10.31389/jied.140