Shock in Sao Paulo due to police throwing a citizen off a bridge: victim survived

A series of cases of police brutality in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s most populous state, are shocking public opinion and putting Governor Tarcisio de Freitas, an ally of far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro and considered a possible presidential candidate for 2026, in trouble.

The pressure on the São Paulo government grew after a video of an agent of the Military Police (PM) who, last Sunday, December 1, threw a detained person from a bridge into the water, who survived the attack. The policeman was arrested.

Awful. police #SaoPaulo
there in #Brazil
throws a person off a bridge. Everything very bad. pic.twitter.com/xoH9Dr0LQ3

— Heinz Zeta (@huichol19) December 3, 2024

The next day, the Police District separated from their duties 12 police officers who invaded a residence in Barueri, one of the municipalities of the metropolitan region of Sao Paulo, and attacked a 63-year-old woman years.

State authorities argue in the face of criticism that crime rates decreased during the administration of Tarcisio de Freitas, former minister of the Bolsonaro government (2019-2022).

(Also read: Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro “planned” and had control of the coup plan against Lula, according to the Police)

Last March, The governor minimized a complaint to the United Nations about the police actions. “I don’t care”he declared.

However, after the recent episodes, Freitas admitted this Thursday, December 5, in a press conference that “It is time to have humility and say: well, there is something that is not working“.

Also He stated that he was “completely wrong” in opposing police officers wearing a mandatory video camera on their uniforms to record all their actions.with automatic and uninterrupted recording.

Freitas had promoted a change to a camera model that agents could turn off at their discretion. But now he promised that the current criteria will be maintained.

At the beginning of November, An off-duty PM agent shot a young black man eleven times in the back who had stolen cleaning products in a market in the capital of São Paulo.

Two days later, A 4-year-old boy was shot to death during a PM operation in the city of Santosin which a teenager also lost his life.

Two weeks later, a 22-year-old medical student who was unarmed was executed by a PM agentafter resisting arrest for having hit a patrol car.

According to the Public Ministry, with 673 victims, deaths caused by police in the state of Sao Paulo increased by 46% in the first nine months of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.

Police lethality impacts the Afro-descendant population even more: between January and August, deaths at the hands of the Police increased 83%, versus 59% for white citizens, according to a study by the Sou da Paz Institute based on official figures.

Under the slogan “Who watches the police?”, hundreds of people called by organizations of the Afro-descendant movement demonstrated this Thursday, December 5, in the center of Sao Paulo to demand “control of the PM, which is totally out of control.”

The participants in the protest clarified that their demonstration was not because of the cases that gained repercussion in recent days, but because of the history of abuses and violence since the right-wing Tarcisio de Freitas assumed the governorship of the state of São Paulo in January 2023. .

The protesters targeted Freitas and They asked for the dismissal of their Secretary of Public Security, reserve police officer Guilherme Derrite, questioned for having declared that the death of a child by the PM was used for “cheap victimhood.”

“It didn’t end, it has to end, I want the end of the Military Police,” the protesters chanted as they marched to the PM General Command.

“My 9-year-old son is afraid of the police and I have no way to explain anything else to him, because for us it is an extermination group“Fernanda dos Santos Garcia, a 31-year-old law student, told AFP whose brother Dennys, 16, was one of the victims of the so-called Paraisópolis massacre, in 2019, when nine young people died of asphyxiation during an action by the PM against a funk dance. The incident remains unpunished.

“We will continue to take to the streets against this genocidal police, made to execute blacks and poor people from the peripheries,” said José Carlos de Assis, 62, who denounces that his son Gabriel, 18, was beaten and executed. shot by the Military Police in 2021, in the eastern area of ​​Sao Paulo.

“The rain came to clean up all the blood spilled in 500 years (of Brazil’s history since the Portuguese colonization). 500 years passed and nothing changed. They continue to kill us, they continue to exterminate us. We live in an extermination camp“art educator Selma Maria, 59, one of the participants in the protest, told EFE.

For Professor Rafael Correa, 40, the demonstration showed that the population is united and intends to fight for their rights against police agents who believe they can kill and that they will go unpunished.