Massacre outside Rio renews focus on police criminality

RIO DE JANEIRO -- The massacre of 30 people in a shooting spree Thursday night, allegedly by a band of rogue police officers, underscores an intractable problem in one of Latin America's most violent countries: corruption and criminal infiltration of Brazil's police forces.

Investigators are searching for the killers who drove through two Rio suburbs, gunning down pedestrians, bar patrons, and other seemingly arbitrary targets. Five adolescents, including a 14-year-old pinball player, were among those killed when the group of up to eight assailants, some wearing masks, fired handguns on foot and from passing vehicles in the working-class communities of Nova Iguaçu and Queimados.

Yet immediately after the killings, police in Brazil's second- biggest city came to a disturbing conclusion: The murderers are almost certainly from their ranks. The slayings, investigators believe, were an attempt by renegade police to terrorize the area and dissuade an ongoing clampdown on crooked officers.

The shootings shocked residents and officials even in a city plagued by one of the highest murder rates on the planet. Despite persistent government efforts to cleanse Brazil's security forces, the killings once again showed that the very people charged with fighting the country's scourge of murders, kidnappings, and other violent crimes often act as lawbreakers, not law enforcers.

''There are two types of Brazilian police," Nilmário Miranda, minister of the government secretariat for human rights, said in a phone interview. ''There's the fair, democratic police that protects society, but there are also large elements that commit crime, corruption, intimidation, and killing."

Among clues of police involvement were spent casings from 40mm shells, ammunition used mostly by law enforcement. The killers, in addition, followed a route suggesting knowledge of areas that would be clear of police patrols at that time. The motive, investigators believe, was further intimidation after police arrested eight officers last week when they killed two civilians in defiance of a cleanup by internal affairs.

While police and public officials made promises of swift, strict justice against the killers, the shootings are forcing Brazilians to look beyond the atrocity of the murders to determine how the country might resolve its longstanding problem of police criminality. Aside from the petty bribes that commonly tempt police rank and file -- a beat officer in Brazil often makes less than $275 a month -- law enforcement is contaminated by ties to the rings that control drug trafficking, extortion, and other serious crimes.

The most notorious of the forces' ills are the police ''death squads" that in recent decades have gone on occasional rampages in bloody demonstrations of force and vengeance. Thursday's massacre was the worst such attack since 1993, when military policemen killed 21 people in a Rio slum in revenge for the killing of police linked to drug traffickers. A few months earlier, police killed eight homeless children -- street bandits deemed annoying -- while they slept outside the city's 17th-century cathedral. Few convictions were made in either case.

''Any hopes that such actions were horrors of the past have been dashed," Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group, said in a statement after last week's massacre.

Police specialists say corruption stems from a host of factors. The police forces, some charge, still contain operational vestiges of Brazil's 20-year military dictatorship, during which enemies of the regime routinely disappeared in extrajudicial kidnappings, imprisonment, and murders.

Although the military police, who are the uniformed forces charged with patrolling the street, and day-to-day law enforcement became autonomous from the armed forces during the transition to democracy in the '80s, a legacy of violence and impunity lives on.

The police face administrative challenges, too. Brazil's constitution mandates a federal police force, which operates throughout the country, plus civil and military police forces in each of the country's 27 states. But the efficiency of the forces, many officials say, is compromised by rivalries, overlap, and a persistent lack of funding.

Some police say those problems are surmountable. Most of their woes, they argue, stem from a broader problem in which ''jeitinho," or fix, defines a national propensity for bending rules and pulling strings, if not paying outright bribes. ''I don't know if any police force in the world has all the funding it needs," said Colonel Ubiratan Angelo, commander of a special operations battalion in Rio. ''A bigger problem here is this idea that there's always a better way to do things than what's clearly written in the rulebook."