Again, it would be necessary to agree criteria. Residents, the police ombudsman’s office, the Public Ministry and civil entities maintain that there are innocent people among the dead. They also point out cases of execution, failure to provide assistance, home invasions and torture. Last month, the violations were taken to the UN Human Rights Council. And governor Tarcísio de Freitas: “I don’t care.”
Captain Derrite seemed uncomfortable with the reporter who asked him about the most recent dead. “You mentioned 56, but perhaps you forgot to mention the police officers who died carrying out their mission. We lost soldiers Cosmo and Patrick Reis, Corporal Silveira… This is real life, not the utopian world of ‘look, there was a number xix of deaths’.”
The logic of a Secretary of Security who invokes the savagery of bandits to justify the savagery of the police is unusual. The way he expresses himself, Derrite seems to think that killing police officers is something so abominable that the police need to kill those who kill. It is the nationalization of barbarism, with the conversion of each taxpayer into an accomplice in state murders.
Even if all those killed by the police were criminals, the shots that kill criminals do not kill crime. Tarcísio’s “I don’t care” and Derrite’s “I didn’t even know” only consolidate the police scolding as a São Paulo brand.
If erasing the differences between crime and the law and equating police officers with criminals reduced crime, it would not be necessary to define questions, choose indices or agree criteria. It would be enough to reduce everything to the level of animal reciprocity, as in a tournament of thieves.
