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RIO 2016
2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games

Rio violence leaves little confidence in public security

Taylor Barnes
Special for USA TODAY Sports

RIO DE JANEIRO — Should Olympic visitors be in a hurry to get to sporting events when they arrive in Rio’s international airport, they’ll hop on the accordion-pleated double buses of the new Bus Rapid Transit line. It takes riders on a smooth ride from the northern edge of the city on through Rio’s west zone, where 21 Olympic arenas and venues are located.

Police watch as a new VLT (Light Rail Vehicle) passes on the day the system was inaugurated ahead of the upcoming Rio Olympic Games on June 5, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro.

The key link between Rio’s north and west is a neighborhood called Praça Seca, where you’ll likely see locals buying handicrafts on its dirt-floored plaza and kids in blue-and-white uniforms streaming out of an elementary school.

On a bright Sunday in June, however, residents going about their weekend errands stumbled across another sight: the bodies of three young men wrapped in sheets and left in front of the school.

A resident who has lived in Praça Seca for 30 years said people in the neighborhood saw a dark car drop the bodies and drive off. He asked not to be named out of fear of the organized crime active in the area, so close to his window he often hears gunshots.

He had taken his dog for a walk when he came across the scene, which he said attracted a crowd of five or six curious onlookers. He characterized the incident as normal.

The resident’s attitude points to the plummeting confidence residents have about their public security even as the seven years since the city’s successful Olympic bid were meant to be ones of reform to change what might be the city’s most internationally renowned legacy: its urban violence. Local news media did not report on the body dump even as residents shared news about it on Facebook sites that deliver citizen reports across Rio’s most crime-alert regions. A police spokesman confirmed that homicide detectives had visited the scene.

Thirty-eight days before sporting events begin in the Olympic Park located just 30 minutes from Praça Seca, the state of public security is hardly what Rio imagined when it embarked on what were once well-regarded reform projects.

Dramatic scenes are playing out across the city, ones that are neither new to cariocas, as locals are called, nor what they had hoped they would be seeing by now.

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Last week multiple communities faced police raids and armed road “blitzes” set up by organized crime groups to check locals’ cars for adversaries, according to local news reports. Five people were killed in one such police operation; the intense manhunt followed an imprisoned drug trafficker, handcuffed as he underwent medical treatment, being sprung from a downtown hospital by armed colleagues who fled in nine vehicles. Elsewhere, an emblematic low-income favela near Rio’s airport — where the government opened a 2011 cable-car line meant to turn the favela into a new touristic attraction — has seen one person shot every five days, according to a count from citizen media.

Rio’s Olympic candidature followed a period that would earn international outcry for its bloody violence: Police in Rio killed a record 1,330 people in 2007, an average of 3 1/2 people a day. Many of those killings were not from legitimate use of force for self defense but rather were extrajudicial killings with little meaningful oversight from authorities, according to Human Rights Watch. The city’s annual homicide rate then stood at 54 murders per 100,000 residents; in Western Europe, that number is routinely about one.

Police corruption

The 2009 Olympic bid came along with a growing mood for reform.

Rio began the first base of its flagship community policing program, called the Units of Pacifying Police, in late 2008. That number would expand to 38 units across dozens of favelas which employed nearly 10,000 cops, about one-fifth of the state’s whole police force.

While the UPPs did not come with significant reform to drug legislation, they did come with what sociologist Julita Lemgruber said was an understanding that police were not prioritizing hunting drug traffickers but instead diminishing the presence of weapons on the streets.

“And this in the beginning even worked, during a short period,” said Lemgruber, who previously was an ombudswoman for the state police force and the head of Rio’s penitentiary system. “Then the strong scheme of corruption came back.”

In the early years of the units, shootouts were so rare they generated major headlines. For nearly three years not a single cop was killed on the job.

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By 2011, confidence began to deteriorate. Three police were attacked with a grenade during a nighttime patrol in a UPP, causing one to lose his legs. An extortion scheme unveiled in a favela near the popular tourist neighborhood Santa Teresa involved payouts of up to $35,000 a month in order for police to look the other way from the drug trade.

In what many observers deem the watershed case for a turn in public opinion, 12 police officers were found guilty of torture, murder and hiding a cadaver after detaining a construction worker in 2013 in a favela along Rio’s beachside. This month, the slain resident’s widow was granted $150,000 in damages from the state.

Lemgruber objects to the official terminology “pacification,” calling it propaganda for describing a project that has been little peaceful. “If it was a mistake to call it that in the past, it is all the more so today,” she said.

‘Not as bad as they say’

Despite the widening cracks and rumors of the UPPs being phased out after the Olympics, Rio has come far in its crime levels: The homicide rate and the number of annual killings by police are about half of what each was when the city won the Olympic bid.

“Before it wasn’t as a good as the media said,” according to Robson Rodrigues, a consultant for the public security think tank Igarapé and formerly the commander of the UPPs, referring to the units' success, “and now it’s not as bad as they say.”

The future of investments in public security were further complicated after the state government last week declared a state of “public calamity” over its ballooning deficit. Rio will put 85,000 security agents on its streets for the Games, including 38,000 members of the armed forces responsible for securing roadways.

Some 500 police investigators protested their unpaid salaries in front of their headquarters on Monday under the banner "Police prioritize people. The government prioritizes the Olympics." A second group protested in the international airport's arrivals terminal with a banner reading, in English, "Welcome to hell."

Lemgruber predicted that “catastrophes,” such as armed carjackings, were likely to be suppressed with such a massive vigilance. Rodrigues pointed out that Rio is used to policing crowds since it has long managed even larger numbers of tourists during the annual Carnival and New Year’s celebrations.

In a down economy, murders and robberies are on the rise, and students have spent months without classes during a teachers’ strike. Employees at public hospitals are watching trash accumulate, and patients are bringing their own needles and diapers as services have been cut.

In Praça Seca, public safety has another twist. The area has been a breeding ground for militias, mafioso groups common in Rio’s west that extort residents and businesses in exchange for forced “protection fees” to carry out vigilante justice.

“The terror of the militia is worse” than that of drug traffickers, said Rodrigues, the former UPP commander. “It’s a silent one.”

Research in 2013 from a State University of Rio de Janeiro team showed that militias in recent years took control of a larger number of favelas than even drug traffickers.

Alexandre Fiani, the head of the residents’ association in Praça Seca, emphasizes basic investments that could have improved quality of life in the area and public security in the process. He takes issue with the new Bus Rapid Transit corridor that cuts through the community, which he says is difficult for disabled residents to use and involved reducing a series of bus lines that were preferred by locals.

The only investment he says the community got in the lead-up to the Games — for which he knows no one holding tickets — was a promise to open two new clinics. A community request to replant trees that were cut down for the new bus line was ignored.

Fiani would like to see better schools and leisure options in the area increasingly dominated by fear. “I believe public security comes from cultural projects and education,” he said.

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