Alarm Grows in São Paulo as More Police Officers Are Murdered

Policemen stood near the body of a gunman on Saturday after the murder of an off-duty officer. More than 70 police officers have been killed in São Paulo this year.

More than 70 police officers have been killed in São Paulo this year.

By SIMON ROMERO

Published: October 2, 2012

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — The sun had just begun to rise here one morning in September as André Peres de Carvalho, an officer in a special-operations police squad, prepared to leave his home. Two masked gunmen lurking outside the door did their work quickly, killing him before disappearing by motorcycle into the crazy quilt of São Paulo’s sprawl.

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A military police officer checks inside a car during an operation in Sao Paulo, Brazil last week.

He was one of more than 70 police officers killed this year in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest and most powerful state. The sharp increase in murders of police officers, up almost 40 percent since last year, has raised fears of a resurgence of the First Capital Command, a criminal organization that carried out a harrowing four-day uprising here in 2006 during which almost 200 people were killed.

São Paulo officials have tried to play down the suspected role of the criminal group in this year’s police killings, calling it a violent reaction by a variety of criminals to tougher policing strategies. But security analysts and some members of São Paulo’s own state police force have characterized the killings as deliberate reprisals by the gang, commonly referred to as the P.C.C., or Primeiro Comando da Capital in Portuguese.

“We’re witnessing a low-intensity war unfold between police units and Brazil’s most powerful criminal organization,” said Camila Nunes Dias, a sociologist who specializes in the P.C.C. at the University of São Paulo’s Center for Violence Studies. “The retaliatory nature of this conflict shows that it can endure for some time to come.”

Whoever is responsible, the sharp rise in killings of law enforcement officers reflects the precariousness of major gains made over the last decade in curbing violent crime in São Paulo. While the state is still safer than it once was, it has struggled anew this year with a crime wave, including climbing rates of homicides, rapes and armed robberies, called arrastões, in which teams of thieves assault upscale restaurants and apartment complexes.

The police officer killings have largely unfolded in the metropolitan area of São Paulo, in which about 20 million of the state’s 40 million people live. Some of the killings involved police officers who were reacting to armed robberies, and some of the victims were recently retired officers. But dozens of the deaths are thought to be execution-style murders.

The sheer scale of the killings has unnerved many here. By comparison, there were 56felonious killings of law enforcement officers in 2010 in the entire United States, which has a population of about 314 million.

The fact that so many officers have been killed in this one state has focused new attention on the P.C.C., which emerged in 1993 in São Paulo’s overcrowded prisons, partly in response to the state’s disastrous handling of a 1992 prison uprising in which security forces killed 111 prisoners at a penitentiary complex called Carandiru.

The P.C.C. stunned São Paulo in 2006 when it coordinated its fierce outbreak of violence, in which police officers were also targeted for execution. Since then, the P.C.C. has maintained a lower profile while focusing on its drug trafficking operations.

São Paulo officials claim that no reliable evidence has yet to emerge connecting the P.C.C. to this year’s surge in police officer killings. But other spheres of government appear to have a different take. According to a prominent newspaper here, the federal government’s Brazilian Intelligence Agency, or ABIN, prepared an analysis expressing concern over the potential for police killings by P.C.C. to intensify, drawing a sharp rebuke from Antonio Ferreira Pinto, São Paulo’s secretary of public security.

“The ABIN has no expertise in this area of intelligence,” Mr. Ferreira Pinto said in an interview. He acknowledged that the P.C.C. remained a potent criminal force but contended that other drug trafficking groups were largely responsible for the police officer killings, including relatively obscure “marginais,” or delinquents. Of the P.C.C., he said, “They are more worried about narcotics trafficking than confronting the state.”

The federal intelligence agency declined to comment. The P.C.C.’s mere existence is a highly sensitive issue in Brazil, especially here in the nation’s richest state, highlighting a security challenge rooted in its own prison system. According to investigative news reports, P.C.C. leaders have continued to operate out of prisons, issuing directives by cellphone and exchanging information via pen drives and cellphone memory chips smuggled behind prison walls.

Altogether, the organization has more than 1,300 operatives throughout São Paulo who are expected to pay monthly dues, according to a report this month by the newspaper Folha de São Paulo based on police documents. In exchange, the group pays for legal fees and provides a monthly allowance for an operative’s family in case of arrest or imprisonment.

Similar to the efficiency goals of private companies, the organization also sets detailed targets for its operatives in drug trafficking operations, while also expanding its reach into money laundering. Herbert Teixeira Mendes, a public prosecutor who has scrutinized the P.C.C. for more than a decade, has been quoted as likening its business structure to “franchising.”

A turning point in the P.C.C.’s profile seemed to come in May, when three police officers with Rota, a feared elite special operations squad within São Paulo’s state police force, were arrested after a witness described their torture of a suspected P.C.C. operative. That episode resulted in the killing of the torture victim, along with five other men believed to belong to the P.C.C.

Evidence of extrajudicial executions in separate episodes has long opened the police here to criticism from human rights groups. But the P.C.C. is nothing if not brutal itself.

In its apparent thirst for revenge, possibly in connection to the episodes like the one involving torture in May, the group has directed operatives to closely observe police officers before carrying out executions when they are off duty, sometimes in front of their own families, according to televised testimony by one frightened police officer.

Killings on both sides have shot up in recent weeks. Eight men believed to be working for the P.C.C. were killed in September by officers from Rota. Graham Denyer Willis, a scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies police violence and the P.C.C. in Brazil, described the police unit “like a SWAT team, only much less disciplined.”

None of the 40 officers from Rota involved in the episode, which the authorities described as a confrontation, were injured that day. But with eerie precision, Rota lost one of its men just two weeks later, when Mr. Peres de Carvalho, the off-duty member of the elite squad, was shot at dawn on Sept. 27.

His assailants, like those in dozens of other unsolved killings this year of police officers in São Paulo, remain at large.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 3, 2012, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Alarm Grows in São Paulo as More Police Officers Are Murdered.

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