Second, in many cases you can _at most_ use the word "suspects" because the people murdered were not in flagrant delict an were not tried and convicted.
Third, all it takes is to read the article to understand the situation. Hyper-scalation of violence has been going on for a long while and this is _not_ a plan to fight crime as much as it is a political reaction of the conservative faction that just won the election with populist claims of "safety through increased state violence". With that knowledge at hand its harder to dismiss the issue as some attempt to push a "liberal agenda" as you tried to do (although the expression and eveb the concept don't translate to Brazil).
I'm sad to have to answer a comment like yours in this forum.
Until the evidence is presented and decided upon, people are not criminals.
Opinions filled with "human rights" concerns from people far removed are probably ethically and morally correct, which is... cute.
We're fighting an Urban War over here. This is a Concrete Jungle. This is a crazy post-apocalyptic situation to which most people in Rio grew accustomed to while most people outside Rio can barely picture.
As a police officer once told my wife as she was leaving her house in Rocinha and stopped to be patted down and inquired why was she being selected:
– Mam, do you know where you are? You are not in in Los Angeles. You are not in Paris.
My moral qualms went out the window around the same time my grandmother was murdered by being thrown off a bridge in Aterro do Flamengo.
Some people genuinely want to live in the Judge Dredd universe..
Anyone can spend 2min googling "wrongful convictions" and the number of people found innocent by the judicial process to see why.
Not to mention the whole reason why "lynch mob" style justice is a terrible idea (it's a highly emotional process which gets it wrong wayyy more often than courts/police, the punishments are often way out of proportion to the crimes, no due process, etc, etc).
This is just as good an argument against any form of law enforcement though. Don't imprison people because you will undoubtedly also target innocent people. Mind you, I'm not pro capital punishment, but "don't do it, because you will also hit innocent people" isn't a good argument against it.
In San Francisco you can walk down market and see people dealing drugs, but would never rob you. The former because the police have a no persecute policy, the latter because they have a no tolerance policy.
In places like Argentina or brazil, the mere sight of people like this means 100% guaranteed robbery. I believe americans visiting the wrong neighborhood in Argentina or Brazil would have deeply false sense of security, which is why they are prime targets.
Pretty much everybody prefers that over total gang land chaos. Don't forget that "living in Scandinavia" isn't the usual alternative.
You: this article about a spike in extrajudicial killings after a far right mayor was elected is making it sound worse than it is
I'm on the fence about this as I don't have enough information to form an opinion. I'm European living in the US and so far removed from anything happening in South America that I cannot judge based on the news. I have one Brazilian friend who does agree with this approach so that's that.
Bun in general, this is going too far. It's no longer a slippery slope. If the cops have authority to fly around and snipe 'criminals' then the opportunity for abuse is ridiculous. Nobody should have that power.
Criminals are people too. Your distinction would apply if the headline had "non-criminals" (a rare construct, but for sake of comparison, akin to "civilians" or noncombatants) instead of "criminals".
The geography of Rio's slums makes killing innocent people rather easy even if you don't set out to kill them; however, there's significant paramilitary activity in the area, both as the drug trade groups you mention, made up of civilians, and groups of officers and ex-officers who initially ran protection rackets, but now run drug operations too. These officers are often high up on the police hierarchy, and use the police structure for their own goals.
(As a reply to another comment: fascism and various genocides have been asked for by citizens throughout history; public approval doesn't make a policy good or moral per se.)
An example of what their "judge, jury and executioner" mandate can bring, aside from direct executions: https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-brazil-rio-militias-2019...