Assessing the Risk of Fatal Police Encounters by Race, Sex, and Gender in the Brazilian Context

• In Event: Rutgers at 50: Advancing International Criminology

Abstract

Over the last decade, attention to police violence as an urgent public health problem has been renewed, especially due to the Black Lives Matter movement. Literature from the United States suggests the risk of fatal police violence fatalities to be the highest among African American men and women, American Indian/Alaskan Native men and women, and Latino men. Although police violence in the United States is problematic, with nearly 1,000 people being killed every year, the number of deadly police encounters in Brazil is exponentially higher. In 2019 alone, nearly 6,200 people lost their lives to police violence. Using data obtained by the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, a non-profit and non-partisan organization focused on promoting data transparency surrounding violence, the current study aims to estimate how age, sex, and race influence the risk of civilians experiencing fatal police encounters in the Brazilian states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro between 2015 and 2018. The study also includes overall mortality data obtained from each State’s Health Department portal (Secretaria Estadual de Saúde) and Census data from the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE).

Authors

• Adriana Santos, Rutgers University

• Andres F. Rengifo, Rutgers University

• Frank Edwards, School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, Newark