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Janaína de Assis Matos, black police officer in Brazil: "They mistreat me a lot"

2020-08-07T23:13:20.786Z


The 35-year-old civil police officer in Rio de Janeiro has enough experience to speak about the structural racism that permeates the body. Machismo and bullying come in the package, as she relates in this interview


Janaína de Assis Matos, 35, black, a member of the group Polices Contra el Fascismo and an agent of the civil police in Rio de Janeiro, has enough experience to speak with knowledge of the facts about the structural racism that permeates the police force. Machismo and harassment come in the "package", as she relates. Since before the election of Jair Bolsonaro, Janaína has endured veiled moral harassment, which translates into “jokes” and comments from her fellow security forces, whose massive support and loyalty to Bolsonaro is being debated.

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“The worst moment was during the electoral period, at the # EleNão event; they treated people as' rats, communists, drug addicts ... ”, recalls Janaína, who is affiliated with PSOL (party of councilor Marielle Franco, killed by militiamen in Rio). "After Bolsonaro's election, the atmosphere also influenced: 'We are going to expel all leftists from the police,' they said."

Janaína does not hide her political preferences: "They mistreat me a lot," she says. They've already reprimanded her, of course. But not officially. "This moral harassment is perceived, although camouflaged, whenever there is a matter about politics."

License to kill

According to the Public Security Institute (ISP), in 2019, Rio de Janeiro state police killed 1,810 people, an average of five deaths a day, the highest number ever recorded. However, the number of police officers killed in Brazil fell by 42% between January and June 2019: 108, compared to 187 dead in the same period in 2018, according to the G1 portal.

With a view to gathering votes from a group with almost 470,000 members, the president of Brazil announced the creation of a Ministry of Public Security, with the aim of bringing the police forces even closer to his government, support that worries Democrats. "Bolsonaro represents a public security policy that does not solve anything and that only kills the youth of the peripheries and the police themselves," says this forensic agent. The president has tried to guarantee impunity for police officers who commit crimes in the performance of their duties.

The vast majority of deaths caused by police officers are declared "acts of resistance" [reaction to the arrest warrant], and are the subject of a new law (8928/20) that requires greater control of this practice in Rio de Janeiro, state that holds the record for police fatality. "How many innocents have they had and will they still have to die?" Janaína asks. 

Black and poor

In 2019 there were 434 deaths from “acts of resistance” in Rio, the highest figure since 1998, according to the ISP. "For the Police, when blacks and poor people are killed alleging an act of resistance, no expert investigation is necessary," Janaína denounces.

Janaína, who works as a police expert, explains that permanent state of exception that deprives a part of the population of universal rights: “In general, no evidence is collected, since most crimes affect a black population with little schooling and low purchasing power. When they are collected, they are normally not considered. In this context, governments do not invest in investigation and it gives the impression that the forensic police are only called when there is no way to incriminate the individual ”.

The agent recalls that "in addition to acts of resistance, we also have Article 70 [which allows the conviction of an individual with the mere statement of the police officer]." For Janaína, these “legal” subterfuges “show that the system does not even need a real crime to imprison and kill”.

Brazilian police kill a lot. More than the United States. In Rio de Janeiro alone, police officers caused nearly twice as many deaths as Americans, compared to data from the US Mapping Police Violence center. 

According to a study carried out by the Brazilian Public Safety Forum in 2018, the most recent one that includes racial data, that year almost 5,000 black Brazilians were killed by the police, most of them young. Brazil's black population is nearly three times that of the United States, and Brazilian police officers killed, according to a comparative study, 18 times more blacks than Americans.

Based on this reality, is there any connection between the Antifascism Police movements and BlackLivesMatter (black lives matter)? “In general terms, Police Antifascism addresses the connections between racism and violence, emphasizing the debates on abusive practices that generate high lethality, such as acts of resistance, and the way in which police officers can intervene and demonstrate that black lives matter. "

High lethality

Janaína, a doctoral student in environmental geochemistry with a specialization in soil analysis - which can be useful in investigating crimes, when determining, for example, where they were committed - says that she has little chance of working on investigations with the forensic police. And even less so in Baixada Fluminense, one of the most violent areas in the state of Rio de Janeiro, where, according to data compiled by Fórum Grita Baixada, cases of violent deaths increased by 7.4% in 2018 compared to the previous year . To put it in context: 2,142 deaths were registered: 56 per 100,000 inhabitants, 71% of them by homicide; Brazil's average is 30.5 homicides per 100,000 people, the second highest in South America. The world is 6.1 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, according to data published by the UN in 2019.

"I asked to be assigned to the investigation of violent crimes in the region, where I was a chemistry professor before joining the police force, five years ago," recalls the expert, who continues in that area. "It is practically a large favela." By court order, the federal government will have to publish information and complaints about police violence in the Baixada in 2019.

Macho culture

Janaína emphasizes that fewer and fewer young people, especially women, are interested in joining the civil or military police in Brazil. And not only due to endemic violence and precarious working conditions, "but above all because of the institutionalized machismo in both institutions." "Women who choose to confront the macho culture of the two bodies in an attempt to transform them, must face moral and sexual harassment already in the training period," he says. A recent example of this surprised her: two female agents filed a complaint against an influential officer and collaborator of the current governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Wilson Witzel, former federal judge and author of the phrase “The police are going to look at the head and… fire ”(order for the shooters to shoot down those who carry rifles).

The instructor Márcio Garcia Liñares - former president of the Civil Police Union, former special adviser of the Civil House of Governor Wilson Witzel, who appointed him, in March 2020, member of the commission for the privatization of the State Water and Sanitation Company of Rio de Janeiro (CEDAE for its acronym in Portuguese) - was denounced by some students, according to what was published in the internal bulletin of the Military Police of the State of Rio de Janeiro in May, obtained exclusively for the report. The case is kept under secret in the Office of Internal Affairs of the PM-RJ.

Janaína says that the Antifascism Police is offering support to the agents who have denounced the harassment of the instructor. "I am convinced that they will try to convince them to withdraw the complaint, under penalty of being frowned upon in the body or under threat of imposing a geographical sanction. But the investigation is ongoing and we trust that they will not give up ”.

Janaína has thought about giving up. “Machismo is built on the division of tasks within the Civil Police; women are automatically assigned to administrative areas and those who are on the street is because they have stood firm ”, she says. "During the training, the teachers already try to separate women from operations by intimidation."

On a day-to-day basis, agents also receive differentiated treatment. “In a meeting we were seven experts, and I was the only woman. I commented on a case that I had investigated and the delegate kept asking for information about the report. I realized that I was the only one being questioned. Delegates and inspectors always question me. The same does not happen with male experts, ”says the agent.

Racism, in the case of Janaína, is a two-way street. The victims of poor and black families are treated worse by the police and they also discriminate against their "colored" colleagues. “On a plantation, a woman accused of murder was caught red-handed, and she was very nervous. I went to talk to her, to tell her her rights, among other orientations, when a delegate, speaking with another policeman and pointing to me, asked: "And who is that 'goose'?" [goose is the pejorative term used by the police to "dehumanize" a criminal]. The policeman replied: "Doctor, that's the expert."

Text in collaboration with the documentary Agora Eu Quero Gritar: Mortos pela Polícia e Ex Ejército no Rio - Uma Conexão between Brasil and Haiti (60 min., 2020), co-produced by journalist Juliana Resende, author of the book Operação Rio - Relatos de Uma Guerra Brasileira (Scrita, 1995).

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-08-07

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