At least six people were arrested Thursday in connection with a massacre that left 19 people dead in Greater Sao Paulo, according to local media outlets.

Five military police officers and a member of the civil guard were arrested, according to GloboNews, following an operation that involved more than 450 officers from military and civil police forces.

Eighteen victims died in the Aug. 13 serial killing in 10 separate locations across the Osasco and Barueri regions of Greater Sao Paulo. A 15-year-old girl later died of injuries sustained during the shooting.

Investigators believe the shootings were revenge attacks by local police in response to the Aug. 8 fatal shooting of an officer at a local gas station.

Witnesses said hooded attackers asked victims if they had a criminal record, with positive responses resulting in shots fired. But investigators found that most of those killed were not known to police.

A member of the military police had already been arrested at the end of August in connection to the killings.

Two other member of the military police were arrested during Thursday’s operation after unregistered arms and munitions were found in their homes, according to the Sao Paulo secretary of public security, Alexandre Moraes. Their arrests are not officially linked to the mass killing.

Moraes said investigators have identified more suspects in the massacre but did not have enough evidence to warrant further arrests. “Everything has to be done in a rigorous way, and this is what we are doing,” he said.

Police also arrested another military police officer linked to a separate multiple shooting that resulted in the deaths of four teenagers outside a pizzeria in neighboring Carapicuíba in September.

Sao Paulo Gov. Geraldo Alckmin has vowed that any member of the police involved in the massacre “will be expelled from the corporation and answer to civil and criminal proceedings”.

Police killed at least 3,022 victims in Brazil in 2014, according to figures released this week by the Brazilian Forum of Public Security. Almost one-third of the victims were in Sao Paulo state – Brazil’s most populous.

Four states did not provide figures, including one of the country’s most violent, Ceará, indicating the final tally is almost certainly higher.

The organization also said 18 Brazilian states witnessed a rise in the total number of intentional violent deaths last year.

Murders, police killings and other fatalities resulting from robberies and assaults totaled 58,559 in 2014 — the equivalent of 160 deaths per day, or seven every hour.

Five police officers in Rio de Janeiro have been arrested after a cellphone video showed them altering a crime scene to justify the extrajudicial killing of a teenager.

The officers allegedly shot 17-year-old Eduardo Santos in the Providencia favela and then left a gun in his hand to make the killing look like self-defence.

As the youth lay dying in a pool of blood, a resident filmed one of the officers putting a pistol into his hand, then firing twice so that gunpowder residue was on the victim’s skin.

“That could have been my child! That’s the UPP! The bogus UPP!” lamented the woman who filmed the incident, referring to the Portuguese initials for the Pacifying Police Units that are supposed to be bringing peace to Rio’s favelas.

The clip went viral on social networks, prompting local media to interview witnesses who supported the accusations of a frame-up.

“He was armed but he surrendered,” a Providencia resident told the Globo TV network. “After he raised his hands, they shot him.”

The officers involved in the shooting registered the killing as a case of justifiable self-defence.

Hundreds of residents staged a protest on Wednesday, demanding justice.

The five police – Eder Ricardo de Siqueira, Gabriel Julian Floriado, Riquelme Paul Gerard, Paulo Roberto da Silva and Pedro Victor da Silva – have been charged with fraud and taken to a military police prison.

In a statement, Rio de Janeiro state security secretary Jose Mariano Beltrame condemned the killing and promised “exemplary punishment” for the five officers.

Brazil’s police kill more and are killed in greater numbers than police anywhere else in the world. Reports of execution-style killings are commonplace, but it is usually only when incidents are filmed that justice is done. The majority of the victims are black or mixed-raced youths from favelas.

In the state of Rio de Janeiro alone, more than 300 people were reportedly killed by police in the first six months of this year.

As the world prepares to mark the International Day against Police Brutality on 15 March, fear and outrage boil over in a community in north-eastern Brazil after police recently killed 12 men.

When 17-year-old Natanael didn’t come home after a night out with his girlfriend in the neighbourhood of Cabula, in north-eastern Brazil’s largest city, Salvador, his grandmother Marina Lima didn’t think much of it.

But the next morning when a neighbour knocked on her door to deliver the boy’s baseball cap, she realized the worst had happened.

Next, Marina was faced with her greatest nightmare: standing at the morgue, she saw Natanael’s body, riddled with bullet wounds, his neck and arm broken.

The teenager was one of 12 men killed by local police officers six weeks ago, on 6 February.

According to the official version of events, the men were planning to rob a bank and the police shot at them in self-defense.

But the lack of a proper investigation and several eye-witness accounts paint a very different picture.

“My taxes paid for the bullet that killed my grandson,” Marina said.

The tragic event should have sent shockwaves through Brazil. But it didn’t.

Instead, the Bahia state Governor, Rui Costa, sent a message to the “brave” police officers, lauding their “heroic” work:

“It’s like a striker in front of the goal trying to decide, in seconds, how he is going to put the ball into the goal. When he scores, all the fans in the stands will clap and the scene will be repeated several times on television. If the goal is lost, the top scorer will be condemned for his failure”, the Governor said after the events.

The ill-conceived comparison of a mass killing with an adrenaline-pumping football match is a sad illustration of the public security problems still experienced in Brazil – where mostly poor, young black men pay the price for the actions of a violent, militarized and poorly trained police force that has gone unchecked for far too long.

I arrived in Cabula just a few days after the fatal shooting and was faced with a strange mix of horror, fear and defiance.

The streets, lined with dozens of small shops, schools, banks and a university, bustled with activity. The place is filled with children running around, using the local wasteland as their football pitch.

The relatives of the 12 men who were killed by the police were so scared that they wouldn’t even tell me their names. They felt sad, outraged and intimidated, but also afraid of what the police could do to them if they spoke out.

Having documented and witnessed similar actions of the police all over Brazil, I was sadly not surprised by what I was hearing. The police in Brazil kill and get killed in high numbers as a direct consequence of the war on drugs which ends up criminalizing the poor while the police resort to brutality.

According to official figures from the Annual Report of Public Security at least six people are killed by police officers in Brazil every single day. As shocking as it is, this figure is probably an underestimate, as most states across the country prefer to keep these alarming figures under wraps.

Even complaining about the police’s brutal actions can be extremely risky, as I experienced when I joined a demonstration by members of the community and civil society organizations from Salvador, who were marching peacefully to demand justice.

During the demonstration, we were followed by a police officer on a motorcycle who eventually stopped next to me and asked me what I was doing there. Human rights defenders are frequently harassed and intimidated, and even when we later reported this incident to the police no one took any notice.

After the protest, I visited the site where the killings happened five days earlier. What I saw there was shocking. The crime scene had not been preserved; plastic gloves, as well as the dead men’s clothes and belongings were still lying around. There were even spent bullets on the floor.

Eventually, the relatives’ desperate calls for justice were heeded and recently the state authorities said the killings are being investigated.

But we have heard this many times before with very little action taken.

On average, the perpetrators are brought to justice in a paltry 5-8% of homicides in Brazil. This means that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, those responsible are never investigated and, if found responsible, punished, thus feeding the cycle of violence and impunity.

In the case of Cabula, the officers who pulled the trigger are still working side-by-side with a community that is living in sheer terror, wondering who will be the next victim. Authorities must promptly conduct a thorough, independent and impartial investigation into the incident and suspend the police officials from duty until the investigation is concluded.

How much longer will it take for the Brazilian authorities to wake up to these horrors and take real action? The lives of thousands of people – many of them young black men – are at stake.

This blog was originally published in the Huffington Post.

With a Black population of 75 million, Brazil has the second highest number of Black people in the world after Nigeria. The country has long boasted that it is free of racism because of a “racial democracy” that doesn’t see and acknowledge skin color. But behind that myth, the real story is much different.

Police Killings of Black People Worse Than in U.S.

Though police killings of Black men have roiled the U.S. in recent months, the problem is actually much more rampant in Brazil. Brazilian police killed 2,212 people last year, according to a study by the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, a national think tank, released last November. That’s an average of six a day. Between the Brazilian state and federal police violence, they have killed more Brazilians in the last five years (11,200) than did all U.S. police combined in the last 30 (11,090). The predominant targets of the Brazilian police are Black people. A 2009 study by economist Daniel Cerqueira found that twice as many Blacks as whites were victims of police violence. “Our police kill by the hundreds,” Ignacio Cano, a sociologist who specializes in the study of crime and police violence, told Bloomberg News. “We have a Ferguson every day.”

Black Brazilians Consigned to the Slums

In the 2010 census, 51 percent of Brazilians defined themselves as Black or brown, while nearly half said they were white. The average income of whites is more than double that of Black or brown Brazilians. More than half the people in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (slums) are Black — while the comparable figure in the city’s richer districts is just 7 percent, according to The Economist. The favelas is where a large percentage of the police killings of Black people occur. Clearly, Brazilian society has been set up in a way that rewards white skin and punishes Blackness.

Blacks Are Ugly

Zeze Motta, who became Brazil’s first Black sex symbol when she starred in the film Xica da Silva in 1976, said the producer of the movie that made her famous at first didn’t want to give her the part because he thought she was ugly.

“Until very recently in Brazil, Black people were all considered ugly,” Motta, now 70, told Henry Louis Gates in his documentary, Brazil: A Racial Paradise? As Gates points out, this is reflected in the fact that all the top actresses, models and television personalities in Brazil look white.

Racial Democracy Is a Joke

Abdias Nascimento, who died in 2011 at the age of 97, was one of the most famous Black activists in Brazil. Asked by Gates whether Brazil has ever truly been a racial democracy, Nascimento laughed.

“This is a joke that has built up ever since Brazil was discovered, and Brazil likes to spread this around the world,” said Nascimento, who was also a celebrated writer, painter and professor. “It’s a huge lie. And the Black people know this. They feel in their flesh the lie which is racial democracy in this country. Look at Black families, where they live. The Black children, how are they educated. You will see it’s all a lie. I am saying this with profound hatred, bitterness, with the way Black people are treated in Brazil. It’s shameful that a country that has a majority of Black people, Black people who built this country, they should remain as second-class citizens.”

‘You Belong in a Circus’

Though the members of Brazil’s soccer team are hailed as heroes in this soccer-crazy nation, not even they are immune to racial insult. Brazilian midfielder Marcos Arouca da Silva was called a monkey during a postgame interview, an event that he said wasn’t an isolated incident. Brazilian referee Marcio Chagas da Silva has said he’s been subjected to more than 200 racially based attacks during his career refereeing matches in the country, according to The Root. Reports say that during a recent game between Brazilian clubs Esportivo and Veranopolis, fans reportedly yelled at the referee from the stands, “You belong in a circus. Go back to the forest, you monkey.”

‘Racial Democracy Doesn’t Exist’

In his documentary, professor Gates talked to rapper MV Bill, who is also an activist and best-selling author in addition to socially conscious rapper. MV Bill, who still chooses to live in the infamous favela known as City of God, told Gates that he has been discriminated against and treated badly in Brazil because of his skin color even after he became famous.

“In Brazil we are not allowed to talk about this. We have to live in a racial democracy that doesn’t exist. There is no equality,” he said. “Brazil was one of the last countries to abolish slavery. And since then we have lived under the myth of a racial democracy. But this democracy is exposed as a lie when we look at the color of the people who live in favelas, the color of the people who are in prison, the color of the people who live from crime. People will tell you in Brazil that our problem is an economic problem, a social problem, anything except racial. It can never be racial. But it is.”

Whites Will Get the Job

Racial stratification has been ignored for so long because the racism exists under a veil, activists told TheEconomist. “In Brazil you have an invisible enemy. Nobody’s racist. But when your daughter goes out with a black, things change,” said Ivanir dos Santos, a Black activist in Rio de Janeiro. He added that if Black and white youths with equal qualifications apply to be a shop assistant in a Rio mall, the white will get the job.

Imbalance at University

The imbalance between Blacks and whites can clearly be seen in the country’s universities. In 2006, only 6.3 percent of Black 18- to 24-year-olds were in higher education, compared to 19.2 percent of whites. Because of these numbers, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff enacted what The New York Times called “one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping affirmative action laws,” requiring public universities to reserve half of their admission spots for the largely poor students in the nation’s public schools and vastly increase the number of Black students in the universities across the country. Brazil’s former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, told the Times he was “completely in favor” of the quotas. “Try finding a black doctor, a black dentist, a black bank manager, and you will encounter great difficulty,” da Silva said. “It’s important, at least for a span of time, to guarantee that the blacks in Brazilian society can make up for lost time.”

One Black Cabinet Member

Though President Rousseff has been proactive with enacting affirmative action legislation, it hasn’t extended to her cabinet. When she enacted the affirmative action plan, only one of the 38 members of her cabinet were Black (though 10 were women). Stand outside the adjacent headquarters of Petrobras, the state oil company, and the National Development Bank in Rio at lunchtime, and “all the managers are white and the cleaners are black,” Frei David told The Economist.

Article reprinted from AtlantaBlackStar.com