PM shoots more than 50 times, kills three and the press calls it "confrontation"
Police chased car with robbery suspects
The video came to me in a WhatsApp group and journalist friends. Not knowing what it was, I opened it and was stunned. A driver filmed the end of a police chase at the entrance to Maringá. Upon reaching a traffic light, the car being chased stopped – you can't see everything clearly because the image shows the police vehicle from behind. What is heard, however, is a flurry of gunfire (I tried to count, but it's impossible, the first volley seems to have more than forty bangs).
Then the hit car begins to roll slowly down the road, probably with the driver already dead. Another car arrives and all the police get out. When they get closer, what you hear is another 20 shots. Around it, dozens of cars, several of them apparently filming, others with eyewitnesses of what has just happened.
I, always shocked by police brutality, thought that at least this time it was clear that it was unacceptable. Everything happened in daylight. There was a shooting, a massacre. You can't see if anyone from the car being chased tried something, shot himself. Witnesses will certainly be able to say that. There are no policemen injured. But the reaction, especially in the second moment, when certainly no one else inside the car was able to do anything and even so the PMs strafed everyone inside, seemed unmistakably outside any acceptable standard.
I thought that this time the chorus would be unanimous against what clearly seemed to me to be an execution. It was stupid of me, as I discovered hours later when I accessed the news portals.
Invariably the newspapers called the case a “confrontation”. I've known the press inside for twenty-odd years, especially the press from Paraná, and it's easy to identify when the texts all come from the same source. All the texts I read, on various sites (some more respectable, some less) looked like variations of the same press release sent by the police.
In the texts it was said that the three dead men were “suspected” of assaults in Marialva. They do not say that someone shot at the police, which would minimally characterize a confrontation: the text of the CBN, for example, says that the police saw the suspects with weapons. And that was enough.
The truculence of the PM exists to a large extent because the State is colluding with it. But whoever sees a video like this is also to blame and is able to see a confrontation where clearly what happened was a hail of gunfire from one side only. We just had the trial of people from the Army for killing a man with more than 250 shots, but it didn't do any good in the country's culture. The police continue shooting a lot and shooting without being held responsible.
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