travest1:

allthebrazilianpolitics:

So, in Brazilian police brutality and racism news, 14 year old boy João Pedro has been shot in his home by cops and died from a bullet of machine gun, on May 18th 2020. The police officers, in a conjoint operation of the Federal, Civil, and Military Police, say they were chasing leaders of a drug dealing faction in the Complexo do Salgueiro favela, in Rio de Janeiro city, who jumped over the walls of a house. The family say the cops broke in shooting (72 shots, say neighbours), despite the family shouting that there were only children in the house, lying down with their hands up. He was taken by the cops in a helicopter but neither did they let anyone come along nor did they say where they were going. They only liberated the body in the Coroner Institute after midnight. They took three phones, one of them João Pedro’s. The cops say they’ve apprehended grenades and a pistol, which the boy’s family say were set up. Firefighter doctors say they tried giving medical aid but they boy didn’t resist the wounds, whereas the Military Police say they were not told to give aid to wounded people in the operation. Rio de Janeiro governor Wilson Witzel sent his solidarity to the family but said the operation was led by the Federal Police, not his state’s Civil and Military ones. He criticized what he called an “ideological rigging” of the Police and said it’s not by shooting in favelas that drug trafficking will be defeated.

“The police arrived in a cruel way, shooting, throwing grenades, without asking who was there.”, said João Pedro’s father. “If they knew my son’s nature, who my son was, they wouldn’t do that. My son is a student, a servant of God. His life was home, church, school, and cellphone games. The police interrupted my son’s dream.”

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On Saturday it was reported that the officers that murdered him released a new statement on the total number of shots fired that day that contradicts the number previously reported - they now admit it was more than triple the original amount. An autopsy revealed João was shot in the back while playing with his friends. They murdered a 14 year old boy, abducted him, and then tried to plant weapons on his house to make it seem like he was a legitimate target of the operation.