K Marx
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K Marx The Spot

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16 October 2009

Blame It On Rio

Catching up on recent copies of The New Yorker brought out this flabbergasting fact from Jon Lee Anderson's article on the gangs of Rio de Janeiro.

Rio's police... kill more people than police anywhere else in the world; in 2008, they acknowledged killing eleven hundred and eighty-eight people who were "resisting arrest," or slightly more than three people a day. By comparison, American police killed three hundred and seventy-one people—classified as "justifiable homicides"—in the entire United States in the same period.

The population of the United States in 2008 was about 304 million. The population of Rio de Janeiro is either about 6 million or a bit over 14 million, depending on whether you mean the municipality or the metropolitan area. So, the homicide rate for Rio's cops is at least 63 times as those of American cops, whose gentleness and passivity is so well-known throughout the world.

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Posted by Tim W at 10/16/2009 10:33:00 PM

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