A military police officer responded with violence to popular protests against police brutality, assaulting an elderly man and then shooting an unarmed man twice in the Brazilian city of Sao Vicente, on the coast of Sao Paulo state.
The wounded man, a San Vicente city council employee, was admitted to the city’s Vicentino Hospital and had to undergo surgery for gunshot wounds to his leg and chest and was still under medical care late Friday evening.
The police attacks took place this Friday on Rua Montese, in the Parc Pitaru district, during another of the many operations that the military police have carried out in the region in the week following the death of an officer while on patrol in the favela.
During this period, two other agents had already died in clashes with criminals and, according to local residents, at least 14 suspects were also killed, some of them unarmed or already subdued.
On Friday, residents of the Pitaru area greeted the police with shouts of protest, and one of the officers, even more agitated and aggressive than his colleagues, began to argue sharply with the protesters. At some point, a police officer pushed an elderly man who was leaning on a cane, and he fell.
The attack on a defenseless man who was peacefully complaining about police violence further outraged residents, and a city employee began arguing with the officer who pushed the elderly man. At some point, the agent, without even any threatening gestures from the apparently unarmed city employee, shot him in the left leg.
Despite the fact that he was bleeding and limping, a city council employee in a coordinating role in the area continued to argue with the officer, who at one point yanked his T-shirt off.
From that point on, both the police officer and the government employee exchanged pushes and blows until the law enforcement officer shot the unarmed man again, this time in the chest.
Images circulating on social media show a sequence of confusion and police brutality and finally a shirtless council officer lying on the floor in a pool of blood. But within the military police, the confusion report says, an agent was forced to use his weapon in response to an “insult to police authorities.”
The police’s actions since the death of the agent last week have come under criticism not only from residents, but also from the press and human rights organizations, as there are suspicions of summary executions of people with genuine links to the world of crime, but also of innocent people. .
Public security in the state of São Paulo is headed by Guilherme Derrite, a former captain of the elite military police group, who faced problems in the corporation precisely because of the violence used in his actions and whom he sent to São Vicente and other cities in the so-called Baixada Santista , such as Santos, Praia Grande and Guaruja, reinforcements of hundreds of agents from the capital and inland cities to respond to the death of an agent with a kind of official revenge.