Under Bolsonaro, Brazil’s highway police prefers force over human rights

A deadly police raid in the Rio de Janeiro favela of Vila Cruzeiro at the end of May resulted in 23 deaths — the second-most lethal law enforcement operation in the city’s history. The incursion drew outrage from human rights groups and a significant portion of the Brazilian population, but one curious aspect of the raid caught the attention of keener observers.

Amid the footage of heavily armed law enforcement marching through Vila Cruzeiro’s alleys, a number of officers were seen wearing uniforms with the letters PRF emblazoned on the back. 

The PRF, or Polícia Rodoviária Federal, is Brazil’s Federal Highway Police, a force officially set up in 1988 to patrol Brazil’s intercity roads. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are no federal highways cutting through the Vila Cruzeiro favela. So, why were they there?

Then, just a day later, the PRF made headlines again. In what appeared to be a routine stop-and-search on the BR-101 highway in the northeastern state of Sergipe, PRF agents pulled over 38-year-old Genivaldo de Jesus Santos for riding a motorcycle without a helmet. What followed, however, was anything but regular police work.

Citizens looked on agape as the officers bundled Mr. Santos — who suffered from schizophrenia — into the back of their squad car, before setting off tear gas canisters inside the vehicle’s trunk. 

Amateur footage from the scene showed the PRF agents holding the car’s trunk door closed on Mr. Santos’s legs, while clouds of smoke filled the vehicle. He suffocated to death soon afterward.

For years, the vast majority of Brazilian citizens’ only contact with the PRF came through DUI blitzes set up at stations dotted across the country’s federal highways, or in news stories about the force’s operations to fight human trafficking and child sexual exploitation.

“Brazil’s federal sphere doesn’t have a high visibility police force,” explains Alan Fernandes, a Military Police captain in São Paulo and member of the Brazilian Public Security Forum. “The PRF are trying to take on that role for themselves.”

“But they lack the track record or experience in high visibility policing. Since when would the highway police go into a violent favela in Rio de Janeiro? You need to know what you’re doing in these operations, you need to have skills,” he tells The Brazilian Report.

Mr. Fernandes cites the idea of proportional force, in which the PRF has little experience. “The officers involved in the Genivaldo case didn’t have electroshock weapons. Here in São Paulo, all the Military Police have them.”

At first, the PRF defended the “legitimate police action” of the officers who killed Mr. Santos,...