Lula tries to leave a mark on public safety

Brazil has for decades suffered an epidemic of violent crime — fueled by persistently high levels of inequality, youth unemployment, and punitive drug laws. 

Homicide rates have consistently dropped since 2019, but they remain sky-high — at around 110 homicides a day. And even if nationwide murder numbers are improving, robbery cases have skyrocketed in several urban centers and some states face major security crises that keep citizens on edge. 

Bahia, the northeastern state ruled by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Workers Party since 2007, had more than 70 homicides in September alone. 

Recent data from Datafolha, Brazil’s most renowned pollster, shows that public safety is the top-of-mind issue for seven out of ten voters. Another recent poll, by Atlas Intel, shows that the sector is precisely the area on which voters rate the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration the poorest. 

Security is a thorn in Lula’s side. Much of the support for former President Jair Bolsonaro’s — who won the presidency in 2018 in a landslide and lost it by a whisker in 2022 — came from his public safety agenda. Mr. Bolsonaro’s life-long approach to public safety had been to offer simplistic solutions to a complex problem: he advocated for the violent repression of criminals and praised police operations that resulted in dozens of deaths. 

Lula, on the other hand, has an approach more connected to human rights and struggled to show effective proposals on the topic during the electoral campaign. Most of the government initiatives so far were highly palliative and apparently short on effectiveness, according to experts.

One of the Workers’ Party coordinators on public security, Benedito Mariano, even complained that the current government did not put...