Less than half of RJ’s elite police group operated cameras, police chief says | Brazil

Representative Fabricio de Oliveira issued a statement on Monday (10th) to Gaesp, the public security specialist group of the Rio de Janeiro public prosecutor’s office.

In addition to CORE, military police and personnel from Rio de Janeiro’s prime minister’s elite unit, BOPE (Special Police Operations Battalion), also participated in the operation. The state government estimates that more than 2,500 personnel participated in the operation and that 121 people were killed.

According to a police statement, most of the clashes with the suspects occurred in the Bope operational area in the Misericordia mountains of Peña state. Mr Oliveira was questioned by the Ministry of Public Affairs about the use of body cameras, and said that while Core had 100 cameras, 128 civilian police officers had been deployed by the group to work on the operation.

Representatives reported that some agents were unable to remove cameras from walls when leaving for operations – he said. The company responsible for the equipment counted 32 cameras that were unavailable.

68 more are now available. According to representatives, 57 were used and 11 were left over.

The camera is located in a room called the dock. This device sits on a wall support and charges the battery and video files. To eliminate the police, you must enter your personal registration number and password.

In addition to those who were unable to remove the equipment from the wall, some may have become disoriented as they headed into surgery, he said.

“We give a briefing on the operation, and when the officers are ready to leave, we go to this room. There’s even a line there, and they pick up the cameras and put them down. If you take the cameras too quickly, you’re putting yourself at risk for battery or even use,” Oliveira said.

“We talk, we have a briefing, everyone gets ready, we put down our cameras before we leave. At that moment, some of us couldn’t get our cameras and we already had time to leave. I think this somehow interfered with this dynamic,” he continued.

“At some point things started to go wrong. The officer tried to do it and couldn’t. Then he was left there and went to another location and (again) couldn’t do it.”

Asked by prosecutors if this had happened before, Fabricio de Oliveira said: “There have been occasional reports from police officers that it is already difficult to remove the cameras,” he said, justifying the recurrence of the problem after an unprecedented 128 police officers were mobilized for the operation.

This testimony is transcribed in a document sent by the Ministry of Public Affairs this Wednesday (12th) to the Minister of the STF (Supreme Federal Court) Alexandre de Moraes, within the scope of ADPF 635, ADPF das Favelas.

According to the report, the company supplying the cameras said it received a request for assistance from the Civil Police Secretariat on October 29, the day after the surgery, to identify possible difficulties in removing the body cameras from the dock. “Preliminary analysis indicates that all 100 cameras were available, but we are investigating the situation further,” L8 Group said.

The Ministry of Public Affairs report also cited two cases of “atypical injuries” among those killed in containment operations that “did not match any others.”

In one of the cases, the body showed signs of a firearm fired at close range. Another body showed signs of being shot from a distance, but also had a wound to the neck “inflicted by a sharp or blunt instrument.”

Although his name has not been made public, the beheading incident is that of Yago Ravel Rodríguez Rosario, 19. The body was found decapitated in a forested area in the Misericordia Mountains. Yago’s head was found hanging between two tree branches.

On Monday, in an autocratic decision, Moraes ordered the Rio government to preserve all images from civilian and military police body cameras. It was also decided that the Rio de Janeiro government had sent a list of police officers who took part in the operation and data from the cameras used on the day.

In the same decision, Moraes asked the Ministry of Public Security to send him a report carried out by an independent expert on the body and a copy of the autopsy report. This Wednesday, the agency sent files containing reports, statements, maps, and data from image records from autopsy examinations, but not the images themselves.

The public prosecutor’s office said in a letter to Moraes that the technical analysis process is at the image cataloging stage. 3D reconstruction of the body is also under development.