On October 28, 2025, a large-scale police operation took place in the Complexo do Alemão and Complexo da Penha communities, reportedly aimed at enforcing some 100 judicial warrants against individuals linked to organized criminal groups. According to official information, at least 121 people were killed, including four police officers. Some 81 people were detained.

For decades, the high lethality associated with policing in Brazil has become normalized, particularly in areas like Rio de Janeiro, where it has recently increased significantly. Brazil must break the cycle of extreme brutality and ensure that law enforcement operations comply with international standards regarding the use of force.

Türk called for prompt, independent, and effective investigations into Tuesday’s events and for a comprehensive policing reform.

Independent mechanisms should also be established to support the families and communities affected to help them access justice and reparation.

Türk urged the authorities to adopt a national policing strategy rooted in a human rights-based approach. Any use of potentially lethal force must be aligned with the principles of legality, necessity, proportionality, and non-discrimination. Lethal force may only be used when strictly necessary to protect life or prevent serious injury from an imminent threat.

Addressing systemic racism against people of African descent in Brazil is paramount.

According to the International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in Law Enforcement (EMLER), the killing of people of African descent by law enforcement in Brazil is not only generalized but is also carried out in a systematic way. An estimated 5,000 people of African descent are killed by the police each year. Young men of African descent living in impoverished areas are the main victims.

“It is time to end a system that perpetuates racism, discrimination, and injustice,” said the UN Human Rights Chief.

“Reforms are urgently needed to avoid repetition. Violations cannot go unpunished. Proper accountability processes must lead to truth and justice to avoid further impunity and violence.”

While Trump did not specify which incidents prompted his statement, allegations of genocide against Nigerian Christians have been circulating in some right-wing US circles in recent weeks. However, violence monitoring organizations report no evidence that Christians are being killed at higher rates than Muslims in Nigeria, a country with roughly equal populations of both faiths.

Nigerian Response

Daniel Bwala, an advisor to Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, stated that both leaders share a commitment to fighting “all forms of terrorism against humanity.” He acknowledged that any disagreements about whether violence targets Christians exclusively “or in fact all faiths and no faiths” would be addressed during an upcoming meeting between Trump and Tinubu.

President Tinubu has maintained that religious tolerance exists in Nigeria and emphasized that security challenges affect people “across faiths and regions.”

Trump’s Warning

In a Saturday social media post, Trump announced he had instructed the US Department of War to prepare for “possible action.” He threatened to send military forces into Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” unless the Nigerian government intervenes, warning that all aid to what he termed “the now disgraced country” would be terminated.

“If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians!” Trump wrote.

Secretary of State for War Pete Hegseth responded to the post, confirming: “Yes sir. The Department of War is preparing for action. Either the Nigerian Government protects Christians, or we will kill the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”

A massive raid on a drug-trafficking gang in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday sparked shootouts that left at least 60 suspects and four police officers dead, officials said.

The operation included officers in helicopters and armoured vehicles and targeted the notorious Red Command in the sprawling low-income favelas of Complexo de Alemao and Penha, police said.

At least 81 suspects were arrested, while 93 rifles and more than half a ton of drugs were seized, the state government said, adding that those killed “resisted police action.”

The operation was one of the most violent in Brazil’s recent history, with human rights organisations calling for investigations into the deaths.

African Americans and police brutality

Americans of all races, ethnicities, ages, classes, and genders have been subjected to police brutality.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, poor and working-class white people expressed frustration over discriminatory policing in northern cities. At about the same time, Jewish and other immigrants from southern and eastern Europe also complained of police brutality against their communities.

In the 1920s many urban police departments, especially in large cities such as New York and Chicago, used extralegal tactics against members of Italian-immigrant communities in efforts to crack down on organized crime.

In 1943 officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were complicit in attacks on Mexican Americans by U.S. servicemen during the so-called Zoot Suit Riots, reflecting the department’s history of hostility toward Hispanics (Latinos).

Regular harassment of homosexuals and transgender persons by police in New York City culminated in 1969 in the Stonewall riots, which were triggered by a police raid on a gay bar; the protests marked the beginning of a new era of militancy in the international gay rights movement.

And in the aftermath of the 2001 September 11 attacks, Muslim Americans began to voice complaints about police brutality, including harassment and racial profiling. Many local law-enforcement agencies launched covert operations of questionable legality designed to surveil and infiltrate mosques and other Muslim American organizations in an effort to uncover presumed terrorists, a practice that went unchecked for at least a decade.

Notwithstanding the variety among groups that have been subjected to police brutality in the United States, the great majority of victims have been African American. In the estimation of most experts, a key factor explaining the predominance of African Americans among victims of police brutality is antiblack racism among members of mostly white police departments. Similar prejudices are thought to have played a role in police brutality committed against other historically oppressed or marginalized groups.
Whereas racism is thought to be a major cause of police brutality directed at African Americans and other ethnic groups, it is far from the only one.

Other factors concern the unique institutional culture of urban police departments, which stresses group solidarity, loyalty, and a “show of force” approach to any perceived challenge to an officer’s authority. For rookie officers, acceptance, success, and promotion within the department depend upon adopting the attitudes, values, and practices of the group, which historically have been infused with antiblack racism.

Because African Americans have been the primary — though certainly not the only — target of police brutality in the United States, the remainder of this article will deal mainly with their experiences, both historically and in the present day.

The Great Migration

Interactions between African Americans and urban police departments were initially shaped by the Great Migration (1916–1970) of African Americans from the rural South into urban areas of the North and West, especially following World War II.

Most white communities, including white police departments, were unaccustomed to the presence of African Americans and reacted to their increasing numbers with fear and hostility, attitudes that were exacerbated by deeply ingrained racist stereotypes. Reflecting the beliefs of many whites, northern police departments acted upon the presumption that African Americans, and especially African American men, possessed an inherent tendency toward criminal behavior, one that required constant surveillance of African Americans and restrictions on their movements (segregation) in the interests of white safety. Accordingly, by the mid-1950s many urban police departments had implicitly reconceived their missions as essentially that of policing African Americans — i.e., protecting whites against Blacks.

The forms of police brutality to which this situation gave rise were variable and generally not limited to physical assault (e.g., beatings) and excessive use of force. They also included unlawful arrests, verbal abuse (e.g., racial slurs) and threats, sexual assaults against African American women, and police homicides (murders of civilians by police). Police were also sometimes complicit in drug dealing, prostitution, burglaries, protection schemes, and gun-smuggling within African American neighborhoods.

Although police brutality against African Americans had become a serious problem in many urban areas by the mid-20th century, most whites remained unaware of it until about the mid-1960s, in large part because most large-city newspapers (whose readerships were primarily white) did not consider it newsworthy. In contrast, incidences of police brutality were regularly covered in the Black press from the early 20th century, frequently in front-page articles. Likewise, local and national civil rights organizations collected thousands of affidavits and letters from African Americans documenting their direct experiences of police brutality.

Police brutality after World War II

For a variety of reasons, incidences of police brutality against African Americans became more frequent and more intense throughout the country in the decades following World War II. First, the victory of the forces of democracy in the war overseas created among African Americans expectations of greater freedom and democracy at home, especially as many of them had served in combat in the U.S. armed forces (albeit in racially segregated units).

As Black Americans began to assert their formal rights and liberties, demanding that they be respected by local governments, judiciaries, and law-enforcement agencies, their demands had the effect of reinforcing the tendency of white police officers to view themselves as protectors of white communities.

Second, the migration of rural whites to nearby cities in search of better economic opportunities encouraged police to view their own violence against African Americans as a more acceptable means of control than the mob hysteria that rural whites had been accustomed to and that urban spaces simply did not allow. In effect, police brutality replaced lynchings as a means of oppressing Blacks.

During this period, white supremacist and terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Council operated openly in Southern cities, where police brutality against African Americans was abetted by government and political leaders, district attorneys, and judges, among others.

Third, in other cities, especially in the North, the flight of whites to the suburbs and the natural growth of the African American population made African Americans more visible and allowed them to be more mobile within formerly white areas.

Such demographic changes made African Americans as a group appear more threatening to white police officers and allowed the latter to more easily justify extralegal tactics as a means of controlling African Americans’ mobility and limiting their use of public spaces.

Fourth, beginning in the 1970s, African Americans who had joined local police forces in large numbers as a result of aggressive recruitment and affirmative action programs themselves committed serious acts of brutality against African American civilians, in part because they wished to be seen as “good cops” and to be otherwise accepted within their departments.

Finally, the escalation of urban crime rates in the 1970s and ’80s, including in predominantly African American and other minority neighborhoods, strengthened the perception among white police officers and whites generally of African Americans as inherently criminal, a trend also reflected in a newly racially charged political and policy discourse, referred to by critics as the criminalization of the Black poor and working class.

Police brutality and race riots

From the 1960s, police brutality was a catalyst for many of the race riots (riots caused by racial dissensions or hatreds) that took place in urban America, including the Watts Riots of 1965 and the Detroit Riot of 1967. In 1980 the Liberty City section of Miami erupted over the police killing of an unarmed African American man.

During a period of three days, 18 people were killed and some 1,000 arrested, and more than $100 million in property damage was committed.

Twelve years later the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers and their subsequent acquittal on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and excessive use of force triggered the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, still considered the worst race riots in American history.

During a period of four days, more than 50 people were killed and more than 2,300 were injured, and property damage was estimated at about $1 billion.

In 2014 the fatal shooting of an unarmed African American teenager, Michael Brown, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and a grand jury’s subsequent decision not to indict the officer on criminal charges provoked rioting in that city.

Later race riots (along with peaceful demonstrations) followed the deaths in police custody of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland (2015), and George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota (2020), both of whom were African American.

Antibrutality campaigns

Most victims of police brutality, including not only African Americans but also whites and other ethnic groups, have come from the ranks of the poor and low-income working classes. They have consequently lacked significant political influence or the financial resources that are sometimes necessary to effectively publicize complaints of police brutality.

Nevertheless, antibrutality campaigns have been mounted in nearly every major U.S. city with a sizable Black population. In sometimes large demonstrations, members of victimized communities have demanded, in addition to an end to police brutality and accountability for guilty officers, major reforms including the hiring of more African American police officers and the placement of more African American officers in supervisory positions, racially integrated patrols or Black-only patrols in African American neighborhoods, civilian review boards, and federal investigation (e.g., by the Justice Department) of egregious cases of police brutality. Their tactics have included sit-ins, boycotts, picketing, and close monitoring of police activity, including (from the late 20th century) by means of videos taken with handheld cameras and mobile telephones.

In 2013 the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida, on charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, led to the founding of a powerful social movement, Black Lives Matter. The movement subsequently played a prominent role in nationwide protests following extreme acts of police brutality against African Americans. In retaliatory attacks in 2016, five white members of the Dallas, Texas, police department and three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were shot and killed.

Antibrutality campaigns tended to be led by activists at the grassroots level and by other members of the communities directly affected rather than by more-established civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League, whose memberships were drawn primarily from the Black middle class.

Indeed, Black middle-class support for antibrutality protests was often limited, largely because, like their white counterparts, middle-class Blacks generally favored tough crime-fighting measures to protect themselves and their property from Black criminals. Because they were relatively inexperienced as leaders, however, antibrutality activists often used direct and confrontational methods, preferring street protests over negotiations.

And because they generally lacked an institutional base and a clear strategy, they were often reactionary, acting in an ad hoc fashion and creating organizations and developing constituencies as the need arose.

Despite such limitations, they were usually effective, because they articulated the anger of their constituencies, who were generally suspicious of electoral politics (“the system”) and who had no faith that Black politicians would adequately address their concerns.

Items worth €88m (£76m; $102m) were taken from the world’s most-visited museum last Sunday, when four thieves wielding power tools broke into the building in broad daylight.

France’s justice minister has conceded security protocols “failed”, leaving the country with a “terrible image”.

The Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement that the arrests had been made on Saturday evening, without specifying how many people had been taken into custody.

One of the suspects was preparing to travel to Algeria, while it is understood the other was going to Mali.
Specialist police can detain and question them for up to 96 hours.

According to reports in French media on Sunday, DNA found at the scene of the robbery lead to the identification of one of the suspects.

The gang left behind a number of items, including gloves and a high-vis jacket.

It has previously been reported that they dropped a crown that once belonged to Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III.

The Paris prosecutor criticised the “premature disclosure” of information related to the case, adding that it hindered efforts to recover the jewels and find the thieves.

The thieves reportedly arrived at 09:30 (08:30 GMT), shortly after the museum opened to visitors.

The suspects arrived with a vehicle-mounted mechanical lift to gain access to the Galerie d’Apollon (Gallery of Apollo) via a balcony close to the River Seine.

Pictures from the scene showed the ladder leading up to a first-floor window.

Two of the thieves entered by cutting through the window with power tools.

They then threatened the guards, who evacuated the premises, and cut through the glass of two display cases containing jewels.

A preliminary report has revealed that one in three rooms in the area of the museum raided had no CCTV cameras, according to French media.

French police say the thieves were inside for four minutes and made their escape on two scooters waiting outside at 09:38.

The museum’s director told French senators this week that the only camera monitoring the exterior wall of the Louvre where they broke in was pointing away from the first-floor balcony that led to Gallery of Apollo.

CCTV around the perimeter was also weak and “ageing”, Laurence des Cars said, meaning that staff failed to spot the gang early enough to stop the theft.

Experts have also expressed concern that the jewels may have already been broken up into hundreds of pieces.

Security measures have since been tightened around France’s cultural institutions.

The Louvre has transferred some of its most precious jewels to the Bank of France following the heist. They will now be stored in the Bank’s most secure vault, 26m (85ft) below the ground floor of its elegant headquarters in central Paris.

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the detainees were arrested under administrative law for attempting to obstruct traffic illegally. A young woman who reportedly climbed onto a police car and verbally confronted officers was charged with hooliganism – a criminal offense.

Administrative penalties are a fast-track form of justice left over from the Soviet Union’s which after a recent amendment allows quickly imprisoning someone for up to 15 days.

The protest, which began around 8 pm, saw demonstrators lying down on the street and chanting “Fire to oligarchy”, as police repeatedly ordered them to move to the sidewalk. Officers formed a cordon in front of the parliament building to prevent further attempts to block the road. Traffic was later restored, though the rally continued on the adjacent sidewalks.

The government will declare a state of emergency in Lima within hours and is preparing a package of measures to tackle rising insecurity, Prime Minister Ernesto Alvarez said late on Thursday in a press conference.

The protest on Wednesday night, called by young Gen Z protesters, transport workers and civil groups, was the latest in a series of demonstrations against corruption and rising crime, which led to the dramatic midnight ouster of former President Dina Boluarte last Thursday.

Police chief says officer carried out shooting

Thousands of protesters amassed around the country, with hundreds clashing with police outside Congress in Lima. Police fired tear gas while some protesters hurled fireworks, rocks and burning objects.

“Everyone must go!” protesters chanted when they reached Congress and tried to tear down metal barriers protecting the building, leading to clashes.

A 32-year-old man, Eduardo Mauricio Ruiz, was killed during the protest and his death will be investigated. Peru’s prosecutor’s office said Ruiz died after being shot.

Later on Thursday, the head of Peru’s National Police (PNP), Oscar Arriola told reporters that Luis Magallanes, a member of the force, had been physically assaulted and carried out the shooting. Arriola added that Magallanes was being treated in hospital and had been removed from his duties.

Jeri expressed regret over Ruiz’s death in a post on X, saying the death would be “objectively” investigated. He blamed violence on “delinquents who infiltrated a peaceful demonstration to sow chaos.”

New interior minister promises police reform

After attending a meeting about the protests at Congress Thursday afternoon, Jeri told reporters he would ask Congress for “authority to legislate on public safety issues”.

Jeri said one focus would be prison reform, but did not elaborate on what those powers would entail.

Speaking to Congress soon after, newly-appointed Interior Minister Vicente Tiburcio, said the government would push for comprehensive reform to the national police, adding that 89 police and 22 civilians had been injured during the protest and 11 people were detained.

The Interior Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the police reform or Jeri’s request for expanded legislative powers.

In its 12th General Report published in 2002 (Developments concerning CPT standards in respect of police custody), the CPT directly focuses on the issue of training of police officers (§34, §49).

In its 20th General Report published in 2010 (Electrical discharge weapons), the CPT focuses again on the issues of training of police officers (§65, §78, §79).

In its 28th General Report published in 2019 (Preventing police torture and other forms of ill-treatment – reflections on good practices and emerging approaches), the CPT focuses that professional policing goes hand-in-hand with adequate training on the use of force in compliance with the principles of lawfulness, necessity and proportionality. Training should also provide opportunities to acquire appropriate investigative skills, taking due account of the age, gender, state of health, any disability or any other circumstances which may render certain persons under investigation particularly vulnerable. Moreover, no significant change can be expected without strong police leadership and management, which scrupulously supervise the observance of procedural safeguards and convey firm and unambiguous messages of zero tolerance of police ill-treatment (§71).

The CPT finds it positive that the police services cooperate with universities, and academic courses provided by universities form part of the syllabus for university training programmes for police officers (§76).

Considering that the Project is focused on training of police officers in procedural justice skills and de-escalation techniques, it should also be mentioned that the CPT encourages police practices which avoid common pitfalls associated with relying on preconceived conclusions. The CPT recommends the police services go outside ‘tunnel vision’ or ‘confirmation bias’ (§76). Further, the development of adequate initial and ongoing professional training is key in the effective implementation of any such framework for police interviewing (§80). Therefore, such an approach goes in line with Project which is focused on dialogue between the police and citizens in contrast to any punitive approaches.

Moreover, the CPT makes a special focus that introducing designated custody officers could also strengthen the practical implementation of various procedural and other safeguards. The police officers with the powers of arrest should be trained properly to pose the appropriate questions and to recognise and record indicative signs of a person in need of particular support and care. This is clearly good practice (§85).

Many cases of the European Court of Human Rights focus attention on the need of the European states to improve national systems of training of police officers in the area of prevention of harm and de-escalation techniques (Saso Gorgiev v. the FYRM, §47; Krastanov v. Bulgaria, §53; Mikhalkova and Others v. Ukraine, §36; Guliani and Gaggio v. Italy [GC], § 249; McCann and Оthers v. the UK [GC], §150; Soare and Others v. Romania, §129; Armani Da Silva v. the UK [GC], §247; Andronicou and Constantinou v. Cyprus, §194; Gül v. Turkey, п.§84-86; Ergi v. Turkey, §72; Nachova and Others v. Bulgaria [GC], §§ 95, 102, 106-108; Celniku v. Greece; Saso Gorgiev v. the FYRM, §49; Emars v. Latvia, §87; Gorovenky and Bugara v. Ukraine, §31-39).

In Celniku v. Greece, the ECtHR stated that Article 2 of the Convention related not only to the direct actions of police officers or security forces, but also to the planning of an operation or even the training of the relevant law enforcement personnel, if it can be proven that the law enforcement officers did not receive adequate training or that the level of their training was not commensurate with the complexity of the tasks assigned to them. One of the possible reasons for the killing of the applicants’ relative was the lack of proper practical training of the police officers.

In Saso Gorgiev v. the FYRM (§51), Abdullah Yilmaz v. Turkey (§§56-57), and Enukidze and Girgvliani v. Georgia (§284), the ECtHR focused that States had to set high professional standards for their law enforcement systems and ensure that persons serving in such bodies meet the established requirements. In particular, when equipping police forces with firearms, care should be taken to provide appropriate special training for police officers.