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| NEWS > 03 December 2005 |
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LA police ask Philip Morris fo
LOS ANGELES- Philip Morris USA has agreed to donate $50,000 to the Los Angeles Police Department to help pay for an investigation into counterfeiting of the company's cigarettes.
The funds, which were solicited by police Chief William Bratton, have drawn criticism from ethics watchdogs and others, who worry the deal opens the door for better services to go to crime victims who can afford to pay.
The City Council's Public Safety Committee on Monday postponed a decision on whether to accept the Philip Morris donation, which was endorsed earlier by the Police Commission.
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Seattle Times - United States
03 December 2005
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Rights group accuses Brazilian
By Paulo Winterstein
The Associate Press
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Police contribute to violence in Brazil's slums, barely keeping a presence except for raids that endanger innocent lives, Amnesty International said in a report released Friday.
The London-based rights group said successive Brazilian governments had allowed police corruption and abuse to become entrenched, rarely investigating rights violations. Some judges accept confessions extracted under torture, it said.
In 2003, more than 2,000 police killings in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were not investigated but instead attributed to "resistance followed by death," the report said, citing official statistics.
Few slums have a steady police presence but are subjected to raids that result in bloody shootouts, according to the report. Judges sometimes sign warrants that allow police to search entire neighborhoods, encouraging the view that all poor people are criminals, Amnesty said.
These tactics reinforce the "impression that police operations are effectively invasions into the community ... trapping thousands between criminal violence and the violent methods adopted by the police," the report said.
Elizabete Silveira, who lives in the poor São Paulo neighborhood of Sapopemba, said about one such police operation in August: "The only thing missing was a soundtrack to make it look like a Hollywood movie."
"Police rappelled down on ropes from helicopters, and when we went out on the street it looked like guerrilla warfare," she said. "... The community was very frightened."
The São Paulo State Public Safety Bureau denied Amnesty's charges that police were nearly absent in poor neighborhoods and defended the operation in Sapopemba, saying 81 people were arrested, including the chief of a drug gang.
Brazil, population 186 million, had 46,678 homicides in 2004, according to Justice Ministry figures, making it one of the world's most violent countries.
Homicide rates in some poor communities are 60 times higher than in wealthy ones.
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