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Police deaths up 57 percent in Brazil’s Sao Paulo

02 November 2012 05:06 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Violence against police has hit a new high in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state, with 88 police officers killed in the first 10 months of this year, officials said, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

The number is 57 percent higher than that registered in the whole course of last year, the state’s military police said, adding that 18 of the 88 killed were retirees.

President Dilma Rousseff has offered to help the state deal with the new wave of violence against law enforcement personnel.

On Thursday evening, the federal government said Sao Paulo Governor Geraldo Alckmin has accepted the offer and representatives of the federal and state governments were to meet next week to map out a joint strategy to fight crimes.

The latest killings occurred late Wednesday, when two officers were shot dead in a slum in the state capital Sao Paulo. Like most of the cases this year, they were off-duty, and in this case, heading home after a day’s work.

Sao Paulo state’s Public Security Secretary Antonio Ferreira Pinto has denied allegations that drug dealers were waging a war against the police, saying that the state government was in control of the situation.

In an anti-narcotics operation in a city slum earlier this week, however, police found a list with the names of police officers believed to have been targeted by drug gangs.

Sao Paulo is struggling with an overall rise in violent crime.

On Wednesday, nine people were killed in the Sao Paulo metropolitan area. From January to September, 3,536 homicides were reported in the state, up 9.5 percent from 2011.