When deaths at the hands of police during security operations in the state of Rio de Janeiro reached extremely high levels, the Supreme Federal Court determined that a series of measures be adopted to contain the violence. One of the measures was the use of portable body cameras for all Military Police (PM, for its initials in Portuguese) during working hours.
Two years later, when the measure was fully put into practice, a special report by TV Globo and GloboNews investigated 774 legal cases from 2023 and 2024 in which police were asked to hand over body camera footage. The aim was to monitor the use of these images in courts. Reporters uncovered shocking images of alleged police misconduct and footage of an officer killed and another injured while on duty. The series reported another worrisome finding: in 60% of the cases analyzed, images were not handed over to the courts by the Military Police.
“The press monitored the timelines for the cameras to be installed, demanded they were installed and that the court decision that forced their use be complied with. But the press hadn't delved into the next phase. I think the great asset of this report was turning the page on the installation and delving into the other phase: how the cameras worked, or didn’t,” GloboNews reporter Marcelo Bruzzi told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). “When we show that in most cases, the Military Police did not send the video, this is very serious because it represents a waste of public money. The contract is worth millions, the state of Rio, the citizens, are paying a fortune for the police to use this equipment and these images need to be preserved.”
The series illustrates the importance of persistence in journalism, as well as the lack of transparency in Brazil.
The starting point for the work was obtaining a spreadsheet via the Access to Information Law (LAI) that contained a list with all the numbers of legal proceedings in which the Military Police was asked to provide images from body cameras. What should have been a common request via the LAI took four months to be fulfilled. The law provides that requests must be responded to within 20 days, extendable for another 10. Bruzzi had to contact the State Comptroller General because the deadlines for submitting the documentation were not met.
“It wasn’t easy to get [the spreadsheet]. Unfortunately, here in Brazil we have many public bodies, especially in state governments and city halls, that believe that public information is not public, it is confidential. So, it is very common for the public administration to try to hide public information, and then the citizen, the journalist, has to fight until the end to have access to this data,” Bruzzi said.
With the list finally in hand and a total of 774 cases, meticulous work began to analyze the material. Bruzzi and series producer Guilherme Ramalho spent six months manually opening each of the cases. The duo listed case by case what the legal action was about, whether the camera images were provided or not, the reason the images were not made available, and, when there was video footage, the duo watched hours and hours of recordings to find the moment when the action was caught on camera. According to the report, of the 774 cases, in 473 the videos were not sent, in 215 the videos were sent in full and in 87 only part of the requested images were made available. In total, five reports were broadcast on TV and nine articles were published on the G1 website.
“We saw the beginning of the implementation of the cameras and what we saw is that there is an improvement at the same time that the equipment starts to be used by the troops. [Complete] recordings were only made available in [about] 200 cases, which is a serious failure. Even so, there were many, many hours of material to watch,” Ramalho told LJR. “The lesson for journalism is to always persist: have an idea for the story, think of a way to investigate and be persistent in the investigation given the limited resources we have in the newsroom. It took just two people to analyze almost 800 cases.”
Most of the cases analyzed by the report involve arrests of suspects for drug trafficking in communities in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The team's investigation showed that, in almost 500 cases, the footage requested was not sent by the military police to the courts. According to the team's investigation, in around 200 of those cases the police themselves admitted that the images were deleted from the system because the agents did not activate the "occurrence mode" button, which saves the files for a year.
“It is important to show both sides in this context of public safety, which includes the honest police officer, who works correctly, who is shot while on duty. Showing the difficulties and challenges, it is not easy to be a police officer in Rio de Janeiro,” Bruzzi said. “Now, the issue of misconduct is very serious. The police officer who does not fulfill his role, who charges bribes, shoots an unarmed suspect, changes the scene of a crime to incriminate someone, will be punished and the proof of the image is very strong.”
According to the report, the images allegedly show abuses of authority, crimes committed by military police and human rights violations. According to the TV Globo and GloboNews investigation, one video appears to show an agent shooting a robbery suspect in the back even though his hands are in the air. There were also cases that highlighted positive examples of good practice, such as refusing bribes. Another impactful case was the moment an agent was killed while on duty. According to the report, cases were found in which the images provided elements for the courts to convict defendants, and occasions in which the recordings helped to acquit people who were arrested.
“These images reveal a series of institutional weaknesses. We cannot place responsibility solely on the police. After all, they are assigned to a job. The least that could be expected is information about the area where they are assigned, what they might find,” retired colonel Robson Rodrigues, former chief of staff of the Military Police, told GloboNews.
In addition to analyzing the legal actions and watching all the recordings, the investigative work also included verifying the legal cases and talking with the institutions involved, including the Military Police itself, the State Public Prosecutor's Office and the State Public Defender's Office. According to the report, in approximately a year and a half of the Military Police using the body cameras, the internal comptroller department opened 2,657 cases that have already resulted in the arrest or administrative detention of 170 police officers. The articles also showed that in the cases in which the videos were delivered and the courts have already handed down a sentence, 74% of the suspects were convicted.
“This data also reinforces the importance of this equipment for police activity. In all the conversations we had, the use of body cameras was highly praised as an important measure to improve security in the state for everyone. After we broadcast the series, the public prosecutor’s office opened 12 investigative procedures and the Military Police removed nine police officers from the streets and administratively detained another six who appear in the images,” Ramalho said.
The Military Police believes that the use of body cameras is a path of no return, and that these materials will be very useful for police training processes and for working to change culture, the entity’s spokesperson, Cláudia Moraes, told GloboNews.
“The corporation is fully interested in the transparency of its actions and this issue of improving responses to requests has been worked on, regardless of the type of incident. It could be an incident of an approach or some type of questioning made by the courts, in the same way as we have the issue of lethality,” Moraes told GloboNews.
In Brazil, the team found that eleven of the 26 states already use or are in the process of implementing body cameras. The federal government defends the recording of police work across the country, but states have the independence to decide whether or not to adopt this type of monitoring.
