The São Paulo Court accepted a complaint from the Public Prosecutor’s Office and made two military police officers (PMs) from the Tobias de Aguiar Ostensive Patrols (Rota) division defendants, charged with qualified homicide and for manipulating evidence of the execution of a person during Operation Escudo, carried out in Baixada Santista in 2023.
The defendants, Captain Marcos Correa de Moraes Verardino and Corporal Ivan Pereira da Silva, were also removed from their positions for the duration of the legal proceedings. The decision was made by Judge Thomaz Correa Farqui, of the 3rd Criminal Court of Guarujá (SP). The defendants can still appeal the decision.
“This case concerns a very serious crime, consisting of aggravated homicide, committed in collusion and by military police officers in the exercise of their duties. The records indicate that the defendants, taking advantage of their positions and using public weapons made available to them by the State (for the defense of society), fled their official duties and then acted as dangerous criminals. And in so doing, they executed (according to a cursory and provisional analysis) an immobilized person, without any ability to react,” said the judge in the decision.
The judge also justified the removal of the agents from their duties. “If it weren’t just the possibly distorted personality of the accused, it is also clear that they would have, according to the complaint, acted to manipulate the evidence, which they did by both erasing images from the cameras present at the crime scene and also by modifying the crime scene (probably even hiding part of the ammunition used in the execution),” said the judge in the decision.
For the judge, the police officers’ attitude shows that the same type of crime could be committed again if they continued to perform their duties.
In a statement, the Public Security Secretariat said that it “does not comment on court decisions.”
The government of the state of São Paulo carried out the Operation Shield in 2023from July to September, in Baixada Santista. The police action left 28 civilians dead. The operation was a reaction to the death, on July 27, of Military Police soldier Patrick Bastos Reis, a member of Rota, who was shot and killed in Guarujá.
Criticism
In early August 2023, residents of neighborhoods where deaths occurred as a result of Operation Shield, in the city of Guarujá, on the coast of São Paulo, reported that police officers ran randomly people identified as former prisoners or with a police record.
The reports were collected by a committee formed by state deputies from the Legislative Assembly of the State of São Paulo (Alesp), representatives of the Human Rights Commission of the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB-SP), the Public Defender’s Office of the State of São Paulo, the Police Ombudsman’s Office of the State of São Paulo, and the State Council for the Defense of Human Rights (Condepe) of the Secretariat of Justice and Citizenship of the State of São Paulo.
