Military and civilian police killed 650 people in the state of São Paulo between January and October 2025. This is the second highest number of deaths caused by security agents in the last five years, just behind 2024, the year marked by Operation Verão, which officially left 56 dead and became the deadliest action in the history of the São Paulo military police since the Carandiru massacre.
The figures show that, with the Tarcísio de Freitas (Republican) government, there has been a reversal of the trend of police lethality in the state. The previous administration, led by João Doria (former PSDB), achieved a 54% reduction in deaths caused by security agents between 2020 and 2022.
During an equivalent period under Tarcísio, the state experienced a 69% increase in police mortality, considering the months of January to October in both comparisons – data for November 2025 has not yet been released. The figures include instances where officers were both on and off duty. Before the governor took office, the statistics were at their lowest level in 20 years.
When questioned, the SSP (Secretariat for Public Security) stated that “all events of this nature are subject to rigorous investigation by the civil and military police, under the control of the internal affairs bodies, the public prosecutor’s office and the judiciary” and that “since 2023, more than 1,200 agents have been arrested, dismissed or expelled for misconduct.”“.
Cases in which police officers killed unarmed people, who posed no risk, had varying outcomes throughout the year. In July, for example, carpenter Guilherme Dias Santos Ferreira, 26, was shot in the back while running to catch a bus. He had just left his job in a furniture factory in Parelheiros, south of São Paulo.
Prime Minister Fabio Anderson Pereira de Almeida, who was off duty and claimed to have mistaken Guilherme for a thief, was arrested more than a month after the crime and detained for less than two weeks. The court’s decision which released him took into account, as mitigating circumstances, the fact that he was a first-time offender, that he had a job and a fixed residence.
On the other hand, there have been flagrant arrests of police officers filmed by their own body cameras attacking unarmed people. In June, for example, a homeless man was shot and killed after being detained by police for more than an hour.
A lieutenant and a soldier were arrested more than a month later, after Internal Affairs analyzed the footage. They said the victim tried to snatch a gun from a police officer. The recording shows the homeless man moving calmly and apparently obeying police orders.
In July, a police chase in the Paraisópolis favela, in the southern zone, ended in the death of a suspect who had his hands raised. The death of 24-year-old Igor Oliveira de Morais Santos sparked community outrage: streets were closed, trash cans were set on fire, press vehicles were destroyed, and cars were overturned by vandals protesting the killing.
The operating details of the prime minister’s body cameras — which changed with the purchase of new equipment under the Tarcísio administration — were key to gathering evidence in both cases. The death of homeless Jeferson de Souza Santos, 23, was only filmed because the old model, from the manufacturer Axon, records continuously and without sound even if the police officer does not activate the equipment. There is footage of Jefferson’s death, but there is no audio.
In the case of the death in Paraisópolis, the incident occurred due to remote activation, a functionality that only exists in the new PM cameras, manufactured by Motorola. When a camera is manually activated, it also activates any other camera within a 20 meter radius.
This is exactly what happened in the São Paulo favela. According to the company, the camera that filmed Igor’s death with his arms raised was activated remotely due to the proximity of other equipment.
Data shows that the regions of Ribeirão Preto, Campinas and Piracicaba, inside São Paulo, and the municipalities of São Bernardo do Campo and Guarulhos, in the capital’s metropolitan region, experienced the highest increases in police deaths in 2025, compared to last year.
“This is what we call, here at the ombudsman’s office, the internalization of deaths,” explains police ombudsman Mauro Caseri. He says the agency analyzes incidents to understand whether or not police fatalities are linked to organized crime behavior.
According to him, the high mortality rate is worrying and it is also necessary to discuss the quality of the evidence collected during investigations against the police officers. It is not uncommon for cases involving evidence of police abuse of force to result in acquittals in court, he said.
“It’s always necessary to check whether the location has been preserved, whether body cameras have been used. You have a set of technologies that could bring us to a more effective conclusion in cases that are not respected,” he says.
Questioned, the SSP said that all police operational protocols “are regularly reviewed” and that the department invests in the acquisition of equipment with less offensive potential, “such as the 3,500 non-lethal weapons incorporated in the police arsenal, and in the expansion of the use of portable operational cameras (COP) of the military police, the implementation of which strictly follows the agreement of the Federal Court (STF)”.
The ministry also says the state has recorded 1,061 deaths in clashes with on-duty police officers over the past two years, “representing a reduction of nearly 25 percent from the early years of the previous administration.”
For the scientific coordinator of the Center for Studies on Violence of the USP, Sérgio Adorno, there is an increasing contamination of the field of public security – which should have technical management – by politics.
“The political cost of being condescending to lethality is low. Why? Because there are no costs. Those who blame are politicized sectors of society, linked to human rights, and areas of research that show that this type of policy does not solve the security problem,” says Adorno. “The government, in a way, accepts that these excesses are committed in the name of public order, tranquility, etc. And not only does it think so, but it often feels that it has popular support.”
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