Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Race and Social Problems https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-018-9225-5 The Decision to Shoot Black Suspects in Brazil: The Police Ofcer’s Dilemma Marcus Eugênio Oliveira Lima 1  · Camilla Lima de Araujo 1  · Emília Silva Poderoso 1 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Reports of Amnesty International (2015) indicate that Brazilian police are among the most violent in the world, and that such violence victimizes, above all, black citizens. Using the “First Person Shooter Task” (FPST), developed by Correll et al. (2002), we analyzed in three studies the impacts of suspect skin color on the Brazilian civilian and military police decision to shoot. The frst study involved 97 white college students. The results indicated the presence of racist shooter bias: participants shot a black armed suspect faster than a white one and took longer to shoot an unarmed black suspect than a white one, and also made more mistakes not shooting the armed white man than the armed black man. In the second study, 60 male military police ofcers (MP) participated, 10 of them were white, 41 brown and 9 black. All police ofcers had 3 months of police service. The results indicated again the presence of racist shooter bias, but only in the response times. There was no efect of the participant’s skin color. The third study was conducted with 58 male MPs, 11 of them were white, 37 brown and 10 black, all with more than 10 years of police service. The same pattern of study 2 was found. The general results demonstrate that levels of racist shooter bias of police ofcers are not higher than that of civilians. The data are discussed considering the risk of racism in making extreme life and death decisions. Keywords Racism · Brazil · Shooting decision · Civilians · Military police Introduction On July 26, 2012, three military police ofcers, in a routine approach for questioning in São Paulo, killed the publicist Ricardo Prudente Aquino, 42, because they confused his cell phone with a gun. On October 29, 2015, this time in Rio de Janeiro, two young black men were traveling on a motorcycle. One of them was holding a hydraulic jack when they encountered military policemen on a routine patrol. One of the policemen mistook the object for a gun and shot the young man. The driver lost control, the motorcycle hit a wall and both riders died. A few months earlier, on Febru- ary 20, 2015, again in Rio de Janeiro, Alan de Souza Lima, 15, was shot dead by military police ofcers while he was talking to friends and recording a video using his cell phone. Alan, who wound up flming his own death, was mistaken for an armed robber. Such crimes against innocent and unarmed citizens hap- pen very frequently in Brazil. In fact, Brazil is one of the most violent countries in the world. In 2012, it ranked 10th in homicides by frearms: over 11% of these crimes world- wide occurred in Brazil. In 2014, Brazil was in frst place, with 59,627 homicides, the highest number ever recorded (Valor Econômico 2016, March 22). Blacks accounted for 75.1% of murdered youths in 2014 in Brazil. It should be noted that blacks (including browns 1 ) are 53.6% of the Brazilian population (IBGE 2015). In fact, vic- timization of blacks in Brazil is increasing: the total homicide rate against the black population increased from 71.7% in 2003 to 158.9% in 2014, representing a 120% increase (Waiself- isz 2015). The probability of a black adolescent becoming a homicide victim is 3.7 times higher than that of a white person (IPEA 2013). In the Brazilian Northeast 2 region, one of the * Marcus Eugênio Oliveira Lima marcuseolima@gmail.com 1 Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Av. Orlando Tavares Macedo, 800, Cond. San Diego, Casa 10, Aracaju, Sergipe CEP 49000447, Brazil 1 The category “browns” (pardos) includes various mixtures of black, white and indigenous ancestry. 2 Brazil is ofcially divided into fve regions: North, Northeast, Mid- west, Southeast, and South.