Under Tarcísio (Republicanos), São Paulo Police Have Killed More Than 2,500 People, One Every 12 Hours. No Officer Has Been Convicted

The Count

Tarcísio de Freitas, of the Republicanos party, took office on January 1, 2023. Since then, São Paulo's police forces have killed, on and off duty, 813 people in 2024 and 835 in 2025, according to the last two editions of the Brazilian Public Security Yearbook, which consolidates the official records of the state secretariats. From January to August 2026, the state Public Security Secretariat (SSP-SP) itself recorded 480 more, according to a survey by Ponte Jornalismo: 393 by on-duty officers and 87 by off-duty officers, one death every 12 hours.

Those three periods alone add up to 2,128 dead. The year 2023 does not appear as an absolute number in the open sources consulted, but the state prosecutors' office counts 463 people killed by military police alone that year (357 on duty and 106 off duty), not including the Civil Police. Adding it up, the Tarcísio government passes 2,500 people killed by police, and the number grows every month. The prosecutors' office, which uses a different base, goes further: 877 killed in 2025, the highest figure in six years.

What Changed in 2023

The prosecutors' series shows the jump. On-duty military police killed 262 people in 2022, the last year of the previous administration; 357 in 2023; 653 in 2024; and 703 in 2025. Between Tarcísio's first and third years, deaths by on-duty military police grew 88%. The 2025 Yearbook recorded that São Paulo's increase in 2024, of almost 61%, was the largest in the country, in a year when deaths by police fell nationwide. The Brazilian Public Security Forum attributes the rise to Operation Escudo (Shield), in the Baixada Santista, and to the hollowing out of the body camera program.

In 2026 the curve did not come down. From January to April, there were 241 deaths, against 233 in the same period of 2025; 227 by the military police and 14 by the Civil Police. In April, deaths by police amounted to 23% of all violent deaths in the state, one in four. In the cumulative total through August, 24%.

No Officer Convicted

Operation Escudo began in July 2023, after the death of a Rota (elite military police unit) soldier in Guarujá, and Operation Verão (Summer) followed it in 2024. According to the report by the Vladimir Herzog Institute released on July 27, 2026, the two left 84 dead. Of the 23 cases the institute followed, 17 were shelved by the prosecutors' office without charges. Nine officers became defendants: four from Rota, for the deaths of two men, and five others, for the deaths of four. None had been convicted as of the report's publication, which calls the operation a “symbol of the trivialization of death and the absence of state accountability”.

Outside the Baixada, the picture is the same. Abestadão searched the open sources for any conviction of an officer for a death since the start of the Tarcísio government and found none: not in the Vladimir Herzog Institute report, not in coverage of São Paulo jury trials, not in the statements in which the SSP answers the press by talking about officers “arrested, dismissed or expelled”, without citing a single sentence. The pattern predates Tarcísio, and his government did not change it. Research using São Paulo Court of Justice data shows that, of 1,293 police actions resulting in death in the capital between 2015 and 2020, 122 led to charges and 20 ended in conviction: 1.5%. Last week, on October 30, the jury acquitted the two military police officers accused of killing Igor Oliveira de Moraes Santos, 24, in Paraisópolis, in July 2025.

What the Government Says

In a statement to Agência Brasil, the SSP said that “since 2023, more than 1,300 officers have been arrested, dismissed or expelled from the forces”, without saying how many were over deaths. To TMC, it said that “all incidents of deaths resulting from police intervention are investigated”, with oversight from internal affairs units, the prosecutors' office and the courts. To Metrópoles, the department compared the first two years of the administration with the last two of the previous one and spoke of a “reduction of approximately 25% in deaths resulting from clashes with on-duty police”, a comparison that uses 2021 and 2022 as its base, the lowest years of the decade, when body cameras were being rolled out.

On the Baixada operations, the government says all deaths were investigated by the Civil Police, with oversight from the military police internal affairs unit, the prosecutors' office and the courts, and cites 2,162 arrests and 238 weapons seized. The result of that oversight, three years and more than 2,500 deaths later, is the one in the previous paragraph: no convictions. If any exists, Abestadão will correct this piece and say where it is.