The disaster of a mega-operation in Alemão and Penha by a government that outsources its command.

I spent the entire day giving interviews to explain the irresponsibility of the government and the operational disaster of a police operation that laid bare the improvisation and populism in the management of public security. These are 16 provisional assessments awaiting further data. And I hope to continue contributing to the discussion about the largest single-person operation in Rio and the one with the highest number of fatalities ever produced so far.

1. Abandonment of the Population and Exposure to Risk

The operation left approximately five million residents without police presence, immobilizing 2.500 police officers for immediate deployment, which implies altering the schedule of about 10 police officers and keeping them on standby. This is a larger force than many state police forces, and without the capacity to maintain mobilization and commitment beyond a short period of time. This contingent, concentrated in a single point of the city, immobilized police forces beyond the state's reach, thus creating opportunities for opportunistic violent crimes and predictable, targeted attacks by armed groups in retaliation. And even more obviously, it shortened the operation's own lifespan, maximizing its risks. The result was increased collective vulnerability, heightened fear, and compromised public security services in the metropolitan region.

2. Increased Lethality and Victimization

The operation was conducted, for the most part, with generalist agents who do not work in specialized units and are not qualified in high-risk police operations. To a large extent, they are conventional police officers who handle routine bureaucratic, investigative, and operational duties, and do not possess a high standard of defensive shooting, either by police shooting modality or by type of weapon. For professional reasons, they operate in small squads or troops, not as tactical units, lacking tactical discipline or specialization for high-risk scenarios. This improvisation, resulting from the summoning of police officers without expertise and technical preparation for special police operations, amplified the chances of lethality and victimization, among both police officers and civilians, multiplying professional and institutional insecurity, the opportunity for stray bullets, and the undue exposure of agents. This reveals the manipulation of police officers as political commodities and the cheapening of their lives, just as it does for the residents of the peripheries from which most of the Rio de Janeiro police officers come.

3. City Paralysis, Mobility Collapse, and Production of Panic and Insecurity

The action made the circulation of people, goods, merchandise, and services impossible. The uncoordinated territorial blockade imposed on an area with approximately 200 inhabitants and about 500 passersby in 5,2 km² generated urban collapse, directly affecting the daily functioning of the city and imposing economic, political, and social losses. This produced more public insecurity. The warlike spectacle aggravated collective fear, fueled moral panic, and disseminated a generalized perception of insecurity. Instead of calming things down and ensuring routine in the city, the predictability and regularity of its police actions, the government produced fear and social disorientation. Furthermore, it compromised the production and distribution of wealth, imposing existential and material losses on the population of the metropolitan region.

4. Impaired Response Capacity

The excessive and unsustainable mobilization of 2.500 state agents compromised the visible and rapid response capacity of the 190 and 192 emergency services, hindering the response to real incidents in other areas of the city, such as robberies, assaults, and traffic accidents, leaving thousands of residents adrift, at the mercy of a lack of policing and prompt assistance in the face of emergency demands.

5. Sabotage of Intelligence and Investigation Work

By leading to the deaths of 64 people, whether suspects or not, the operation ended up sabotaging the intelligence and investigative work of the police themselves. After all, the dead, if they are indeed "criminals," would be precisely those who could reveal the partnerships between the State and crime, the exchange of favors with clients from below, alongside, and above, destroying the possibilities of elucidating the criminal networks and the bosses, partners, and employees from the State and politics who make up this criminal political economy.

6. Exhaustion of Repressive Remedies

The politically motivated, trivialized, and disorderly use of police operations—an expensive and noble resource that produces qualified and focused repression—has led to the exhaustion of the repressive capacity of the military and civil police, who are becoming incapable, in the short and medium term, of sustaining the results of the repression they themselves produced. 

It is important to remember that the police are a force that is constantly on call and ready for immediate deployment, and therefore do not have a stockpile of repressive resources, being continuously employed in every effective police action. In other words, there is no such thing as a stockpile of repressive resources. Thus, its excessive expenditure, abuse, or misuse leads to the exhaustion of its own capacity to police. This is one of the serious effects of operations used for electoral spectacle. 

It should also be clarified that no operation, anywhere, is capable of producing control of territory and population indefinitely, due to the scarce nature of police repressive resources. Thus, as explained by the doctrine of special police operations, the effects of operations are specific and temporary, limited in time and space, and with high operational costs. Therefore, they require highly qualified planning and management.

7. Services rendered to Organized Crime

One should not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs of investigation and intelligence. Paradoxically, by killing alleged criminals, the State has done a service to organized crime, eliminating potential members of its criminal-commercial base. This is a cheap, precarious, and easily replaceable workforce, but one that is costly to keep quiet both inside and outside prisons.

The CV's leadership core remained untouched and protected by the exchange of gunfire between the police and the drug traffickers, who cannot retreat or surrender until the criminal leaders have left the territory with the support of those who have accurate shooting skills, police registration, and permissiveness anywhere: state agents allied with crime and militiamen.

8. Operational Inefficiency and Maintaining the Power of the CV

The operation had little impact on the CV's coercive capacity, as has been the case for the last 40 years in Rio de Janeiro. After all, the CV's coercive capacity does not depend on the use of rifles to control geographically irregular perimeters, without a clear field of vision with at least 180 degrees of rotation.

Rifles are very heavy, have low mobility, and offer little advantage in rough terrain. For criminals, when employing low-skilled labor, it is more advantageous to use automatic weapons that require less specialization, are lighter, can be used by anyone without much training, allow them to shoot while running, jumping, or moving, and are easy to reload while on the move.

Rifles require more skill, decision-making ability, and tactical positioning for effective performance. You can't learn them solely from internet tutorials. In the heat of a shootout, they are the first weapons to be abandoned along the way, contributing to the operational outcome, delaying the police, and allowing for faster criminal movements.

09. Political Planning and Disregard for Protocols

Under electoral interference, the planning of the joint operation appears to have ignored the operational protocols for police operations of the PCERJ and PMERJ themselves, drawn up in 2018, which determine technical parameters for planning, command and control, and evaluation of operational performance by tactical group.

If the police had simply followed their protocols, the results would not have been the deaths of 64 individuals, the increase in public insecurity, and the paralysis of life in Rio de Janeiro.

It is important to emphasize that there is a doctrine of international police operations and of state police forces, as well as technical and scientific criteria for evaluating performance.

10. Misinformation and Lack of Leadership

Without an operations center to feed the media and inform the public about what was happening during the operation and the changes in urban order, rumors, gossip, and misinformation prevailed—the true sources of public insecurity. This fostered despair and chaos, paralyzing essential services in the city and leaving the population disoriented and vulnerable, at risk of shootings and other violence.

There was a lack of chain of command and control with coordination. Here, once again, it was up to the State to create public insecurity and multiply it to its extreme. No police operation can paralyze a city. This is an expression of abuse and misuse of police power by those who govern. It was a matter of reproducing the 3 S's POLICY: first, it scares the population with showy police, then it demonstrates a burst of authority with bravado, a stern face, and a puffed-up attitude, and finally it promotes operational fixes that are not sustainable in the medium and long term but have a high publicity effect.

11. Homework Done Badly

The leader who demands integration didn't even do his homework: he neither integrated nor coordinated his own state agencies, nor did he seek to coordinate their functions during the operation. Instead of acting systematically and in a planned manner, each agency was left adrift, subject to its own corporatism, and the result was the collapse of public functioning and the exacerbation of collective fear.

a) Public Prosecutor's Office (MP)

The Public Prosecutor's Office should have been involved from the planning phase, ensuring focus, legality, and qualified repression. It is the responsibility of the Public Prosecutor's Office to monitor the execution of operations, control the use of force, define investigative priorities, and safeguard fundamental rights, preventing the trivialization of death as a public policy.

b) Public Defender's Office

The Public Defender's Office should have worked alongside the Public Prosecutor's Office, maintaining mobile units and emergency assistance channels for the affected population. Its role would have been to protect residents at risk, guide families of victims, and guarantee access to justice in cases of violations resulting from the operation.

c) State Military Fire Department

The State Fire Department should be mobilized to ensure prompt medical assistance and to act in rescues and medical emergencies during the operation. Without this presence, lives are lost due to negligence, and help arrives too late—if it arrives at all.

d) Municipal Guard

The country's largest municipal guard force should have been called in to manage traffic, divert bus routes, guide pedestrian flow, and prevent the city from coming to a complete standstill. Instead, the city was abandoned to chaos, with no traffic control or logistical support.

(e) Inspectors and Traffic Agents

Traffic inspectors and agents should have been integrated into the operational plan, working together with the security guards to clear roads, signal roadblocks, and prevent urban collapse. Their absence reinforced logistical paralysis and a feeling of collective abandonment. The result was a "mixed-up" operation, without coordination and without an effective chain of command—a true reflection of the governmental "me alone" approach, in which each agency was demobilized or ignored. The disaster was foreshadowed by the way it was executed: with mismanagement of the chain of command and control, without integration, and without shared public responsibility.

12. The "Me Alone" Bloc and the False Theater of War

You don't ask for federal support with armored vehicles like you're borrowing a cup of coffee. You can't put the Armed Forces to work as "Uber drivers" for security.

If the support of the Armed Forces is needed, then it is necessary to request and share the planning, command, and control, in order to also divide responsibility for successes and failures.

An integrated operation is not an impromptu weekend barbecue where everyone brings what they have, forgets to bring the meat and to chill the beer. It's not the mixed-up atmosphere of an impromptu samba circle, where the rhythm is lost and the laughter is out of tune.

There needs to be a joint plan, with a beginning, middle, and end, to avoid a repeat of the dramatic end of the Alemão operation in 2010, where the Armed Forces entered and remained for months precisely because there weren't enough police officers to maintain control of the territory.

The spectacle of a war without an army has demoralized the government in yet another futile effort, while the damage inflicted on crime will be offset in a week of regional and national revenue. Whether through naiveté, ignorance, poor political advice, or opportunism, an "Instagrammable" operation was devised to catapult the ruler, demonstrating that he has real and legal power, capable of acting alone without anyone's support, replicating the heroic "me alone" government narrative.

Since such an operation could not be sustained from the outset, for basic logistical reasons, time passed and the 2.500 police officers were forcibly disengaged, and the operation became a poisoned chalice: it cannot continue because it lacks legs; it cannot be discontinued because the operational results produced do not offset the cost of the deaths and the material and existential losses of the residents of the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area.

And, of course, once again, the concealment of the political responsibility of the commander-in-chief of the police meant placing the blame on the Supreme Federal Court and the federal government, which has also fallen short when it comes to public security policy.

13. It's My Fault and I'll Blame Whoever I Want

As is typical, a governor who becomes a crowd-pleaser, serving as a poster boy for operations, becomes dependent on "Instagrammable" operational results, regardless of the legality with which they were produced. All municipal, state, and federal governors become dependent on what the police can produce and deliver. And they are almost forced to turn a blind eye to the misuse and abuse of police power. When the operational results are good, every governor becomes the father of the police operation and turns into a kind of jack-of-all-trades, with a thousand and one political and partisan uses for the police. And in a context of outsourcing the command of public security to corporatist and partisan groups, the governor abdicates responsibility as commander-in-chief and attributes the blame to someone else at the federal, state, or municipal level according to convenience, coexistence, and complicity.

He's bluffing when he says that the ADPF das Favelas (Arguição de Descumprimento de Preceito Fundamental das Favelas) handcuffed the police, when in reality what the ADPF did was demand police professionalism and compliance with the police doctrine of use of force and, in turn, the doctrine of police operations.

ADPF 635 demanded, for the first time, that the police be called Police with a capital “P”.

During its validity, there was an increase in police operations in Rio, as demonstrated by Operation Fogo Cruzado. To say that the ADPF (Arguição de Descumprimento de Preceito Fundamental - Claim of Non-Compliance with a Fundamental Precept) allowed barricades to prosper is, at the very least, childish. This is because barricades are visual demonstrations of the inability of CV, TCP, or any other armed group to guarantee sovereignty over territory.

They serve to control the flow of people, hinder invasions by rival groups, and are of little use in containing or preventing police, who are not gangs, but armed organizations with superior means and methods. If the barricades are there, it is because the State wants them that way, as part of leasing popular spaces to crime. Barricades serve to give the CV (Comando Vermelho, a Brazilian criminal organization) some defensive advantage against rivals of the same caliber. Barricades become playthings in the face of the police and armed forces.

14. The Fallacy of Lack of Integration Due to a Lack of Law

Nothing could be more misleading than claiming that the lack of integration with the federal government stems from the absence of a law—such as the Security Amendment or the Anti-Crime Package.

It should be clarified that, with the regulatory and legal instruments we already have, it is now possible to conduct joint operations, integrated operations, and task forces.

All of them are temporary and limited in time and to their mission, as they should be, to guarantee superior and transparent results.

This type of integrated action does not need to wait for legislative change, however good it may be. And even if it is necessary. This is because it involves decisions of a political and administrative-procedural nature, within the reach of any manager in a position of command.

The Brazilian logic of selling to the insecure and uninformed citizen the idea that only by changing the law can the world be changed is a liberal-authoritarian concoction that serves as an excuse for producing a monopoly on inaction and for concealing the absence of national, state, and municipal policies. Selling the fantasy that only by changing the law can something be done is to kill public policy and conceal leniency.

Furthermore, it's about providing services to others without committing to the enforcement of the law itself, implying that one "already did their part" by creating the law, and that it would now be up to those who enforce it—as if laws couldn't create problems regarding enforcement, expenses, and accountability.

Besides being morally cowardly, it's putting the fear, insecurity, and violence experienced by the population today at the end of a waiting line. As if fear and insecurity could be postponed until the approval of a miracle law. We can't ask organized crime, everyday criminals, to suspend their activities and only return when we have a law that integrates them or a tougher law.

Finally, in this illusion of changing the law as immediate salvation, there is the delusion of a total big-data system containing all information and a central intelligence, naturally for good, that would coordinate all police forces from top to bottom, responding to every demand, every action. Nothing could be more naive, since not even the dictatorship achieved this admirable world of single, centralized command and control. Here we have the Brazilian authoritarian fetish with a new bullet in its paper. Note that integration here corresponds to a unification, standardization, and monopoly of sources in a large-scale federative country with diverse scenarios and challenges, which in practice seeks to establish who is in charge of whom and who is in charge of everything.

15. The Truth That People Don't Want to Talk About

No criminal organization in Rio de Janeiro fully controls the territory. Control is over the population, through the threat of violence.

And, in order to exist, these organizations depend on partnerships with the State, which guarantees predictability and stability to the land leases for crime.

There is no such thing as a parallel power structure—whose purpose was to conceal the relationship between politics and organized crime. It is the State that, functioning as a regulatory agency for crime—for better or for worse—organizes or disorganizes crime from within.

There is no way to guarantee armed territorial control with any stability of command without the direct collaboration of state powers. There is no, and never has been, an absent state. What exists in Rio are governments that negotiate their form of presence, as is also seen in other states and other countries.

Well, these were some points clarified in my interviews, and later, when I have more data on this operation of October 28, 2025, in Alemão and Penha, I will be able to explain the technical and scientific parameters based on empirical evidence that will help us break the mantras that deceive us and unmask the "chloroquine" of security that poisons us with false explanations. Until the next post.”