Policing the police

OVER the past two weeks, the nightly news on TV Globo, Brazil's most-watched television channel, has carried pictures of people in shanty-town districts being savagely beaten, robbed and fired at by thugs. Nothing out of the ordinary: many of the poorer areas of Brazil's big cities are violent places. But two things combined to turn these incidents into a national scandal. First, the thugs were uniformed policemen. Second, residents had become so fed up that they arranged for the incidents to be filmed by concealed video cameramen.