People all over the world are justly horrified by police killings in the US which desproportionately target blacks. The situation is, however, much worse in Brazil: here, police killed 5,800 people last year, about 3/4 of them black. Why doesn’t it garner as much media attention? 
Will answer this later, but first the numbers: the US police killing rate is 3 per million; here in Brazil it’s 27.6. In Rio de Janeiro, the rate is 100 per million! Even accounting for much higher homicide rates here, it is an astonishing difference.
In both countries, police institutions were created in the nineteenth-century and molded by the need to control the enslaved and free people of color. There were many differences, of course, but extreme and persistent inequality is essential to understand these institutions.
A major difference is that Brazilian police has been militarized from the outset while militarization accelerates in the US after imperialist wars abroad (first in the Philippines, almost a century later in the Middle East).
Internationally, though, Brazilian police violence provokes less outrage because US soft power means that its news are of global interest - and also because people expect bad things to happen in poor and middle income countries, but not in the richest nation on Earth.
There are, though, many good pieces in English on this comparison, such as this one by @thiamparo. (Forgive me for tweeting this all in English - it was a request by @pseudoerasmus)
americasquarterly.org/article/why-am…
americasquarterly.org/article/why-am…
