Silvia Ferreira Giordano's only son was just a normal,...

Silvia Ferreira Giordano's only son was just a normal, soccer-loving Brazilian teenager when he was picked up by police after a fight on a summer night.
Four policemen decided to kill 17-year-old Thiago Ferreira and two friends after they mistakenly beat one of the boys unconscious. Betting on impunity and fear of witnesses, they shot all three in the head and dumped them in a mangrove swamp.
The bodies were found 16 days later and Ferreira was identified by the braces on his teeth. Three years later, all four policemen have been sentenced to between 52 and 59 years in prison, including the senior officer convicted in June.
"Police believe they are feared and therefore act as they wish," says Giordano, 41. "Maybe we have shown that if people speak up, they will have to learn to treat us correctly, within the law, without authoritarianism and barbarity."
Having secured one of the few convictions of police officers in Brazil, Giordano has the right to be hopeful. But crime experts, rights activists and even government officials say Latin America's largest nation is at pains to make progress against police impunity.
The federal government's human rights secretary, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, says point-blank: "We have a serious problem with summary executions." He puts the annual number in the hundreds, for which he pins most blame on the 27 states, which have their own police forces and court systems.
Most of the victims are poor and lack a local support network. When there are prosecutions, they are often influenced by international condemnation and foreign activists.
In May, a jury sentenced two police commanders to up to 228 years in prison for the 1996 killings of 19 peasants in the northern state of Para. But another 153 policemen were acquitted in the incident known as the Eldorado dos Carajas massacre.
In 2000, the police commander who ordered the massacre of 111 inmates during the 1992 uprising in Sao Paulo's Carandiru prison complex was sentenced to 632 years in prison, although he awaits his appeal at home while he runs his security company.
The numbers show civilian deaths by police keep rising in 2002, an election year in which violence ranks high on the list of society's gripes.
After a spate of heinous crimes and high-profile kidnappings in Sao Paulo state early in the year, civilian killings by police are up 26 percent in the first six months from a year ago to 387, a figure the ombudsman calls "alarming." Police deaths rose 33 percent to 69.
In a single operation to foil a robbery at an airport, police killed 12 men who were allegedly members of the criminal faction First Command of the Capital. Eleven of the 12 had bullet wounds in the head, prompting accusations of execution, but investigations have not incriminated police.