Brazil: 92 percent of killers go free

If you kill someone in Brazil, there’s a 92 percent chance you’ll never be caught, according to statistics published today in the newspaper O Globo. The data comes from researcher Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz, who has spent years tracking his country’s murder statistics. The long odds for catching killers are caused by a shortage of investigators, lack of technical infrastructure to collect and analyze evidence, and Brazil’s notorious bureaucracy, experts say. Of the estimated 50,000 homicides committed every year in Brazil, only some 4,000 are ever solved. And that’s the national average. In Alagoas, which ranks among the country’s most violent states, investigators solve less than 2 percent of homicides.