Brazil: What happened during the country's deadliest documented police raid in Rio de Janeiro?
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October 28, 2025
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
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On the morning of October 28th, 2025, hundreds of police officers surrounded two low-income neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro.
By nightfall, the operation would become the deadliest in Brazil's history.
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WARNING. This video contains graphic content, including blurred images of dead bodies. Viewer discretion advised.
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122 people were killed, including two children and five police officers. According to the autopsy records, over eighty five percent of non-police victims were Black.
Police in Rio de Janeiro are required by Supreme Court order to wear body cameras.
However, only twenty-three percent of officers wore body cameras that day, and in the footage reviewed by Human Rights Watch, not a single killing was captured on camera.
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Damir Khairat
Research Technologist
Digital Investigations Lab
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Human Rights Watch was given access to the prosecutor's investigation into the operation, including 8,800 pages of records, 122 autopsies, and nearly 4,000 hours of body camera footage.
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Prosecutors have released the body camera footage shown in this video. Most footage is sealed as evidence and cannot be published.
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Watching all the footage day and night without any breaks would have taken a single researcher almost six months. So, we trained several artificial intelligence models to help us identify the moments that mattered most.
First, we needed to organize everything.
The models, alongside software that Human Rights Watch developed, synchronized recordings from different officers, mapped their locations, and scanned footage for gunshots and signs of camera tampering.
From there we had a searchable platform that let us view the operation as one coordinated event, rather than thousands of separate recordings.
What we found was evidence of widespread tampering and obstruction of body cameras. And it consistently happened at the exact moment cameras should have been recording, during arrests, shootouts, or while officers entered homes.
Authorities said that the purpose of the raid was to arrest suspected drug traffickers. The evidence we found points to an operation that appeared lethal by design.
To explain how we came to this conclusion, let's look at some examples of the moments we trained our AI models to detect.
An officer's camera captured this video in an alleyway as a large group of his colleagues pass by, after which the officer quickly covers his camera.
He or another officer then flags that there's a camera recording.
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The team has a camera. The team has a camera. No, no I’m talking about the thing there.
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It's unclear why he covered it, but prosecutors later charged him with camera tampering.
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So, this would be the kind of like overall operational view.
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To find incidents like this across almost 4,000 hours of footage from nearly 500 officers, we trained a model to detect similar moments when a camera continued recording, but the lens was covered.
Here, an officer is seen struggling to pick the lock on the door of someone's home. Once it's open, he removes his camera and leaves it unattended for over an hour, presumably while he's inside the home.
Because the camera was still capturing an image, this recording wasn't initially flagged by our software.
So, we trained a second model to identify "stale scenes" where the recording stays the same for long periods of time.
As our models learned and improved, they uncovered lots of suspicious recording gaps.
In the end, we documented more than 250 camera obstructions.
Moments like these are exactly the situations that body cameras are meant to document, helping ensure that any unlawful behavior is captured and that circumstances surrounding the 122 killings can be properly investigated.
Another method we used was an AI system that analyzes audio to detect gunshots.
After we trained it specifically for Rio police body cameras and local conditions, the model successfully detected most gunshots in a test set of videos.
We were also able to use AI to pull text directly from the videos, like the date, time, location and ID number of the officer wearing the camera.
But one of the most striking findings came from what we didn't see.
Despite the scale of the operation and the number of deaths, we found no footage showing the killings themselves.
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To understand what was missing, we organized body camera recordings across the operation using extracted timestamps.
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Unusable footage
Usable footage
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We found that more than half the officers’ recordings had either ended or had significant gaps by noon. From there, the usable footage continued to decline, just as the operation became most deadly.
The missing footage, combined with extensive evidence of camera tampering, suggests that body cameras were deliberately misused to prevent killings from being recorded.
Throughout our investigation, AI was one tool out of many.
Our team of researchers interviewed witnesses in Rio, visited the neighborhood where the killings took place, analyzed police records and autopsies, verified photographs and videos, and manually reviewed AI findings.
What AI provided was speed and scale.
It helped us process thousands of hours of footage, connect pieces of evidence, and focus our attention where it mattered most.
In other words, AI helped us find needles in a very large haystack.
Now, it's up to Brazilian prosecutors to thoroughly investigate both the killings and the decisions that led to such a deadly operation.
Those who use disproportionate force or misuse body cameras should be held accountable.
To learn more about the events of October 28th and Human Rights Watch’s findings, visit HRW.org and read our investigation, A Strategy of Death.
Police officers tampered with body cameras and obstructed justice during an operation in a low-income neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on October 28, 2025, Human Rights Watch said in an investigation published today. Evidence indicates police used excessive force and may have intentionally killed scores of men and boys.
The investigation, “‘A Strategy of Death’: Investigating Brazil’s Deadliest Police Operation,” documents Operation Containment (Operação Contenção), in which a total of 122 people were killed. This included two children and four police officers killed that day, and a fifth police officer who later succumbed to his wounds. An additional two men were killed in the early morning before the official start of the operation.
