Police in Brazil have been killing an average of six people every day, new figures show.
Research by the NGO Brazilian Forum on Public Safety found that 11,197 were killed by law enforcement officers between 2009 and 2013.
That is an average of around 2,240 a year for those five years.
In contrast, it has taken police in the United States 30 years to kill more than 11,000 members of the public.
Most of those who have been killed by police in Brazil have died while they have been apparently resisting arrest, according to The Economist magazine.
The NGO discovered that the Brazilian city where the most people were killed by police in 2013 was Rio de Janeiro, with 416 people killed there in that year.
The city is notorious for its crime-ridden favelas, which were subject to considerable police action before the World Cup.
The figures come just over a year before the 2016 Olympics are due to be held in the city.
Rio de Janeiro took over as the police killing capital from Sao Paulo, where 546 were killed by police in 2012, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The report from Brazilian Forum on Public Safety said: "The empirical evidence shows that Brazilian police make abusive use of lethal force to respond to crime and violence."
Bruno Paes Manso, from the University of Sao Paulo's Center for the Study on Violence added that Brazilian police frequently execute suspects.
It was, he said: "A practice rarely investigated."
The study also found that the number of homicides overall was 50,806 in 2013 - about one every ten minutes.
That compares to figures for England and Wales where there were 551 murders in 2012/13, according the the Office for National Statistics.
The country with the worst murder rate in the world in 2012 was Honduras, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, where there were 90 murders per 100,000 people.
In Brazil, which came 18th on the worldwide table, there were 25 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2012.
http://news.sky.com/story/1371595/police-in-brazil-kill-six-people-every-day 
