The Death of Marco Aurélio Cardenas Acosta and the Birth of the Police Cowardice Scale (PCS): Classifying Institutional State Violence in São Paulo, Brazil

Police lethality in Brazil is the highest in the world, yet the concept of institutional cowardice as a scientific category has never been formally operationalized in the criminological literature. This paper proposes the 10-criterion Police Cowardice Scale (PCS), classifying a violent event as an Act of Institutional Police Cowardice (AIPC) when ≥3 of the variables is present. The hypothesis underlying this scale was first publicly enunciated by the author on September 22, 2025, before a delegation of lawyers and civil society representatives at the Internal Affairs Division (Corregedoria) of the São Paulo Military Police, following the cowardly killing of his son, 5th-year medical student Marco Aurélio Cárdenas Acosta (22 years old), on November 20, 2024. It was formally published in an open letter on October 14, 2025, widely covered by major Brazilian media outlets. It supports that the São Paulo Military Police is not only the most violent police force in the world, but also, by the proposed scientific criteria, the most cowardly. The case of Marco Aurelio functions as the paradigmatic axis, receiving a full application of the PCS. Additional cases are analyzed across two periods: before the public enunciation of the hypothesis (November 2024 – October 2025) and after it (October 2025 – April 2026), the latter serving as an independent empirical validation of the predictive power of the scale. The paper also documents a series of judicial inversions that may be without precedent in the legal history of police impunity: the killers sought a protective injunction against the victim’s father; and, as of June 23, 2026, the TJSP’s 12ª Câmara de Direito Criminal denied both the fifth request for preventive detention and the family’s procedural right to seek it — while the accused officers remain free and in active duty.