Police violence in Brazil killed the equivalent of more than one black person every four hours last year, disproportionately hitting the Afro-Brazilian population, a report said Thursday.

At least 2,770 black and mixed-race Brazilians died as a result of police operations in 2022, representing 87 percent of all such deaths, according to the report by the Network of Security Observatories, an umbrella group of public security organizations.

Black and mixed-race Brazilians make up 56 percent of the country's 203 million people.

"Once again, the number of blacks killed by police represents the vast majority, highlighting the violent and racist structure of police activity," the group's coordinator, Silvia Ramos, said in a statement.

The report, based on freedom of information requests, said much of the violence was concentrated in favelas and other poor communities, where Brazil's police wage frequent battles with heavily armed drug gangs.

The police are often targets of deadly violence themselves. Those victims are also disproportionately black: according to the Brazilian Public Security Forum, blacks make up around 37 percent of the country's police forces but 52 percent of murdered police officers.

Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery in the Americas, in 1888.

The number of blacks killed by police in Brazil was far higher than in the United States, another country where allegations of racism and excessive police violence have been in the spotlight.

In the US, 312 black people were killed by police in 2022, according to the monitoring group Mapping Police Violence.

That represented 26 percent of those killed by police, for a demographic that makes up 13 percent of the US population, according to the group.

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