The New Normal: Self-Defense, Portuguese-Style
In a courtroom outside Lisbon, a police officer explains why killing a Black man was “legitimate.” This is what justice looks like when fear becomes policy.
In the Sintra courthouse, PSP agent Bruno Pinto describes the man he killed as "astute," "hard to stop," possibly a martial artist. He claims Odair Moniz threatened him in Creole, a language Pinto says he doesn't understand, yet somehow felt endangered by. As if a working-class Cape Verdean man from Cova da Moura had stepped out of a Hollywood fantasy.
This is October 2024, but the script never changes. A Black man lies dead, and a police officer says he was scared. Odair was shot twice in the early hours of October 21. Now his killer stands in court, wrapped in the oldest colonial reflex dressed up as police testimony: fear of the unknown, fear of Blackness itself.
The phantom threat Pinto conjures would be laughable if it weren't lethal. He paints Odair as a calculating aggressor, dangerous and unpredictable. Yet the video evidence shows no knife, no sign of the fight Pinto claims happened. Just a man gunned down.
Still, the courtroom allows the fantasy to breathe. The "dangerous aggressor" becomes the phantom threat that absolves the officer who pulled the trigger. In Portugal, where Black men have been killed by police with disturbing regularity, legitimate defense remains the escape hatch — the phrase that makes accountability disappear.
Odair's widow, Ana Patrícia, sits through it all. Around her, activists and neighbors from Cova da Moura recognize what's really on trial here. Not just one cop's version of events, but the entire system that grants some lives built-in suspicion while offering others built-in excuses.
They know how this ends. They've seen it before. The question is whether Portugal is finally ready to look back at what its police have done, or whether the coward's defense will be enough once more.
In a country that prides itself on being welcoming, on its history of multiculturalism, the courtroom reveals a darker truth: some Portuguese lives come with the presumption of innocence. Others come with the presumption of threat. And when you're presumed threatening, even your death can be called self-defense.
