Gotta keep the undesirables from spreading out in Brazil.
RIO DE JANEIRO, March 28 (Reuters) - The government of Rio de Janeiro is building concrete walls to prevent sprawling slums from spreading farther into the picturesque hills of this world-famous tourist destination, an official said on Saturday.
Construction has begun in two favelas, or shantytowns, in the southern districts of Rio de Janeiro, a government spokeswoman told Reuters. One of the two is Morro Dona Marta, which police occupied in November to control crime and violence caused mostly by rival drug gangs.
That's one way to control urban sprawl. It illustrates how the rule of law isn't sufficient to maintain control. Physical barriers are needed.
Some people complain about Mexico as a failed state. But Brazil does Mexico a favor by being worse. Thankfully though for Brazil, El Salvador has an even bigger murder problem.
According to the latest statistics available from the UN, the murder rate in Mexico in 2006 was 10.97 per 100,000 people, with a total of 11,558 homicides that year. Assuming 6,000 people were killed in 2008 because of the drug violence compared to a conservative estimate of 1,500 in 2006, this rate would have risen to around 15 last year, all other factors being equal. Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela and Guatemala all have higher rates, according to various sources including the UN and the World Health Organization, while in Latin America the list is headed by El Salvador with, in 2006, a whopping 58 murders per 100,000 people.
But there's hope. The Broken Windows concept of law enforcement is getting tried out in Rio. Hey, get down there and see it quick before it becomes as law-abiding as Germany.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - Checking car registrations in Rio de Janeiro is a thankless task.
So far this morning, transit official Roberto Barbosa has been verbally abused by drivers and chewed out by pedestrians. An entire busload of commuters screamed invectives as they rode past.
Mr. Barbosa, his colleagues, and hundreds of other city and state officials are the sharp ends of a new push to transform a city famous for its "anything goes" outlook into a metropolis where laws have meaning again.
"We Cariocas are famous and proud of our informality, but it had become illegality, too," Zuenir Ventura, a popular columnist and author, says of Rio's decline into one of the world's most crime-ridden cities. "There was no respect for public places, no respect for noise levels, no respect for traffic laws, no respect for rules of any kind."
But the police in Brazil contribute to the murder rate.
In relation to the death squads (esquadrões da morte), Alston says that these extermination groups are formed by police and others with the objective of killing, mainly for financial gain. "Such groups sometimes justify their actions as an illegal tool of 'combating crime'. In cases where the groups are being contracted for money, the contractors sometimes integrate other criminal organizations, such as traffickers or corrupt politicians who feel threatened and are looking to dominate that threat, gain advantages over the other rival group, or to take revenge."
According to the report, data from the Public Ministry of Pernambuco indicates that approximately 70% of the assassinations in Pernambuco are carried out by death squads.
"One CPI (Parliamentary Inquiry Commission) of the national congress found that the majority of extermination groups are made up of government agents (police and prison agents) and that 80% of the crimes committed by these extermination groups involve police or ex-police," it added.
America's immigration law enforcement ought to be pursued far more aggressively to remove foreign criminals from our society. I do not want America to become more like Brazil or Mexico.
So far various Navies have shown themselves ineffectual against Somali pirates.
But the wily buccaneers of Somalia’s seas do not seem especially deterred — instead, they seem to be getting only wilier. More than a dozen warships from Italy, Greece, Turkey, India, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, France, Russia, Britain, Malaysia and the United States have joined the hunt.
And yet, in the past two months alone, the pirates have attacked more than 30 vessels, eluding the naval patrols, going farther out to sea and seeking bigger, more lucrative game, including an American cruise ship and a 1,000-foot Saudi oil tanker.
The pirates are stalking bigger game. They are getting away with stuff like Johnny Depp. They need film crews assigned to them. This could make great reality TV.
Finally, nations are at least pretending to take serious this threat to the international trading system. Can't have mere pirates flaunting their disregard for authority now can we? No. The big governments are talking tough.
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 16 -- The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Tuesday to authorize nations to conduct military raids, on land and by air, against pirates plying the waters off the Somalia coast even as two more ships were reportedly hijacked at sea.
The vote represented a major escalation by the world's big powers in the fight against the pirates, who have disrupted commerce along one of the world's most active sea routes and acquired tens of millions of dollars in ransom. It came as China -- which has had several ships commandeered in recent months -- said it is seriously considering joining U.S., European and Russian warships policing the region.
Are the pirates making enough money to buy the tech they need to fight back? Or are they too unsophisticated to get guided missiles to use against ships?
I recall years ago reading an essay by Charles Murray where he said once illegitimacy passes some threshold adults no longer control neighborhoods. That is, parenthetically, an argument against letting in immigrant groups that have high rates of illegitimacy and single parent households. Well, in those neighborhoods where the adults lose control adults are afraid to tell the youthful criminals to stop their activities.
A study of young, violent criminals in New York City found that they used fear and intimidation to keep adults from interfering with their criminal activities.
Almost 40 percent of the young offenders interviewed said that adults' fear of teens was the defining characteristic of their relations.
As a result, in many situations, adults ignored criminal activity by teens and young adults, findings showed.
These results suggest that one of the usual prescriptions for ending youth violence -- more informal social control by neighborhood adults -- may not be realistic in some violent neighborhoods.
Putting all the criminals into jail and keeping them there long enough to allow the law abiding to restore order is one approach that could work. If a neighborhood's law abiding adults can't restrain its youths then the criminal element needs to get put in jail in very large numbers.
"There are these somewhat naive notions that the key to reducing violence is to create these close ties with neighbors, where adults can provide informal social control over teens," said Deanna Wilkinson, author of the study and associate professor of human development and family science at Ohio State University.
"That's not going to work in neighborhoods where relations between adults and young people are governed by fear."
We need a male birth control device that youthful street criminals could be put on as a condition of probation. At least that way these thugs wouldn't knock up women to create new generations of criminals.