Facebook vigilantes catching thieves and punishing them
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> She set up a Facebook page called "Chapa tu choro", or "Catch your thief", calling on others to follow her lead, and her campaign has had a dramatic effect. More than a hundred similar pages have cropped up in rapid succession, and more are being created all the time. Many have far more brutal names than the original, adding phrases like "leave him paralysed", "cut off his hands" and "castrate him" into the title.
Next step: crowdsourced (mis)identification (a la Reddit's Boston Bombing debacle [1]) of suspects followed by the old as dirt lynching mob.
Not a good way to bring justice, technology only increases the chance of slacktivism to become deadly on those parts of the world (or any other by that matter).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/1iv343/the_...
Turning the information over to the police and not taking the punishment into your own hands is key though. This includes harassing the person or their friends and families.
Does this scream punishment or identification to you?
Perhaps varying quality of service, or ability to pay for good service, if you're in a lower-income neighborhood. Or a selective enforcement of laws—you know that your citizen bosses could fire you if you go after them instead of "intruders".
How's that working out in the US? Right now there's a Holocaust happening where some 50 million poor blacks have been killed inside their mothers' wombs. It's alright though, in the US babies and kids are barely citizens, otherwise hitting them would be criminal assault.
Police : Government :: Human Resources : Corporation
Got it? Or do I need to show you YouTube videos of several cops saying to a citizen that they (the cop) don't really work for them (the citizen)?
It's nice that it's in writing but if the police officer as a person doesn't know about it, it doesn't help the citizen being abused by the officer that the officer actually works for the public.
If you want the police to protect the poor from the rich, you have to come up with a way that this police answers to the poor and to no one else. Right now the rich decide how the police can selectively enforce the law and guess what, it's usually to the detriment of the poor.
I asked my Spanish tutor about it and he said that they had a movement there to counter the growing gang culture and police indifference / corruption. People had whistles, and if anyone heard one they were to coming running with whatever weapons they had to hand.
The conversations were in Spanish so I may have misunderstood some of the details but he had some pretty harrowing stories. He wasn't involved, but he relayed a case in which a gang member was dragged into the street and killed by being set alight. When the police arrived everyone just said they had no idea what had happened.
Similarly, police protect the citizenry, right? Well, yes, but the citizenry unless actively prevented will work out ways of protecting themselves. The notable difference with a formal police and court system is that we still treat criminals with respect. Allowing the police and courts to breakdown is, in the final stable societal state, more dangerous for criminals and anyone perceived to be criminals, ultimately potentially degenerating into outright tribalism (usually called gangs in this context) that simply equates "outsider" and "danger".
People really underestimate the importance of these social mechanisms, and corrupt them at more peril than they realize for their own petty short-term gains.
There are people within politics who are not so deluded to believe they have already won every contest they enter. Your comment has a real lack of charity for your fellow man.
Most of us are used to having a police force that are "on our side", in much of South / Central America that's just not the case. He listed off numerous cases when people close to him had been robbed at gunpoint, raped and even killed by gangs. It's hard to imagine living in an environment where you're driven to take the drastic measures these people are taking.
Ultimately it could probably all be solved by ending the war on drugs and trying to sort out police corruption (which I think would naturally happen once the drug power structures wee rearranged).
when you have lots of hostile tribes, you need to join one or create your own, you cannot as a single person face them.
when the government behaves like a tribe too, then stuff is unfixable, only violence removal of other tribes work (until eventually there is only one tribe or coalition of tribes that are aligned, then they can afford disbanding).
Or just form a new government.
I totally disagree with this 'popular justice' movement, but I kind of understand the frustration of people who really have no one to help them.
That's not an argument for or against vigilantism, just that justice is tricky.
It's kind of deifying the official. If the official process sucks, then it sucks. At least there is some process in place to hold the official justice system accountable only counts (in my eyes) if and when that works.
I think there's a stretch of an analogy to the current refugee crisis. On one hand we have this official set of ideals in laws and institutions. The principles are clear enough. Refugees need to be assessed fairly and settled in safe places.
In the other hand we have selfishness, bigotry and/or genuine practical objections mean that these do not produce a result. The reality is that taking refugees from some distant war on a different continent is politically a landline.
So, the official establishment ties itself in bureaucratic knots. Throttles and avoids the rock and the hard place.
Lets not forget that it's all people. Cops are people. Judges, Presidents, people.
Just because a system is not formalized doesn't means it works worse.
Also, a vigilante system can have a system to hold itself accountable as well.
Legal systems become corrupt and unaccountable, giving rise to vigilante systems. Those that survive long enough begin to improve as those involved seek to better the new systems. Eventually they reach the point of being the new legal system which slowly corrupts itself til it is beyond being held accountable, at which point it reverts back to a vigilante system that competes with new ones.
Perhaps the only issue is we should consider a different name from a vigilante systems that arise due to a corrupted legal system not meeting the needs of the populace vs the legal system itself that falls into a state where it is no longer held accountable.
The mob had the wrong house.
It is only when we see this problem in the private sector, that we are then allowed to comment on how this is a problem and therefore private police can never work. /s
Even first world death penalty cases aren't a 100% certain, but we still murder the accused.
A legal justice system often ends up not being justice at all either. As some will point out, it is a legal system more than a justice system.
What then is the difference between a vigilante justice system and a legal system? It seems to me to be an issue of popularity, not of results nor legitimacy.
What next PIRA style Kneecapping or a 50/50 for those in the community you don't like
>But he's not entirely negative about the vigilante movement. In fact, rather than condemning the "Catch your thief" campaigns in their entirety, he says he actually wants to harness its energy, and endorses the notion of citizen's arrests. "Catch your thief yes, but hand him or her over to the police. Don't take justice into your own hands," he says.
But here the police is stronger than Peru, and the official stance that the police is supposed to pass on is that you should not even try to defend yourself (also guns got banned in 2003).
Of course this does not work, specially because a rise of gratuitous murders (ie: people that murder someone else for no reason at all, one happened in my parents neighbourhood for example, where a pedestrian was walking, then he suddenly stopped, pulled a gun, shot a guy that was sleeping in his own home in the head, then concealed the gun again, and kept walking like if it was a completely normal day and nothing had happened), we don't have (that I know of) wildly popular facebook pages about vigilantism, but people DO share on their timelines targets for vigilantism, and frequently share the end result of vigilantism, every time I log in on Facebook it is a gorefest, lots of pictures of several cases around the country of thieves shot, lynched, kicked to death, guts spilling out after being knifed to death, and so on...
And honestly, sometimes I share those pics too, and I want a gun too, I saw the wrong side of a gun (ie: the open end of the barrel) too many times for my taste, and the police never helps, sometimes they don't even pickup the phone (by the way: neither the firefighters, the few times I had to call a firefighter, they never came, one of those times one house, thankfully not mine, burned down).
So the police tell us to "don't react", sure, I will stay standing, give the guy my stuff, and then get shot in the face, like it happened to some kid some time ago (it is a infamous case, because it was captured on camera, and the kid followed exactly what the police taught: he was in front of his house, a robber that was too young to be legally arrested showed up with a gun, the camera has no sound, so what we can see is the victim, that was coming back from school, giving his entire backpack, and contents of his pockets to the robber, then the robber starts to walk away, stops, turn around, consider the student for a moment, and shoots him in the face, then he smiles happily and walks away again).
He probably thinks the police could use some help.
So ya, this is terrible. But it is a clear example of why having a fair and effective justice system is so important to a society. Because failing that, this is the type of thing we will eventually get.
Not sure what to make of it, maybe people think they're Superman, or maybe they think evil and corruption lurk around every corner and somebody has to do something so it may as well be them.
The question always is: what if you're wrong?
Remember that when they spy on Americans, they have to at least pretend to have a cause, and fill all those secret reports to give to the secret judge and receive the secret authorization and so on.
Imagine living in a place where the is literally no chance of the police helping you out or successfully prosecuting crime. Indeed, imagine living in place where the police often actively work against justice. Imagine living in a country where there is no value to life and everyone has a family member who has been murdered and there is no chance whatsoever of a prosecution because, likely, the person who murdered your loved one is part of a society-wide general corruption of civil institutions.
Just for a small taste of how things are: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113293/900-bus-drivers-de...
So please, spare me your moralizing when it comes to people who turn to self-policing neighborhoods just so they can try and bring a semblance of stability to their lives.
The article talks about Peru, so for the moment, let's scope to that. According to the article, Peru's crimes tend not to be violent, yet the vigilantes can be. Some of the cases described appear to show a lack of restraint - consistent with mob mentality. Also, if the mob is wrong? Nobody cares.
Now let's extend this to places that are actually violent. Organised crime run the show. They could easily pay/manipulate these groups to do their dirty work. Anyone who threatens the organisation will have themself and their relatives killed, so the hardened criminals remain protected. Lawlessness still reigns supreme. Now, you may argue that it's difficult to track the orchestrator (which isn't hard). But, if it were, they make a statement by killing people randomly who may have contributed. Organised crime will not tolerate these vigilantes. Violence begets more violence.
What's also missing in your argument is peaceful protest. You assume violence is the only option. Think of Gandhi.
I'm not sure if your comment attacking moralistic people is a dig at political correctness. I support any constructive criticism of political correctness (and there are many valid criticisms), but morality? I'm assuming you've lost something in translation. The world you talk of and are willing to tolerate sounds like the antithesis of my world.
Fortunately we are all products of our various environments, so quit telling people to stop moralizing if you don't have "the slightest clue as to how it is to live" in a place where the demarcation between right and wrong is more clear.
(see how twisted that logic can get?)
I've spent a lot of time in Peru (particularly Lima) since most of my family is Peruvian and I was born there myself but was raised almost entirely in the States. As I got older I became more aware of the differences between my life in the States and that in Lima. One thing that particularly struck me is that upper middle class neighborhoods like Miraflores or San Isidro are frequently patrolled by private security holding submachine guns. Not cops, just private security, hired by individuals or community organizations.
People in Peru don't have faith in the police. People's homes are usually walled off with 'murros' covered in barbed wire, ornamental fence spikes, or shards of glass sticking up. These houses end up looking like boxes on the street obscuring a normal looking home behind the murro. You sometimes see similar architecture in parts of San Francisco.
People less wealthy might not have the resources to build murros or hire private security so this sort of attitude towards policing is not totally surprising but terrible to think about.
Another Peruvian here. What some people in this thread miss is that the police may actually be complicit in the crimes. This happens in cases like short-term kidnapping. I know someone who this happened to, and since her father worked in the police department, she actually recognized one of the accomplices from being one of her father's peers.
Cell phones have been so incredibly powerful in making things safer for everyone. From using services like Glympse to show a family member where you are when you jump in a taxi to taking pictures/video to ensure accountability.
At least I hope so, because I'm sometimes hopelessly optimistic and even I don't believe the natural state of people is to respect other people's "rights", which are themselves a construct of civilization, not an inherent portion of the human mental state (we often have a hard time defining things like ownership across cultures, much less instinctually understanding someone's right to such).
Edit: meant to end first sentence with "believe", not "express".