Comment by jayess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jayess | Hacker News Reader

The negative comments on here are obviously coming from folks who live in societies where police and court systems are effective. I don't think most on here understand the extent to which police and courts are corrupted or completely ineffective in several countries. Having spent a good amount of time in places like Guatemala makes you appreciate how secure we are in the developed western world.

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.

There are a number of fundamental points you fail to comprehend or address in your posting. The article does a much better job in this regard.

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.

You fail to comprehend that I was attacking those who moralize about how bad it is for people to take justice into their own hands without having the slightest clue as to how it is to live in a lawless place. Of course I don't oppose morality.

Ahhhh yes, the old "you don't know how I grew up" argument but with a global twist.

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?)

What country do you live in?

Peru isn't Guatemala by a long shot and hasn't been plagued with the type of gang violence present in Central America in over a decade but...

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.

> People in Peru don't have faith in the police.

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.

I think a lot of people on here just believe that crime is manufactured by the government. They chafe at western justice systems and they chafe at vigilante justice because they have a hard time coming to grips with the idea that any of this could be necessary. That societies are naturally full of criminals who don't, without outside coercion of some sort, respect other peoples' rights.

That seems like a rather extremist point of view to have "a lot of people on here" believe. I imagine it's more that a lot of people on here express that point of view, but if pressed and probed their actual stance would be revealed to be more nuanced and down to Earth.

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".

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