To Soften Image, Brazilian Police Ride in Atop Horned Beasts | Hacker News Reader

To Soften Image, Brazilian Police Ride in Atop Horned Beasts

nytimes.com

21 pointsdanso9 comments

The only mounted police I've seen are horseback police in the States, but it seems like they have similar, positive effects, even in urban areas. When they aren't galloping down one of the busy avenues, horseback NYPD are almost always surrounded by people wanting to see the horse up-close. The high vantage point can't hurt either. Even though I still laugh everytime I see a horseback cop waiting at the traffic light and then sprint down the street, it's still a more welcoming site than cops on motorcycles or Segways.

The last day of the California state fair often breaks out into a mild riot...a cop told me that having cops walk directly into the crowd is often enough to break up the disturbances, while not putting the officer or the crowd at great risks...I guess for mischief-level riots (think of kids wanting to go crazy the week before school starts), the crowd might be willing to bang up a police cruiser, but might draw the line at hurting a horse.

site != sight And that ain't even an auto-correct typo.

Technically, bicycle cops are also mounted police. I'm always bemused by the dichotomy that exists within bike-cops; the obviously love biking ones who probably volunteered and the ones that are there because they failed some PT requirement.

For a modern city I'm inclined to think a bicycle is a better solution overall. e.g. If you think about the bike messengers that roam NYC - clearly seems to work well for the terrain.

Police in Brazil wear army uniforms, paint skulls on their vehicles, and kill about 6 people a day (mostly poor and black). This has a lot to do with the fact that it was created to defend the state, not the people. So there's a lot to do.

The state including officials and parties is corrupt, the education is basically non-existent, the rich and powerful take whatever they can and the infrastructure is disastrous (water problems in São Paulo since years, in some parts of the city water gets turned off at midday, and when there is water it has more chlorine than public swimming pools in Germany). From my experience, I have to conclude that Brazil is a semi-failed state. The more I know of this country, the less I respect the elite that is so proud of Brazil when in other countries.

But, on the positive side of things, this makes Brazil a place to learn about human social behaviour when there are no or few rules. That knowledge is important in developed countries, too.

> The state including officials and parties is corrupt,

This is true. But the rest of your comment is simply hyperbolic.

Brazil isn't a "semi-failed state". Iraq, Yemen, Somalia are recent examples of failed states. Brazil's got a government, there's no doubt about its sovereignty over Brazilian territory, our economy is roughly the size of UK's, etc. We even get illegal immigrants.

The public schools are famously bad, even Feynman noted that many years ago [1]. And while the public universities are better, it is very hard to get a place. This leads to a poorly educated public and an educated elite.

The income inequality in Brazil is huge [2]. While the elite earns more money than they would in comparable positions in Germany, everybody else earns way less. And they don't feel bad for it, not an in inch.

Since I live here I suffered several power outages, the internet connection is unreliable, the roads are in bad state, and what I said about the chlorine in the water is not a hyperbole. I brought some of the tap water to Germany and did admittingly unscientific but nevertheless tests and other people agreed too, that the tap water here has a lot of clorine. I meant what I said literally.

In Brazil there are regions where the state has no records of who lives there. In that sense, the government has not sovereign control over its whole territory. I'd also like to point to the favelas. Brazilian society advances (more or less) simply because the poor people in Brazil have good hearts.

Brazil is like a colony where the colonial power moved from an external government to the very own government. You have a small well-educated elite with money which lives in 24/7/365 guarded places, and you have the rest.

Of course, what I said is not in general true. There are exceptions. However, what I said explains the general picture of life in Brazil/São Paulo. I think people outside of Brazil should be shown this, and not the marketed tourism-paradise.

[1] http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_Brazil

From the same island,

"It is one of the most enticing archaeological mysteries of the Americas — a long-overlooked ancient culture that existed for 900 years on an island at the mouth of Amazon River and then disappeared."

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_18242426

Also quite beautiful are their ceramics which are still being reproduced today (type 'arte marajoara' into Google to see more)

http://i.imgur.com/aie8Bny.jpg, http://i.imgur.com/20kyvS8.jpg

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