7 ms·

Facebook vigilantes catching thieves and punishing them

77 points by SimplyUseless 11y ago

smeyer 11y ago
I was particularly interested by the lack of condemnation from the government. I would have expected a stronger stance. >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.
- userbinator 11y ago
  Jose Luis Perez Guadalupe, Peru's interior minister, admits that the system does need improvement. "Basically there are problems within our police forces. Sometimes their reach is limited, there aren't enough men on the ground," he says. He probably thinks the police could use some help.
- speeder 11y ago
  I am from Brazil, some police departments here support vigilantism (even when it is violent, for example a cop friend of mine told me that when a small town population found out that the owner of the biggest factory raped hundreds of children, the police purpusefully ignored the riot and let the population maim the guy, because they knew that if they just arrested him, the broken justice system would release him again and allow him to do his nasty stuff again). 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).
  - throwaway1967 11y ago
    > 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 Don't you see now why the government tells you not to react? If you were the government, what had you rather? 1) some kid or guy shoots and kills some other person, nothing is investigated, killer doesn't go to jail, so basically like nothing happened and the public servants don't need to lift a finger. OR 2) you have a gun which you use to defend yourself; you then call the police about what happened; now they're going to have to file paperwork, drive to your location, get someone to pick up that dead body, find a place to bury it, etc. In other words you've created work for these public servants! All because you care so much about your life. You heartless right-wing fascist! /s Seriously now. You shouldn't have a gun and you shouldn't want to protect yourself because <space reserved for spurious gun-control argument with statistics to make it sound like it's obvious having a gun doesn't protect you despite thousands of anecdotal evidence constituting data>. That's why you should be happy being shot in the face. Governments are gangs of criminals. Who else would want their population disarmed when it's clearly going to get them killed? Look back in history and you will find out the biggest Tyrants with the largest death counts to their names through atrocities have all instituted gun control before doing their dirty deeds. Obama is now trying to ban guns. But he's not a Tyrant! He's just going through the motions of one (like passing most executive orders out of any president) just to see how it feels.
littletimmy 11y ago
This is very worrisome. Particularly if the thief has been forced into crime as a victim of circumstance and misfortune, it is inhumane to target him/her as a vigilante.
- FreeFull 11y ago
  Or they turn out not to even be a thief. A lot of the time, vigilante justice ends up not being true justice at all.
  - netcan 11y ago
    Sometimes official justice turns out not to be real justice. Sometimes the whole institution is corrupt, sometimes it's corrupt this time, sometimes it just makes mistakes. That's not an argument for or against vigilantism, just that justice is tricky.
    - xtian 11y ago
      It is an argument against vigilantism because there is at least some process in place to hold the official justice system accountable for its mistakes.
      - wehadfun 11y ago
        Really what is it?
      - kragen 11y ago
        I'm willing to bet you don't live in Perú.
      - netcan 11y ago
        Obviously, I'm playing devils advocate a little, but I don't like this line of thinking. 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.
golemotron 11y ago
This is the next step after our internet shaming culture.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
luso_brazilian 11y ago
From the article: > 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_boston_bombing_debacle/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/1iv343/the_...
- alwaysdoit 11y ago
  There's a difference between crowdsourcing identification/discovery/information processing and crowdsourcing punishment. The former has be done for a long time through things like wanted posters, and even the police in this article support it. 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.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    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. Does this scream punishment or identification to you?
    - alwaysdoit 11y ago
      Sorry if I was not clear. I consider threats harassment which I tried to explain are a kind of punishment that should not be taken into our own hands.
lawlessone 11y ago
These are definitely against FB TOS for promoting violence.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  and the members ought to be tracked by the NSA and GCHQ
  - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    Why would they be? I doubt some Peruvian hotheads are remotely a threat to English or American national security interests. Honestly, I'm getting a little sick of the "NSA sees all" strawman. SIGINT is used for US interests, and the efficacy of the current programs are in question, not the idea of SIGINT. We give no shits about stuff like this.
    - saint_fiasco 11y ago
      The NSA spies on foreign people more than they spy on Americans. 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.
  - adrusi 11y ago
    Why? The members who actually participate in the violence ought to be jailed, but why should they all be tracked? Especially when they already put all of their worst crimes on a public forum — what good would surveillance do if they already confess to their worst crimes publically?
    - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
      You don't think fascist death squads worthy of monitoring?
paulhauggis 11y ago
Im not surprised. We already bully, silence, and ruin the lives of anyone tjat is against the current narrative. This id the next step.
aidos 11y ago
I actually saw this when I was in Xela (Guatemala) a few years ago. They had the slogan "Vecinos Organizados Contra la Delincuencia" stencilled on the side of buildings. 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.
- matwood 11y ago
  The movement tags buildings, kills other people, and then acts like nothing happened. So they are just another gang?
  - aidos 11y ago
    Firstly, I definitely don't support vigilante behaviour. 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).
- jerf 11y ago
  A lot of social mechanisms are quite counterintuitive. One example I like to point out is that the purpose of voting is not to determine the winner, but to determine the loser. The winner already knows they won. Problem is, the loser also knows that they won. Voting is brilliant for creating a non-violent mechanism for convincing losers to go away while feeling like they have a chance next time. That's why voting corruption is so dangerous... the problem is less "the wrong thing winning" and more "society breaks down, the losers stop trusting the ballot box and start trusting their guns". People ought to be a lot angrier about voting corruption, even if they think it corrupted it on to "their side", then they actually are. (This is also why high voting rates are important. It's not about whether you tipped the balance between the two options, it's whether you are bought in to the result being fair, at scale. Low participations leaves rationalizations available to the losers. It really is a civil duty, even if the immediate payoff seems low.) 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.
jayess 11y ago
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-dead-guatemala-city-worlds-most-dangerous-job 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.
- bernardom 11y ago
  Is Guatemala in the orient or something?
- rayiner 11y ago
  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.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    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".
patrickaljord 11y ago
I used to live in Peru. Cops are totally useless there, they just don't come in case of emergency, you have to go to the station and pay them for the "gazolina" (gas) they'll be using to get to your place. Most residences there use private security agents, they are much more effective, way less corrupt and when an agent misbehaves, he's reported by the residents and fired. This convinced me that police is something that could be private and not be done by the state. Even here in France, bad cops just keep their jobs, in Peru bad private security agents get fired and replaced and they're always here to help you first as a client.
- Flimm 11y ago
  One of the most important roles police can have is to protect the poor from oppression from the rich, and private armed forces are not a substitute there.
  - throwaway1967 11y ago
    > One of the most important roles police can have is to protect the poor from oppression from the rich 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.
  - patrickaljord 11y ago
    Poor people have private agents too, they usually gather the money to pay monthly. There are various types of private agencies, some are way more sophisticated, expensive and efficient than others. Some are just ex-cops trying to make a living (this is what it was like where I was). And it works great, poor people tend to have less stuff to defend from thieves while rich people have way more valuable property to protect so they attract more thieves and kidnappers than the poor and have to pay more efficient/modern/expensive agencies, which makes sense.
draw_down 11y ago
Could just be "the media" or perception or whatever, but there seem to be more instances of people deciding that they are qualified to act as moral arbiters to the general society. The Ashley Madison story is a great example, but also there seem to be more instances of minor things like people breaking into cars to "rescue" dogs or babies (and often then discovering that the dog or baby in question is not real, or otherwise not what they thought). 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?
jsalinas 11y ago
Peruvian from the ugly side of Lima here. What really happens when you are robbed and try to go the police is that the cops would try to get money from you with lot of excuses: gas for the patrol unit, office supplies, even food for them... So, most of the time, it's almost a joke to ask the police to do something. 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.
jqm 11y ago
I have to imagine vigilante justice is how justice systems begin in the first place. I mean... at it's essence, what is a justice system but either A) the arm of the masses or B) the arm of the powerful? 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.

77 points by SimplyUseless 11y ago

I was particularly interested by the lack of condemnation from the government. I would have expected a stronger stance. >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.

userbinator 11y ago
Jose Luis Perez Guadalupe, Peru's interior minister, admits that the system does need improvement. "Basically there are problems within our police forces. Sometimes their reach is limited, there aren't enough men on the ground," he says. He probably thinks the police could use some help.
speeder 11y ago
I am from Brazil, some police departments here support vigilantism (even when it is violent, for example a cop friend of mine told me that when a small town population found out that the owner of the biggest factory raped hundreds of children, the police purpusefully ignored the riot and let the population maim the guy, because they knew that if they just arrested him, the broken justice system would release him again and allow him to do his nasty stuff again). 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).
- throwaway1967 11y ago
  > 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 Don't you see now why the government tells you not to react? If you were the government, what had you rather? 1) some kid or guy shoots and kills some other person, nothing is investigated, killer doesn't go to jail, so basically like nothing happened and the public servants don't need to lift a finger. OR 2) you have a gun which you use to defend yourself; you then call the police about what happened; now they're going to have to file paperwork, drive to your location, get someone to pick up that dead body, find a place to bury it, etc. In other words you've created work for these public servants! All because you care so much about your life. You heartless right-wing fascist! /s Seriously now. You shouldn't have a gun and you shouldn't want to protect yourself because <space reserved for spurious gun-control argument with statistics to make it sound like it's obvious having a gun doesn't protect you despite thousands of anecdotal evidence constituting data>. That's why you should be happy being shot in the face. Governments are gangs of criminals. Who else would want their population disarmed when it's clearly going to get them killed? Look back in history and you will find out the biggest Tyrants with the largest death counts to their names through atrocities have all instituted gun control before doing their dirty deeds. Obama is now trying to ban guns. But he's not a Tyrant! He's just going through the motions of one (like passing most executive orders out of any president) just to see how it feels.

littletimmy 11y ago

This is very worrisome. Particularly if the thief has been forced into crime as a victim of circumstance and misfortune, it is inhumane to target him/her as a vigilante.

FreeFull 11y ago
Or they turn out not to even be a thief. A lot of the time, vigilante justice ends up not being true justice at all.
- netcan 11y ago
  Sometimes official justice turns out not to be real justice. Sometimes the whole institution is corrupt, sometimes it's corrupt this time, sometimes it just makes mistakes. That's not an argument for or against vigilantism, just that justice is tricky.
  - xtian 11y ago
    It is an argument against vigilantism because there is at least some process in place to hold the official justice system accountable for its mistakes.
    - wehadfun 11y ago
      Really what is it?
    - kragen 11y ago
      I'm willing to bet you don't live in Perú.
    - netcan 11y ago
      Obviously, I'm playing devils advocate a little, but I don't like this line of thinking. 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.

golemotron 11y ago

This is the next step after our internet shaming culture.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

luso_brazilian 11y ago

From the article: > 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_boston_bombing_debacle/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/1iv343/the_...

alwaysdoit 11y ago
There's a difference between crowdsourcing identification/discovery/information processing and crowdsourcing punishment. The former has be done for a long time through things like wanted posters, and even the police in this article support it. 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.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  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. Does this scream punishment or identification to you?
  - alwaysdoit 11y ago
    Sorry if I was not clear. I consider threats harassment which I tried to explain are a kind of punishment that should not be taken into our own hands.

lawlessone 11y ago

These are definitely against FB TOS for promoting violence.

spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
and the members ought to be tracked by the NSA and GCHQ
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  Why would they be? I doubt some Peruvian hotheads are remotely a threat to English or American national security interests. Honestly, I'm getting a little sick of the "NSA sees all" strawman. SIGINT is used for US interests, and the efficacy of the current programs are in question, not the idea of SIGINT. We give no shits about stuff like this.
  - saint_fiasco 11y ago
    The NSA spies on foreign people more than they spy on Americans. 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.
- adrusi 11y ago
  Why? The members who actually participate in the violence ought to be jailed, but why should they all be tracked? Especially when they already put all of their worst crimes on a public forum — what good would surveillance do if they already confess to their worst crimes publically?
  - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    You don't think fascist death squads worthy of monitoring?

paulhauggis 11y ago

Im not surprised. We already bully, silence, and ruin the lives of anyone tjat is against the current narrative. This id the next step.

aidos 11y ago

I actually saw this when I was in Xela (Guatemala) a few years ago. They had the slogan "Vecinos Organizados Contra la Delincuencia" stencilled on the side of buildings. 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.

matwood 11y ago
The movement tags buildings, kills other people, and then acts like nothing happened. So they are just another gang?
- aidos 11y ago
  Firstly, I definitely don't support vigilante behaviour. 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).
jerf 11y ago
A lot of social mechanisms are quite counterintuitive. One example I like to point out is that the purpose of voting is not to determine the winner, but to determine the loser. The winner already knows they won. Problem is, the loser also knows that they won. Voting is brilliant for creating a non-violent mechanism for convincing losers to go away while feeling like they have a chance next time. That's why voting corruption is so dangerous... the problem is less "the wrong thing winning" and more "society breaks down, the losers stop trusting the ballot box and start trusting their guns". People ought to be a lot angrier about voting corruption, even if they think it corrupted it on to "their side", then they actually are. (This is also why high voting rates are important. It's not about whether you tipped the balance between the two options, it's whether you are bought in to the result being fair, at scale. Low participations leaves rationalizations available to the losers. It really is a civil duty, even if the immediate payoff seems low.) 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.

jayess 11y ago

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-dead-guatemala-city-worlds-most-dangerous-job 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.

bernardom 11y ago
Is Guatemala in the orient or something?
rayiner 11y ago
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.
- kbenson 11y ago
  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".

patrickaljord 11y ago

I used to live in Peru. Cops are totally useless there, they just don't come in case of emergency, you have to go to the station and pay them for the "gazolina" (gas) they'll be using to get to your place. Most residences there use private security agents, they are much more effective, way less corrupt and when an agent misbehaves, he's reported by the residents and fired. This convinced me that police is something that could be private and not be done by the state. Even here in France, bad cops just keep their jobs, in Peru bad private security agents get fired and replaced and they're always here to help you first as a client.

Flimm 11y ago
One of the most important roles police can have is to protect the poor from oppression from the rich, and private armed forces are not a substitute there.
- throwaway1967 11y ago
  > One of the most important roles police can have is to protect the poor from oppression from the rich 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.
- patrickaljord 11y ago
  Poor people have private agents too, they usually gather the money to pay monthly. There are various types of private agencies, some are way more sophisticated, expensive and efficient than others. Some are just ex-cops trying to make a living (this is what it was like where I was). And it works great, poor people tend to have less stuff to defend from thieves while rich people have way more valuable property to protect so they attract more thieves and kidnappers than the poor and have to pay more efficient/modern/expensive agencies, which makes sense.

draw_down 11y ago

Could just be "the media" or perception or whatever, but there seem to be more instances of people deciding that they are qualified to act as moral arbiters to the general society. The Ashley Madison story is a great example, but also there seem to be more instances of minor things like people breaking into cars to "rescue" dogs or babies (and often then discovering that the dog or baby in question is not real, or otherwise not what they thought). 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?

jsalinas 11y ago

Peruvian from the ugly side of Lima here. What really happens when you are robbed and try to go the police is that the cops would try to get money from you with lot of excuses: gas for the patrol unit, office supplies, even food for them... So, most of the time, it's almost a joke to ask the police to do something. 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.

jqm 11y ago

I have to imagine vigilante justice is how justice systems begin in the first place. I mean... at it's essence, what is a justice system but either A) the arm of the masses or B) the arm of the powerful? 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.