I'm from Belo Horizonte now living in Canada... Mostly moved because couldn't take the anxiety of being in fear every single time I had to leave home. Most peo

I'm from Belo Horizonte now living in Canada... Mostly moved because couldn't take the anxiety of being in fear every single time I had to leave home. Most people just play the numbers game. I, for example, have been robbed at gunpoint, with a knife, with 4 teenagers threatening to beat me up when I was 14 and I was even "lightning kidnapped" (I don't even know the term in English, but I was put in a car and bandits kept me for 8 hours and drove me around waiting for the banking hours to reset the withdraw money from ATM to take more form my account). A lot of my friends, though, have never been robbed at all. In general, we all know we are subject to that, but in the end it is mostly just bad or good luck. Just being in the wrong place in the wrong time. From all the people I know, those that have never been through this just live life mostly normally. But once you've suffered that at least once, you can never really fully rest again. The homicides problem on that news is actually not that relevant in that context because, as others have said, it is really concentrated in poor neighborhoods or slums, where the State basically is nonexistent. For example, in a lot of violent slums, criminals take and sell access to pirated cable TV, energy and water, to the point where the official employees can be made to fix stuff when they go there to try and cut signals. That is how absent the state is in those places. But when you see homicides numbers like that go up, probably the random crimes to the whole population is going up as well.