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I'm reminded of this recent viral Youtube which depicts what is apparently a routine occurrence in South Africa: A professional gang, armed with heavy caliber w

I'm reminded of this recent viral Youtube which depicts what is apparently a routine occurrence in South Africa: A professional gang, armed with heavy caliber weapons, executes a sophisticated highway ambush in an attempt to capture a vehicle loaded with cell phones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAvqDF3Wujc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAvqDF3Wujc I watched an interview with Leo Prinsloo, the star of the video. He mentioned that although this incident went viral, it is actually a common occurrence in South Africa, and many gangs have ex-police and ex-military members. Unsurprisingly the police don't provide effective protection against these professionalized gangs, creating the need for private security guards like Prinsloo. In the US, we are used to thinking of "crime" as just another political issue. But observing countries like Mexico and South Africa, where gangs and police forces have started to merge, has helped me realize that there are important nonlinear effects. Once "crime" gets bad enough, the state begins to lose its monopoly on force, and I'm not sure it is possible to recover from that. I'm starting to understand why people in the Philippines might support politicians such as Rodrigo Duterte who disregard due process--at a certain point, it becomes more important for the state security forces to win than for them to play fair.

andred14 5y ago
Haha, so you think the government which has been robbing us blind at every turn needs to win? Taxation is robbery, I do not consent to my hard earned money being spent on experimental injections and wars.
gonzo41 5y ago
So what you're observing is the process in which states originally asserted themselves as sovereign in the first place. Ie with a ton of violence. Say in ~20 years if those states failed, and Narco states were born out of them, eventually they'll establish a version of governance and im sure sure the cycle would continue.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  There was an old (facetious) John Stewart bit where he said the cheapest way to defeat (iirc ISIS) was to not fight them at all but let them get bogged down in having to actually govern. Obviously ISIS is an extreme example but I do think this method could be applied in a way to cartels. I’m not up to date on the situation but I do know that Columbia officially ended its civil war in 2019 with the FARC becoming a political party.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Some cartels in Mexico govern way better than the Federal government there. So, funny joke, but we'd be better off inviting them to the UN and sternly demanding that they codify their random executions into some form of law that they follow consistently.
    - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
      >Some cartels in Mexico govern way better than the Federal government there. Do you have a citation for this?
      - vmception 5y ago
        Experience? Infrastructure? Level of development? You can act afraid of Mexico or just go there and have a good time and notice the difference. The only bad parts of Mexico is where the recognized government and the local cartel haven't ceded power and are in conflict. They both like a booming economy and market confidence, just a different strongman to pay from a user experience perspective.
        qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
        Supposing my pocket is picked in a cartel-governed part of Mexico, what remedies are available?
        nsomaru 5y ago
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
  I think it's a bit more complicated than that. First, just because the state loses its monopoly doesn't mean some other entity gains a monopoly. In Mexico, cartels aren't just fighting the state, they are also fighting each other. If the state collapsed, they will continue fighting each other, and the people of Mexico will effectively live in a semi-permanent warzone. Second, not all violent entities are created equal. Cartel members are motivated by greed and lust for power. Many are willing to employ tactics such as torture and terrorism to advance those goals: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mexican-drug-cartels-new-scare-tactic-beheadings-2488578.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mexican-drug-cartels-new... I'm not claiming every cop is a saint, far from it. There is certainly room for improvement in the US at least. However, bad cops are newsworthy because we expect better from our cops than our gangsters. On a statistical basis, a much larger fraction of the police force is motivated by a desire to protect and serve the public. And our police forces are subject to at least nominal democratic accountability. If due process requirements don't meaningfully differentiate cops from gangsters in your eyes, we might as well do away with them anyways.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > In Mexico, cartels aren't just fighting the state, they are also fighting each other. To be fair, states also sometimes fight each other. They also tend to de-escalate these fights over time as long-term institutional arrangements come to predominate.
    - rnd0 5y ago
      "To be fair, states also sometimes fight each other. " That's basically European history in a nutshell. The middle ages was basically walled cities fighting other walled cities, renaissance too.
  - lifeformed 5y ago
    > Second, not all violent entities are created equal. Cartel members are motivated by greed and lust for power. Many are willing to employ tactics such as torture and terrorism to advance those goals First world governments are known to employ torture and terrorism to achieve their goals, but it's abstracted away as much as possible. While I think the same motivations of greed and power lust exist in governments too, I do agree there is a big difference between cartels and "good" governments: a good government represents the will of the people, and has checks and balances to at least reduce the brazenness and frequency of their violent excesses. To me, the takeaway is that we can't really rely just on individuals to run moral power structures, but that we need to encode these values into the rules of structure itself - the democratic principles, laws, and enforcement - to get a decent approximation of a civil society. I don't know the details of cartel governance, but I imagine it's authoritarian without much oversight.
- Bancakes 5y ago
  The mafia's idea of economy is based on sucking people dry via their vices and weaknesses. I don't want any sort of governance by pushers, pimps, and goons.
  - rnd0 5y ago
    vices and weaknesses -such as fast food, lottery and tax-free religions? pushers -like the pharmaceutical industry? Pimps like the folks in Hollywood who make money off of titillation (and more -see Harvey Weinstein for one example) and goons such as the ones who raid travellers of cash in the name of "civil forfeiture"(eg https://www.huffpost.com/entry/civil-asset-forfeiture-cash-money_n_6623972 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/civil-asset-forfeiture-cash-m...? ) The difference is becoming less profound than you may perhaps be aware of. Ask yourself -why do the police still commit violent abuses even with body cams and the bad publicity? The answer is -because it doesn't matter, because they can. That is different from "goons" how?
    - Bancakes 5y ago
      The biggest fast food chains are a mafia in business terms and treat their employees and IP accordingly. Same with patented Monsanto GMO, for instance. Non-government lotteries are dubious at best and held by the mafia at worst (at least in eastern euro). Non-instituionalised religions prove time and time again to be cults. The pharmaceutical industry is based on science, and subject to audits and regulation. In fact, one of the best ways to rehabilitate people is gradually decrease their intake with pure, medical-grade narcotics. That aside, the infamous ADHD/OCD pills are last-ditch effort - nobody talks about schizophrenia and mania pills that do a good job. A small fraction of police still commit violent abuses because America is full of aggressive, suppressed, violent people. Again, police officers' actions are subject to audit and regulation, and action in a court of law. Let's not forget they have the right to apply necessary force to make you comply, a lot of people simply earn a beating. The rest of the cases are a minority nonetheless. We must move on and escape the mob mentality. Root it out of our DNA. Amortise punishments over time and rationality.
      - 5y ago
VectorLock 5y ago
For something almost as harrowing but much closer to the US, the carjacking attempt in Nuevo Laredo while less viral is for me even more terrifying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyBV81kVKVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyBV81kVKVw
yellow_lead 5y ago
The video you linked to titles it a cash in transit heist. Was it really cellphones?
- sebmellen 5y ago
  Yes, they seem to be a more valuable commodity than cash in South Africa: https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/who-is-leo-prinsloo-driver-in-cit-heist-video-pretoria-n4-5-may-2021/ https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/who-is-leo-prinsloo-dri....
  - c0nducktr 5y ago
    This is absolutely wild. I had watched that video earlier, and assumed it was a car transporting cash. Someone should start a drone cellphone delivery business for South Africa. It's hard to understand people putting their lives on the line like that to deliver cell phones.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      People also put their lives on the line for cellphone towers in South Africa.
staplers 5y ago
where gangs and police forces have started to merge "By 1923 it was estimated over half of the PPB were also members of the Klan." If you research most municipal police forces in the United States, it's always been that way.. we just aren't taught that in American schools. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Police_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Police_Bureau
- sebmellen 5y ago
  ”Most” is quite definitely an overstatement.
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
  That was about 100 years ago. Do you have more recent numbers? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy
  - rnd0 5y ago
    Not numbers, but it does appear that the problem far right radicals in law enforcement persists to this very day: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-in-law-enforcement https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/27/white-supremacists-militias-infiltrate-us-police-report https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/27/white-suprem...
hungryforcodes 5y ago
When I lived in the Philippines a couple of years ago, Duterte was extremely popular on the street for this reason. He basically "cleaned the place up", when I asked people about it.
- jpmoral 5y ago
  It's dehumanisation. 1. Many of the police's murder victims were children. People accept this because hey, it's not my kids. 2. The process by which victims are chosen is opaque. When you're dead, no one's going to listen to your family protest your innocence. 3. Early on Duterte promised to haul in big fish: generals, governors, and the like. So far the biggest fish have been mayors in small towns in far-flung provinces. Most victims have been from the poor and marginalised. Anyone who thinks the drug trade has been stamped out is kidding themselves. 4. What little statistics there were at the time the anti-drug campaign was launched showed that drug crime was not the bogeyman it was hyped to be. 5. Street crime and violent crime is still rampant. Wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be the same cops now emboldened with a license to murder. The human cost has been appalling, for no benefit that I can see.
stickfigure 5y ago
Holy moly. For anyone else wondering what kind of vehicle this is, here's pictures of the aftermath: https://twitter.com/Abramjee/status/1388195293565489156 https://twitter.com/Abramjee/status/1388195293565489156 Another camera angle of the ambush, shows what's going on: https://twitter.com/eNCA_BBateman/status/1389839622914510849 https://twitter.com/eNCA_BBateman/status/1389839622914510849
qart 5y ago
For an Indian example where the links between crime and government are more direct, there was a recent scandal where a disgraced Mumbai Police Commissioner wrote an open letter where he said his (also disgraced) subordinate was tasked by the state's Home Minister to extort 13 million USD from the city's businessmen every month. Heck, I assumed that nearly all politicians and a lot of policemen here are thoroughly corrupt. This open letter showed me I had underestimated the extent of it. The aspect of Vaze's "encounters" are worth a read too. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachin_Vaze#Extortion_allegation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachin_Vaze#Extortion_allegati... Edit: I wonder how imprudent it was of me to not use a VPN'd account to write this comment. On the one hand, this information is on Wikipedia. On the other hand, the political party I wrote about has a history of sending their police dogs after ordinary citizens for comments made on the internet.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  >>Edit: I wonder how imprudent it was of me to not use a VPN'd account to write this comment. Unless they can hack HN servers to check its logs, I don't see how they'd track down the IP from where your comment was submitted from.
  - qart 5y ago
    They don't hack. The send legal notices to the companies. They have sent legal notices to get people on Google, Facebook, etc. I still wrote my comment assuming that HN is obscure enough for them not to be aware of it.
    - josephcsible 5y ago
      Why would a site hosted outside of India respond to a legal notice from India?
      - qart 5y ago
        The usual reason is that if they don't, the website gets banned in India.
austhrow743 5y ago
I think Mexican cartels are well past just having ex police and ex military members and are effectively have the status of "monopoly on force" in some regions. Here's CJNG showing off some of their troops: https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/ht8bx7/this_is_not_the_mexican_army_or_police_its_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/ht8bx7/this... Here's one of them not only with a police escort but happy to show it: https://old.reddit.com/r/NarcoFootage/comments/mdq35m/cjng_operator_based_in_cdmx_with_a_police_escort/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NarcoFootage/comments/mdq35m/cjng_o...
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Yeah it really is time for the Mexican federal government to start training elite military forces to take out these guys and treat them as full on terrorists and kill on sight orders. War is ugly.
  - MaxDPS 5y ago
    I’m sure that’s what they’ve been doing. And it works to some extent. The problem is that often times those elite forces find out there is more money to be made either working with the cartels, or replacing them altogether.
jb_gericke 5y ago
South African here. It's not so much the state has lost its monopoly on force, but rather through years of top down corruption which has pervaded all levels of government, police and state officials aren't incentivised to be effective at combating crime.
ok_ok 5y ago
God you're fucking stupid. I can always count on HN for the dumbest takes.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> But observing countries like Mexico and South Africa, where gangs and police forces have started to merge, has helped me realize that there are important nonlinear effects. This happens in the US[1][2], as well. [1] https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-fbi-investigating-sheriff-20190711-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-fbi-investigating-... [2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-13/villanueva-banditos-deputies https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-13/villanue...
- leephillips 5y ago
  I was going to say...as someone who grew up in New York in the `60s and `70s, the idea of the police force collaborating with the “gangs” is a pretty commonplace one for me.
paganel 5y ago
> Once "crime" gets bad enough, the state begins to lose its monopoly on force, and I'm not sure it is possible to recover from that. Exactly, it's the old hobbes-ian dilemma, you need a "Leviathan" to hold said monopoly on force no matter what, otherwise you risk sinking into a civil war situation.
vagrantJin 5y ago
The article is about Mexican cartels taking the fight to the police. As a South African, I worry that our crime levels probably get more attention than they deserve. The are certainly not much more than any other country. Even on platforms like HN, a few people watch a few videos and see a few social media posts. Conclude the country must be rife with violent crime and proceed to happily spread the word, even when no one asked or whether it's relevant to the topic. South africa is not a police state. Surveillance and obsessing about would-be crimes is not on the agenda. Police respond to crime and act accordingly. Just like everywhere else.
- Sacho 5y ago
  It's difficult to compare crime statistics due to the nature of what is criminalized being different, but the numbers for South Africa are stark enough for this to not matter. Here's a report from the SA police on crime for 2020 - https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/421424/south-africa-crime-stats-2020-everything-you-need-to-know/ https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/421424/south-afri... I can see that there were 22k murders on a population of about 60 million. I couldn't find USA crime statistics for 2020, which has seen a surge of murders; but the 2019 statistics show 19k murders on a population of over 300 million. Even taking the increase into account, that's a factor difference of x4-5. Here's wikipedia's page on intentional homicide rate by country - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... SA's rate of 36 for 2018 is only surpassed by countries in Central America, like Venezuela and Honduras. The US's rate for 2018 is 5.
  - vagrantJin 5y ago
    For comparison the USA... Therein lies my problem. You are going to compare one of the wealthiest, most powerful countries in human history, with South Africa?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - 5y ago
roenxi 5y ago
> at a certain point, it becomes more important for the state security forces to win than for them to play fair. If the state security forces aren't going to follow the rules; what does it matter whether they are stronger or not? The only difference between them and the crime gangs is the crime gangs can balance a budget. A strong state that sees itself as above the law is no less dangerous than out of control crime gangs.
mc32 5y ago
I knew a SA who left because of this kind of gang violence. She’d mentioned people would booby trap their cars and also some people would carry flame throwers with them depending where their trip took them. SF isn’t there yet by a long shot, but a couple of decades of hands off approach and deference to criminals and it’s not out of the question.
jpmoral 5y ago
It's not a 'disregard of due process'. It's straight up murder. The drug crime situation in the Philippines was never as bad as what we're seeing in Mexico. Voters were shown a bogeyman and many fell for it. Also, the victims of the anti-drug campaign are suspiciously mostly small-fry (or worse, innocent). Anyone who thinks that this is any sort of systemic solution is kidding themselves.
dennis_jeeves 5y ago
>In the US, we are used to thinking of "crime" as just another political issue. But observing countries like Mexico and South Africa, where gangs and police forces have started to merge, has helped me realize that there are important nonlinear effects. In the US we have legalized extortion, which have a benign term: taxes. Take away the taxes and the people in powers will morph in not what is considered the mafia. To me they are both, sides of the same coin.
pizzazzaro 5y ago
You'll find that most crime Syndicates in the Western Hemisphere have a hidden Anarchist root, when you dig deep enough. Mexican cartels? Much like US street gangs are often the perverted evolution of community defense networks, trace their roots back to Anarchist Revolutionaries from the Mexican Revolution. The problem with simply decapitating these groups and besmirching their ideologies as "evil" becomes that the network-building skills still exist among fringe members - so vast that it becomes impossible to catch them all. And by marginalizing their ideas, you leave them with nothing to build towards, aside from illicit dark-capitalist empires. There are exceptions on the fringes. Down south in the Hills of Chiapas, the contemporary indigenous people remember Emilio Zapata as a hero. So they built what many modern Anarchists consider a flagship project for modern anticapitalist, anti-state self governance. Though, there is a tangled history with Anarchism in Mexico itself. Much like in the Spanish Civil War, Anarchists of that day considered the Church to be a dangerously oppressive force, and sometimes violently eschewed ties to groups open about religion. This is how Franco the Fascist won international sympathy and assistance in Spain; in Mexico? It simply kept the Anarchist forces divided. The Southern Mexican (more indigenous) forces carries crosses and Catholic iconography as they marched, fighting for community self-determination. The more Northern, contemporarily-academic Anarchist forces viewed these "backwater illiterates" as dangerous zealots, even as they shared the same goals. When the profoundly successful Mexican Revolution Zapatistas marched to Mexico City to reinforce the more academic minded Anarchists? These unsuccessful Anarchists not-so-politely told their southern comrades to "f#$k off and go pray elsewhere," even as they were losing. So the seeds of the current faux-democratic regime? Won out over the Anarchists. And slowly, painstakingly, over decades pushed the Southern autonomous forces back. "Anarchism" became a dirty word to the Southern Community-Autonomy forces, even to this day among modern Zapatistas. And the state, after crushing the ideology? Found the same North-Mexican networks rebuilt to a new purpose - enriching the communities off of US-targetted newly-imposed contraband. The state aligned with the US for aid in crushing this threat, while the networks persisted, mutated, became downright cancerous and heirarchical. These networks even inherited the contemporary Anarchist penchant for "adventurism" and assassination, which modern anarchists consider a stain upon their history.
ck2 5y ago
Yeah but in the philipines they went from extra-judicial killing of drug dealers right to extra-judicial killings of drug users. They also have outright literally terrorists living/hiding on some of the islands, so the unlimited force thing obviously isn't a solution.

andred14 5y ago

Haha, so you think the government which has been robbing us blind at every turn needs to win? Taxation is robbery, I do not consent to my hard earned money being spent on experimental injections and wars.

gonzo41 5y ago

So what you're observing is the process in which states originally asserted themselves as sovereign in the first place. Ie with a ton of violence. Say in ~20 years if those states failed, and Narco states were born out of them, eventually they'll establish a version of governance and im sure sure the cycle would continue.

edgyquant 5y ago
There was an old (facetious) John Stewart bit where he said the cheapest way to defeat (iirc ISIS) was to not fight them at all but let them get bogged down in having to actually govern. Obviously ISIS is an extreme example but I do think this method could be applied in a way to cartels. I’m not up to date on the situation but I do know that Columbia officially ended its civil war in 2019 with the FARC becoming a political party.
- vmception 5y ago
  Some cartels in Mexico govern way better than the Federal government there. So, funny joke, but we'd be better off inviting them to the UN and sternly demanding that they codify their random executions into some form of law that they follow consistently.
  - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
    >Some cartels in Mexico govern way better than the Federal government there. Do you have a citation for this?
    - vmception 5y ago
      Experience? Infrastructure? Level of development? You can act afraid of Mexico or just go there and have a good time and notice the difference. The only bad parts of Mexico is where the recognized government and the local cartel haven't ceded power and are in conflict. They both like a booming economy and market confidence, just a different strongman to pay from a user experience perspective.
      - qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
        Supposing my pocket is picked in a cartel-governed part of Mexico, what remedies are available?
        nsomaru 5y ago
qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. First, just because the state loses its monopoly doesn't mean some other entity gains a monopoly. In Mexico, cartels aren't just fighting the state, they are also fighting each other. If the state collapsed, they will continue fighting each other, and the people of Mexico will effectively live in a semi-permanent warzone. Second, not all violent entities are created equal. Cartel members are motivated by greed and lust for power. Many are willing to employ tactics such as torture and terrorism to advance those goals: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mexican-drug-cartels-new-scare-tactic-beheadings-2488578.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mexican-drug-cartels-new... I'm not claiming every cop is a saint, far from it. There is certainly room for improvement in the US at least. However, bad cops are newsworthy because we expect better from our cops than our gangsters. On a statistical basis, a much larger fraction of the police force is motivated by a desire to protect and serve the public. And our police forces are subject to at least nominal democratic accountability. If due process requirements don't meaningfully differentiate cops from gangsters in your eyes, we might as well do away with them anyways.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > In Mexico, cartels aren't just fighting the state, they are also fighting each other. To be fair, states also sometimes fight each other. They also tend to de-escalate these fights over time as long-term institutional arrangements come to predominate.
  - rnd0 5y ago
    "To be fair, states also sometimes fight each other. " That's basically European history in a nutshell. The middle ages was basically walled cities fighting other walled cities, renaissance too.
- lifeformed 5y ago
  > Second, not all violent entities are created equal. Cartel members are motivated by greed and lust for power. Many are willing to employ tactics such as torture and terrorism to advance those goals First world governments are known to employ torture and terrorism to achieve their goals, but it's abstracted away as much as possible. While I think the same motivations of greed and power lust exist in governments too, I do agree there is a big difference between cartels and "good" governments: a good government represents the will of the people, and has checks and balances to at least reduce the brazenness and frequency of their violent excesses. To me, the takeaway is that we can't really rely just on individuals to run moral power structures, but that we need to encode these values into the rules of structure itself - the democratic principles, laws, and enforcement - to get a decent approximation of a civil society. I don't know the details of cartel governance, but I imagine it's authoritarian without much oversight.
Bancakes 5y ago
The mafia's idea of economy is based on sucking people dry via their vices and weaknesses. I don't want any sort of governance by pushers, pimps, and goons.
- rnd0 5y ago
  vices and weaknesses -such as fast food, lottery and tax-free religions? pushers -like the pharmaceutical industry? Pimps like the folks in Hollywood who make money off of titillation (and more -see Harvey Weinstein for one example) and goons such as the ones who raid travellers of cash in the name of "civil forfeiture"(eg https://www.huffpost.com/entry/civil-asset-forfeiture-cash-money_n_6623972 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/civil-asset-forfeiture-cash-m...? ) The difference is becoming less profound than you may perhaps be aware of. Ask yourself -why do the police still commit violent abuses even with body cams and the bad publicity? The answer is -because it doesn't matter, because they can. That is different from "goons" how?
  - Bancakes 5y ago
    The biggest fast food chains are a mafia in business terms and treat their employees and IP accordingly. Same with patented Monsanto GMO, for instance. Non-government lotteries are dubious at best and held by the mafia at worst (at least in eastern euro). Non-instituionalised religions prove time and time again to be cults. The pharmaceutical industry is based on science, and subject to audits and regulation. In fact, one of the best ways to rehabilitate people is gradually decrease their intake with pure, medical-grade narcotics. That aside, the infamous ADHD/OCD pills are last-ditch effort - nobody talks about schizophrenia and mania pills that do a good job. A small fraction of police still commit violent abuses because America is full of aggressive, suppressed, violent people. Again, police officers' actions are subject to audit and regulation, and action in a court of law. Let's not forget they have the right to apply necessary force to make you comply, a lot of people simply earn a beating. The rest of the cases are a minority nonetheless. We must move on and escape the mob mentality. Root it out of our DNA. Amortise punishments over time and rationality.
    - 5y ago

VectorLock 5y ago

For something almost as harrowing but much closer to the US, the carjacking attempt in Nuevo Laredo while less viral is for me even more terrifying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyBV81kVKVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyBV81kVKVw

yellow_lead 5y ago

The video you linked to titles it a cash in transit heist. Was it really cellphones?

sebmellen 5y ago
Yes, they seem to be a more valuable commodity than cash in South Africa: https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/who-is-leo-prinsloo-driver-in-cit-heist-video-pretoria-n4-5-may-2021/ https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/who-is-leo-prinsloo-dri....
- c0nducktr 5y ago
  This is absolutely wild. I had watched that video earlier, and assumed it was a car transporting cash. Someone should start a drone cellphone delivery business for South Africa. It's hard to understand people putting their lives on the line like that to deliver cell phones.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    People also put their lives on the line for cellphone towers in South Africa.

staplers 5y ago

where gangs and police forces have started to merge "By 1923 it was estimated over half of the PPB were also members of the Klan." If you research most municipal police forces in the United States, it's always been that way.. we just aren't taught that in American schools. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Police_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Police_Bureau

sebmellen 5y ago
”Most” is quite definitely an overstatement.
qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
That was about 100 years ago. Do you have more recent numbers? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy
- rnd0 5y ago
  Not numbers, but it does appear that the problem far right radicals in law enforcement persists to this very day: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-in-law-enforcement https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/27/white-supremacists-militias-infiltrate-us-police-report https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/27/white-suprem...

hungryforcodes 5y ago

When I lived in the Philippines a couple of years ago, Duterte was extremely popular on the street for this reason. He basically "cleaned the place up", when I asked people about it.

jpmoral 5y ago
It's dehumanisation. 1. Many of the police's murder victims were children. People accept this because hey, it's not my kids. 2. The process by which victims are chosen is opaque. When you're dead, no one's going to listen to your family protest your innocence. 3. Early on Duterte promised to haul in big fish: generals, governors, and the like. So far the biggest fish have been mayors in small towns in far-flung provinces. Most victims have been from the poor and marginalised. Anyone who thinks the drug trade has been stamped out is kidding themselves. 4. What little statistics there were at the time the anti-drug campaign was launched showed that drug crime was not the bogeyman it was hyped to be. 5. Street crime and violent crime is still rampant. Wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be the same cops now emboldened with a license to murder. The human cost has been appalling, for no benefit that I can see.

stickfigure 5y ago

Holy moly. For anyone else wondering what kind of vehicle this is, here's pictures of the aftermath: https://twitter.com/Abramjee/status/1388195293565489156 https://twitter.com/Abramjee/status/1388195293565489156 Another camera angle of the ambush, shows what's going on: https://twitter.com/eNCA_BBateman/status/1389839622914510849 https://twitter.com/eNCA_BBateman/status/1389839622914510849

qart 5y ago

For an Indian example where the links between crime and government are more direct, there was a recent scandal where a disgraced Mumbai Police Commissioner wrote an open letter where he said his (also disgraced) subordinate was tasked by the state's Home Minister to extort 13 million USD from the city's businessmen every month. Heck, I assumed that nearly all politicians and a lot of policemen here are thoroughly corrupt. This open letter showed me I had underestimated the extent of it. The aspect of Vaze's "encounters" are worth a read too. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachin_Vaze#Extortion_allegation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachin_Vaze#Extortion_allegati... Edit: I wonder how imprudent it was of me to not use a VPN'd account to write this comment. On the one hand, this information is on Wikipedia. On the other hand, the political party I wrote about has a history of sending their police dogs after ordinary citizens for comments made on the internet.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>Edit: I wonder how imprudent it was of me to not use a VPN'd account to write this comment. Unless they can hack HN servers to check its logs, I don't see how they'd track down the IP from where your comment was submitted from.
- qart 5y ago
  They don't hack. The send legal notices to the companies. They have sent legal notices to get people on Google, Facebook, etc. I still wrote my comment assuming that HN is obscure enough for them not to be aware of it.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    Why would a site hosted outside of India respond to a legal notice from India?
    - qart 5y ago
      The usual reason is that if they don't, the website gets banned in India.

austhrow743 5y ago

I think Mexican cartels are well past just having ex police and ex military members and are effectively have the status of "monopoly on force" in some regions. Here's CJNG showing off some of their troops: https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/ht8bx7/this_is_not_the_mexican_army_or_police_its_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/ht8bx7/this... Here's one of them not only with a police escort but happy to show it: https://old.reddit.com/r/NarcoFootage/comments/mdq35m/cjng_operator_based_in_cdmx_with_a_police_escort/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NarcoFootage/comments/mdq35m/cjng_o...

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Yeah it really is time for the Mexican federal government to start training elite military forces to take out these guys and treat them as full on terrorists and kill on sight orders. War is ugly.
- MaxDPS 5y ago
  I’m sure that’s what they’ve been doing. And it works to some extent. The problem is that often times those elite forces find out there is more money to be made either working with the cartels, or replacing them altogether.

jb_gericke 5y ago

South African here. It's not so much the state has lost its monopoly on force, but rather through years of top down corruption which has pervaded all levels of government, police and state officials aren't incentivised to be effective at combating crime.

ok_ok 5y ago

God you're fucking stupid. I can always count on HN for the dumbest takes.

heavyset_go 5y ago

> But observing countries like Mexico and South Africa, where gangs and police forces have started to merge, has helped me realize that there are important nonlinear effects. This happens in the US[1][2], as well. [1] https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-fbi-investigating-sheriff-20190711-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-fbi-investigating-... [2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-13/villanueva-banditos-deputies https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-13/villanue...

leephillips 5y ago
I was going to say...as someone who grew up in New York in the `60s and `70s, the idea of the police force collaborating with the “gangs” is a pretty commonplace one for me.

paganel 5y ago

> Once "crime" gets bad enough, the state begins to lose its monopoly on force, and I'm not sure it is possible to recover from that. Exactly, it's the old hobbes-ian dilemma, you need a "Leviathan" to hold said monopoly on force no matter what, otherwise you risk sinking into a civil war situation.

vagrantJin 5y ago

The article is about Mexican cartels taking the fight to the police. As a South African, I worry that our crime levels probably get more attention than they deserve. The are certainly not much more than any other country. Even on platforms like HN, a few people watch a few videos and see a few social media posts. Conclude the country must be rife with violent crime and proceed to happily spread the word, even when no one asked or whether it's relevant to the topic. South africa is not a police state. Surveillance and obsessing about would-be crimes is not on the agenda. Police respond to crime and act accordingly. Just like everywhere else.

Sacho 5y ago
It's difficult to compare crime statistics due to the nature of what is criminalized being different, but the numbers for South Africa are stark enough for this to not matter. Here's a report from the SA police on crime for 2020 - https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/421424/south-africa-crime-stats-2020-everything-you-need-to-know/ https://businesstech.co.za/news/government/421424/south-afri... I can see that there were 22k murders on a population of about 60 million. I couldn't find USA crime statistics for 2020, which has seen a surge of murders; but the 2019 statistics show 19k murders on a population of over 300 million. Even taking the increase into account, that's a factor difference of x4-5. Here's wikipedia's page on intentional homicide rate by country - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... SA's rate of 36 for 2018 is only surpassed by countries in Central America, like Venezuela and Honduras. The US's rate for 2018 is 5.
- vagrantJin 5y ago
  For comparison the USA... Therein lies my problem. You are going to compare one of the wealthiest, most powerful countries in human history, with South Africa?
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roenxi 5y ago

> at a certain point, it becomes more important for the state security forces to win than for them to play fair. If the state security forces aren't going to follow the rules; what does it matter whether they are stronger or not? The only difference between them and the crime gangs is the crime gangs can balance a budget. A strong state that sees itself as above the law is no less dangerous than out of control crime gangs.

mc32 5y ago

I knew a SA who left because of this kind of gang violence. She’d mentioned people would booby trap their cars and also some people would carry flame throwers with them depending where their trip took them. SF isn’t there yet by a long shot, but a couple of decades of hands off approach and deference to criminals and it’s not out of the question.

jpmoral 5y ago

It's not a 'disregard of due process'. It's straight up murder. The drug crime situation in the Philippines was never as bad as what we're seeing in Mexico. Voters were shown a bogeyman and many fell for it. Also, the victims of the anti-drug campaign are suspiciously mostly small-fry (or worse, innocent). Anyone who thinks that this is any sort of systemic solution is kidding themselves.

dennis_jeeves 5y ago

>In the US, we are used to thinking of "crime" as just another political issue. But observing countries like Mexico and South Africa, where gangs and police forces have started to merge, has helped me realize that there are important nonlinear effects. In the US we have legalized extortion, which have a benign term: taxes. Take away the taxes and the people in powers will morph in not what is considered the mafia. To me they are both, sides of the same coin.

pizzazzaro 5y ago

You'll find that most crime Syndicates in the Western Hemisphere have a hidden Anarchist root, when you dig deep enough. Mexican cartels? Much like US street gangs are often the perverted evolution of community defense networks, trace their roots back to Anarchist Revolutionaries from the Mexican Revolution. The problem with simply decapitating these groups and besmirching their ideologies as "evil" becomes that the network-building skills still exist among fringe members - so vast that it becomes impossible to catch them all. And by marginalizing their ideas, you leave them with nothing to build towards, aside from illicit dark-capitalist empires. There are exceptions on the fringes. Down south in the Hills of Chiapas, the contemporary indigenous people remember Emilio Zapata as a hero. So they built what many modern Anarchists consider a flagship project for modern anticapitalist, anti-state self governance. Though, there is a tangled history with Anarchism in Mexico itself. Much like in the Spanish Civil War, Anarchists of that day considered the Church to be a dangerously oppressive force, and sometimes violently eschewed ties to groups open about religion. This is how Franco the Fascist won international sympathy and assistance in Spain; in Mexico? It simply kept the Anarchist forces divided. The Southern Mexican (more indigenous) forces carries crosses and Catholic iconography as they marched, fighting for community self-determination. The more Northern, contemporarily-academic Anarchist forces viewed these "backwater illiterates" as dangerous zealots, even as they shared the same goals. When the profoundly successful Mexican Revolution Zapatistas marched to Mexico City to reinforce the more academic minded Anarchists? These unsuccessful Anarchists not-so-politely told their southern comrades to "f#$k off and go pray elsewhere," even as they were losing. So the seeds of the current faux-democratic regime? Won out over the Anarchists. And slowly, painstakingly, over decades pushed the Southern autonomous forces back. "Anarchism" became a dirty word to the Southern Community-Autonomy forces, even to this day among modern Zapatistas. And the state, after crushing the ideology? Found the same North-Mexican networks rebuilt to a new purpose - enriching the communities off of US-targetted newly-imposed contraband. The state aligned with the US for aid in crushing this threat, while the networks persisted, mutated, became downright cancerous and heirarchical. These networks even inherited the contemporary Anarchist penchant for "adventurism" and assassination, which modern anarchists consider a stain upon their history.

ck2 5y ago

Yeah but in the philipines they went from extra-judicial killing of drug dealers right to extra-judicial killings of drug users. They also have outright literally terrorists living/hiding on some of the islands, so the unlimited force thing obviously isn't a solution.