Crime

Crime

Crime is a tricky subject to discuss in part because most of us don’t have a good, fact-based sense of how big a problem it is, what it is (violent muggings vs. shoplifting, for instance), or where it’s happening (many of the people who are most worried about crime are at very low risk of becoming victims of it).

It’s also tricky because we all have a lot of priors about crime, how best to prevent it, who (or what groups of “whos”) are most responsible for it, and so on.

Because of all this topic-fuzziness, it’s interesting to me to see ultra-refined versions of theories and approaches applied in real life, as it gives us extremes to push against, to grab components of for less-extreme use, and to learn from in more holistic ways (what worked? what didn’t? why? was it a horrible-enough outcome that we can cross that approach off the list of things to try in the future? or were there obvious benefits that we might amplify by trimming away excess assumptions and application methods?).

This piece on a widespread crackdown on crime in El Salvador is interesting to me for all these reasons, as through some lenses it’s a massive abuse of power by the country’s (fairly authoritarian-leaning) leader, through others it’s a violation of norms (that gangs run roughshod over everyone else in the country), and through still others it’s an experiment into what happens when you allow and even encourage human rights violations in one aspect of society in order to improve human rights (basically: not being plagued by violent gangs that operate like governments) in another: https://unherd.com/2023/01/inside-el-salvadors-brutal-gang-crackdown/

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