We have another Latin American country that has finally decided to address the issue of crime. When Nayib Bukele took over in El Salvador, he made cleaning up the streets of his nation a priority and that meant putting criminals in prison. In Venezuela, police squads have conducted raids that resulted in the deaths of gang members and those most likely to join gangs.
Here’s more:
Crime used to be so out of control in Caracas that Miguel Dao, a professional kidnapping negotiator, was hired to secure the freedom of three different captives in a single day. But it’s been three years since Mr. Dao has had a single kidnapping to negotiate.
The homicide rate in Caracas has plummeted in recent years, a remarkable shift for a city once known as the world’s murder capital. Street robberies are rare. Kidnappings, both extended high-ransom cases and “express” abductions lasting about a day, have all but disappeared.
Mr. Dao, a former director of Venezuela’s equivalent of the F.B.I., said he was a critic of the country’s authoritarian government. But he called the sharp decline in crime under its watch an “accomplishment by any measure.”
…
Bypassing the legal system, police squads executed thousands of poor young men, according to United Nations investigators, in a campaign targeting the demographic most likely to join criminal gangs. Mass migration also played a role, with gang members constituting a small percentage of the millions who fled Venezuela’s economic collapse.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is also reportedly looking into these police raids, prompting Venezuela to leave the organization.
Wonderful things happen when you take crime seriously.
“In Venezuela, just like in El Salvador, just like in Chicago, all the crime and disorder that materially worsens everyone’s quality of life is caused by a small number of men and law enforcement is very familiar with all of them,” Friedman wrote. “You don’t have to build a social services bureaucracy that assigns multiple professionals to each one of them. You don’t have to pay $500 an hour for a court appointed attorney every time you arrest them to make a deal to keep them out of jail. And you don’t have to spend $150,000 per year per inmate on incarcerating them when they inevitably do something that forces even progressive officials to lock them up.”
Making criminals afraid to be criminals reduces crime. In other news, water is found to be wet.
This line is so telling. The Left, including the folks at The New York Times, find safety to be the exception, and not the rule. There’s nothing “eerie” about a city where you can walk the streets without being mugged, assaulted, or worse.
Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.
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