
Facebook vigilantes catching thieves and punishing them - SimplyUseless
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-34224196
======
luso_brazilian
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_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/1iv343/the_boston_bombing_debacle/)

~~~
alwaysdoit
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
_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
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.

------
patrickaljord
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
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.

~~~
patrickaljord
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.

------
aidos
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.

~~~
jerf
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.

~~~
adam-a
> The winner already knows they won. Problem is, the loser also knows that
> they won.

There are people within politics who are not so deluded to believe they have
already won every contest they enter. Your comment has a real lack of charity
for your fellow man.

~~~
jerf
There's charity, and then there's just plain being naive. You, ironically, can
only say this precisely because you very likely live in a civilization that
has had strong voting traditions for hundreds of years, which gives people a
lot of training in losing properly. That's a long-term effect of successful
voting, a bizarre local aberration in history that's disturbingly fragile, not
a universal human truth. One would have to be naive to the point of willful
blindness not to see the Will to Power writ large in human history.

~~~
adam-a
So according to you I am naive, over privileged, unaware of the "universal
human truths" and wilfully blind. This is what I mean about charity. If you
can't make a point without accusations and hostility then I believe you need
to look at your beliefs and whether they stem from rationality or a desire to
put people down.

------
jsalinas
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.

------
littletimmy
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
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
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
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.

~~~
netcan
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.

~~~
xtian
I'm struggling to discern your point here. I'm not arguing for the
infallibility of official institutions, but how often do you imagine one mob
can succeed in holding another mob accountable for its mistakes?

------
smeyer
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.

~~~
speeder
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).

------
jqm
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.

------
golemotron
This is the next step after our internet shaming culture.

------
draw_down
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?

------
lawlessone
These are definitely against FB TOS for promoting violence.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
and the members ought to be tracked by the NSA and GCHQ

~~~
adrusi
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
You don't think fascist death squads worthy of monitoring?

------
jayess
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-
de...](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113293/900-bus-drivers-dead-
guatemala-city-worlds-most-dangerous-job)

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.

~~~
rustynails
There are a number of fundamental points you fail to comprehend or address in
your posting. The article does a much better job in this regard.

The article talks about Peru, so for the moment, let's scope to that.
According to the article, Peru's crimes tend not to be violent, yet the
vigilantes can be. Some of the cases described appear to show a lack of
restraint - consistent with mob mentality. Also, if the mob is wrong? Nobody
cares.

Now let's extend this to places that are actually violent. Organised crime run
the show. They could easily pay/manipulate these groups to do their dirty
work. Anyone who threatens the organisation will have themself and their
relatives killed, so the hardened criminals remain protected. Lawlessness
still reigns supreme. Now, you may argue that it's difficult to track the
orchestrator (which isn't hard). But, if it were, they make a statement by
killing people randomly who may have contributed. Organised crime will not
tolerate these vigilantes. Violence begets more violence.

What's also missing in your argument is peaceful protest. You assume violence
is the only option. Think of Gandhi.

I'm not sure if your comment attacking moralistic people is a dig at political
correctness. I support any constructive criticism of political correctness
(and there are many valid criticisms), but morality? I'm assuming you've lost
something in translation. The world you talk of and are willing to tolerate
sounds like the antithesis of my world.

~~~
jayess
You fail to comprehend that I was attacking those who _moralize_ about how bad
it is for people to take justice into their own hands without having the
slightest clue as to how it is to live in a lawless place. Of course I don't
oppose morality.

~~~
pdeuchler
Ahhhh yes, the old "you don't know how I grew up" argument but with a global
twist.

Fortunately we are all products of our various environments, so quit telling
people to stop moralizing if you don't have "the slightest clue as to how it
is to live" in a place where the demarcation between right and wrong is more
clear.

(see how twisted that logic can get?)

