Brazil's Declining Crime Rates - Signs of Hope?

A few weeks back, the Economist had an article about declining crime rates in Brazil. Murder rates in the country as a whole have declined, and they have taken a very dramatic drop in São Paulo, parts of which used to be among the most violent neighborhoods in the world.

Unlike Boz, I'm not so surprised at the decline of crime in São Paulo. Earlier this year, I commented on the police's change in tactics against drug gangs in Brazil's largest city. Unlike in Rio, where the police still go into favelas with guns blazing and then occupy the favelas for weeks or months, police in São Paulo spend a lot of time gathering intelligence on individual drug lords and their networks, and go in targeting those groups specifically, instead of anybody (including the innocent) that gets in their way. Additionally, after police go into the favelas to root out the drug networks, the state follows in, offering social programs to the innocent civilians living in the favelas. In so doing, the state in São Paulo has simultaneously been able to increase its presence in a non-violent way (compared to the non-stop presence of military police in favelas in Rio) as well as offering better social services to the favelados. That the tactic of concentrating attacks only on drug gangs joined with efforts trying to improve the living conditions within the favelas has led to a decline in violence should come as no surprise. While I think the article overstates the role of gun control somewhat, it certainly hasn't hurt, either. I don't buy the demographics argument so much, simply because São Paulo has 18 million people; just because the population is getting older in the entire city doesn't necessarily mean that it's getting older in the favelas, where levels of violence can be higher.

That said, Boz's caution that we not view these gains as the beginning of a "Paz Brasiliana" is absolutely right. Rio is still suffering from the same, stale police tactics of shooting first and calling everybody "traficantes" later. Additionally, the growing presence of paramilitary militia groups that are sometimes entering into the drug trade in Rio is a bad omen. Finally, while São Paulo's murder rates have dropped significantly, rural violence (generally between rich landowners and indigenous groups or the landless and their champions) has shown no signs of slowing down. It would be great if Rio would at least try to implement some of the changes in its tactics that São Paulo has implemented, but the issue of favelas and the police is also very different from São Paulo, due to (among other things) state and city economies, geographies, and politics. As I said, the dawn of some peaceful period in Brazilian history is still a long ways off. Nonetheless, one cannot help but be at least somewhat happy to see things improving in Brazil, even if it's incrementally.