Notices in parks, posts and corners of neighborhoods throughout the city are becoming more frequent, where residents and merchants threaten eventual thieves with beatings, in case they decide to commit their misdeeds in that sector.
In turn, it is common to find news and videos on social networks, where thieves are lynched by the angry mob or where cars run over people, on motorcycles or on foot, whom the public points out as criminals.
There is a very fine line between self-defense and justice into one’s own hands, a line that is becoming increasingly blurred given the widespread feeling of impunity that prevails in society.
The ideal would be to be able to trust the actions of the authorities, to guarantee respect for the life and patrimony of those of us who have worked with sweat and effort, however, reality shows us that crime exceeded the operational capacity of the institutions in charge to give us security.
But the fault does not lie with the public forces, it lies with a collapsed system that, like a downward spiral, brings us closer to a situation for which no adequate solution seems to be found: Police stations have become detention centers with a vocation for permanence, where there is overcrowding of 500% or even more; in spaces designed for five people they finish up to twenty.
There is no place to put one more detainee, in prisons the phenomenon is similar.
For this reason, when a person is caught for stealing a cell phone, for example, many times they choose to let it go, because there is no space to leave it and that becomes a problem for the police officer, since the The safety and well-being of that prisoner becomes his responsibility and that agent or officer ends up with a very high legal risk of a possible disciplinary process being opened, even criminal, if something were to happen to that prisoner, therefore, I reiterate, many times it is decided to release him, because unfortunately our law enforcement agents must weigh between one more prisoner, who has nowhere to put, and the risk he is subjected to while finding a space for his detention; It would not be a bad idea to think about providing legal support from the district administration to the members of the public force who are subjected to investigations due to this situation, which is clearly not created by them.
When a detainee regains his freedom or is transferred to a penitentiary, it must be assessed whether the space that was opened in a station should be filled with a thief or wait for a person who is charged with a more serious crime to arrive.
A similar dilemma afflicts the guarantee control judges.
That is why the very high rate of recidivism that occurs in crimes such as theft and extortion.
Meanwhile, the neighbors and businessmen lose their hope in justice, and in the authorities in general and feel that it is better to beat up a thief than notify the Police. Impunity has the effect of making people lose confidence in their authorities and in their justice system, and with it also comes a loss of hope.
As long as spaces are not set up for the temporary detention of people arrested for crimes of high social impact, such as theft in all its forms, we gain nothing by having more police officers, since their hands will be tied and we will continue to live in a dystopian reality where the victims , seized with despair, aspire to become victimizers.