Facebook vigilantes catching thieves and punishing them

From the article:<p><i>&gt; She set up a Facebook page called &quot;Chapa tu choro&quot;, or &quot;Catch your thief&quot;, 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 &quot;leave him paralysed&quot;, &quot;cut off his hands&quot; and &quot;castrate him&quot; into the title.</i><p>Next step: crowdsourced (mis)identification (a la Reddit&#x27;s Boston Bombing debacle [1]) of suspects followed by the old as dirt lynching mob.<p>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).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;MuseumOfReddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1iv343&#x2F;the_boston_bombing_debacle&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;MuseumOfReddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1iv343&#x2F;the_...</a>

I used to live in Peru. Cops are totally useless there, they just don&#x27;t come in case of emergency, you have to go to the station and pay them for the &quot;gazolina&quot; (gas) they&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;re always here to help you first as a client.

I actually saw this when I was in Xela (Guatemala) a few years ago. They had the slogan &quot;Vecinos Organizados Contra la Delincuencia&quot; stencilled on the side of buildings.<p>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 &#x2F; corruption. People had whistles, and if anyone heard one they were to coming running with whatever weapons they had to hand.<p>The conversations were in Spanish so I may have misunderstood some of the details but he had some pretty harrowing stories. He wasn&#x27;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.

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&#x27;s almost a joke to ask the police to do something.<p>I <i>totally</i> disagree with this &#x27;popular justice&#x27; movement, but I kind of understand the frustration of people who really have no one to help them.

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&#x2F;her as a vigilante.

I was particularly interested by the lack of condemnation from the government. I would have expected a stronger stance.<p>&gt;But he&#x27;s not entirely negative about the vigilante movement. In fact, rather than condemning the &quot;Catch your thief&quot; campaigns in their entirety, he says he actually wants to harness its energy, and endorses the notion of citizen&#x27;s arrests. &quot;Catch your thief yes, but hand him or her over to the police. Don&#x27;t take justice into your own hands,&quot; he says.

I have to imagine vigilante justice is how justice systems begin in the first place. I mean... at it&#x27;s essence, what is a justice system but either A) the arm of the masses or B) the arm of the powerful?<p>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.

This is the next step after our internet shaming culture.

Could just be &quot;the media&quot; 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 &quot;rescue&quot; dogs or babies (and often then discovering that the dog or baby in question is not real, or otherwise not what they thought).<p>Not sure what to make of it, maybe people think they&#x27;re Superman, or maybe they think evil and corruption lurk around every corner and <i>somebody</i> has to do something so it may as well be them.<p>The question always is: what if you&#x27;re wrong?

These are definitely against FB TOS for promoting violence.

The negative comments on here are obviously coming from folks who live in societies where police and court systems are effective. I don&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>Just for a small taste of how things are: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newrepublic.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;113293&#x2F;900-bus-drivers-dead-guatemala-city-worlds-most-dangerous-job" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newrepublic.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;113293&#x2F;900-bus-drivers-de...</a><p>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.