The head of the CICPC, the Venezuelan National Police Agency, declared his organisation detained last year 1601 persons for cases of homicide. This statement doesn't tell us much about what happened to them and how many of them killed how many others.
Now, as I said in my German post yesterday, more than 18000 persons have been murdered in Venezuela in the same period. There are many murderers who kill several people, but there will be also cases where several people are involved in murdering one person. In any case, we can assume the Venezuelan police is only capable of detaining less than 1 out of 10 murderers.
If this is not failure and incompetence, I don't know what it is.
The head of the CICPC also said now the police will be tracking down guns and munition to find out the sources. I am perplexed: and what the hell were they doing all this time? Weren't they doing that? When I was a child several decades ago I thought police everywhere in the world were doing that as part of their work, for prevention and more. What has the Venezuelan police being doing in the last 13 years, in a period when the murder rate has more than tripled? Did their directors have their heads stuck in the sand?
Keep in mind that we don't know when those supposed murderers committed their murders, so we don't know what the appropriate denominator is.
ReplyDeleteJuan, you are right we don't know when these people committed their crimes. As I said, we don't even know how many each one murdered either. But we can guess murdering someone in Venezuela and getting away with it is extremely easy these days.
ReplyDeleteAnd then I have to come back to a thought I have dismissed several times: could the government -or part of it- not have a vested interest in all this?
Is it sheer incompetence only?