Brian Winter: evaluation

Transcript context

…There is a but. — it is a country, or city rather, where you are still much more likely to be a victim of an armed robbery, of a carjacking, to have your cell phone taken from your hands. A lot of people when they go there, either as visitors or members of the economic elite in São Paulo, choose to have armored cars, choose to not pull out their cell phone when they’re out on the street. As a matter of fact, with the spread of payment apps and Brazil’s digital currency, which is an amazing story in itself — it’s called Pix — a lot of Brazilian friends I know have stopped taking their cell phone out of the house at all because they’re afraid that either the phone will be stolen or they’ll be the victims of a kidnapping and made to empty their account. That’s a reality. That’s serious. I’ve been very interested in the progress that they have made on the homicide front, but when you talk to ordinary people, regular people in São Paulo, the perception is that violence has not gotten any better. There’s another issue here, which you made reference to, which is that the street population has, by some measures, tripled in the last 10 years. Some of that is the pandemic, but there seem to be other factors as well. What do you think will happen with crime in Rio de Janeiro, the city? Is that even stable? Can it continue? It seems something has to give.…

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