Anyway: police are a big deal in our town. Where we live, there is only one police station in the whole district. It’s a two-room wood building without windows painted a sad institutional blue. This small outpost is all the law and order there is in for 3000 or so people. Inside are three police officers, and, theoretically, two are always on duty while the other sleeps. In practice, sometimes more than one is asleep, sometimes they’re all awake, and sometimes no one is there at all. They sometimes have a motorcycle, but it’s usually broken, which means the officers limit themselves to patrolling the 100 yards between the station and the pulperia down the street, where they can buy a coke.
They seem like decent guys, but you never get the chance to know them, because they’re rotated out roughly every week – a policy apparently instituted to keep corruption at bay. They also have a difficult job, patrolling a huge area without transportation which has seen a huge uptick in drug trafficking in the last couple years. That said, they are also a constant source of complaints in the community. The stories range from the common – the police are called but never show up, the police are called but never answer their phone – to the ridiculous: someone recently discovered a pair of addicts throwing rocks at their house, apparently in retaliation for being stopped from robbing the kitchen earlier that day. When the police were called, they said that A) it was a pretty long way to the beach, so they didn’t think they could make it out there, B) there’s not much they could do if they were there anyway, C) the best thing to do with crackheads is to take them out to distant, abandoned fields and beat them, which they, as police, are really not supposed to do, but D) they highly recommend that everyone else do it. I’ve heard similar stories from several people, which makes me worried there is some confusion about the difference between participatory democracy and vigilantism here.
Security is a growing concern in Costa Rica – a recent national poll ranked it above jobs and the economy – and there is a fear that it’s only going to get worse. We’ve been told that a member of the Fuerza Publica can’t actually arrest anyone unless they’re caught in the act (if they’re outside the house holding your TV, you have to call someone else to investigate the crime), and the byzantine sentencing laws make it really hard to actually send anyone to jail. This is a country where there is no institution responsible for even mid-level property crimes and, it is estimated, 98% of all crimes go unpunished.
Yet we feel remarkably safe. I’m the last person to say that police need more power, and I come from a country with a larger jail population than the total population of most other countries, a country that condemns children to life sentences, and a country that – in some states – mistakes revenge for justice and gives the state permission to kill its citizens. I actually like a lot of what Costa Rica tries to do in terms of communal security, in organizing towns to prevent crime through keeping kids active and happy and watching out for each other, or the fact that, unlike the rest of Central America, Costa Rica has a healthy democracy, one which uses government spending as a way to ensure a relatively fair distribution of wealth. All these factors help prevent high crime rates. Our experience here is a testimony to how important the rest of the community is to safety: you don’t need that many police when everyone knows each other, when there’s a sense of community and common interest.
It also helps when a key value of your culture is to be tranquilo: calm, relaxed criminals can only do so much harm.
On a loosely related note, whereas the stereotype of the fuerza publica is that they’re largely ineffective, the stereotype of the transit police is that they’re corrupt. This has been exploited brilliantly by the Costa Rican artist Banton, whose video is below. You need absolutely no Spanish to understand what is going on in this song – which is hugely popular here – and, if you get lost, just listen to the funny voice of the transit cop and watch the midget dance.
while it seems that Banton is the first guy they show, it's odd that the second guy appears to do all the rapping... por que? i can now say i fully understand the corruption of the transit cops in Costa Rica despite understanding nothing in the song--that little person sure gets a lot across this language barrier with his sweet dance moves.
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