Blurring the categories disguises how the killing keeps poor people in their place. Governments walk a perilous line. To shape the violence in the interests of the elite, governments maintain ties to private security. Yet, to disguise the class nature of the social control, they publicly distance themselves from private forces and mask the violence. In the process, internal security begins to spin out of control, not unlike what Paul Verhoeven depicted in his 1987 film Robocop .
Governments cede sovereignty to corporations.
Since then, by most accounts, the rate has kept rising. When homicide inspires any media attention, the story usually portrays the crime wave as stemming from moral decay. Nothing Else Has Helped. Last year, relatively egalitarian Costa Rica had only six murders per 100,000 inhabitants, according to a United Nations report. The rate was four times higher in Brazil, a country with greater wealth but also the world s sixth-most lopsided income distribution the top 1 percent of inhabitants owns more than does the population s entire bottom half.