The officials often hire their public subordinates to work off-duty, and they deploy squad cars and other public equipment in the ventures. The U.S. cities of Los Angeles and New York have formed business improvement districts in which private security forces chase potential criminals off public property to enhance conditions for tourists, local shoppers and commercial interests. To pay for a BID, a municipality collects taxes from the area s merchants and property-owners. BID agents are known for interrogating, roughing up and falsely arresting people. In Latin America, similar privatization occurs in free trade zones, production centers for which a government has provided tax incentives to attract transnational corporations.
Some zones are new industrial parks, but many others are previously existing city blocks or malls.
The businesses create the zone s de facto government, setting rules and hiring private security to enforce them. As private guards have proliferated, so have self-defense classes, gun sales, armored vehicles and rottweilers. And, as never before, wealthy people are avoiding public spaces and conventional homes in favor of controlled environments and walled communities. Security defenses account for 20 percent of the monthly fees paid at many exclusive condominium complexes. Paulo s 35 million residents pay guards to watch over their homes, according to U.N. figures in the New York Times .