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Notes -
It looks like it took the police killing at least 6k people, possibly up 12k or even higher, to reduce the number of murders over that period by ~15k cumulatively. Probably a fair bit of "substitution" there, assuming drug gangsters were murdering each other at high rates before -- some of this must be criminal-on-criminal killings being replaced by cop-on-criminal killings. Still, it does look like it was plausibly a net win on that measure -- have to be believe at least that police killings were better targeted at criminal elements than the background murders were. And it sounds like Filipinos broadly supported the effort. Still not sure how much it cut down on the actual drug use, but cutting down on the associated crimes is probably more important.
El Salvador, yeah there it does sound like they made big gains with locking up all the gangsters, don't know if they had to kill a lot of people to do that, or if US accusations that Bukele cut deals gang leaders are true. Easier to know who to go after in a place where the criminals are basically tattooing their criminal affiliations on their faces.
High-end organised crime produces mid- and high-level leaders where everyone knows they are guilty of all the crimes, but they can't be prosecuted due to some combination of plausible deniability that they are ordering the crimes committed by their subordinates and the ability to prevent prosecution by bribing or intimidating some combination of cops, prosecutors, witnesses, juries and judges.
If you have a problem with that kind of organisation, going Judge Dredd/Nayib Bukele is going to improve things, even if it violates rule-of-law principles. The same is true to a lesser extent of full-on lawfare - there is a whole load of things which Federal law enforcement does which are tyrannical overreach when done to a small-town doctor accused of overbilling Medicare but which became SOP for good reasons during the period when the Feds were fighting the Mafia.
Policing disorganised crime is harder because effective deterrence relies on distinguishing between the chavs who are actively criming and the chavs who are just chaving.
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