Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Cittadini Non Distratti.

Slate explains that a private group in Venice is combatting pickpockets by making citizens' arrests. "Venice is beautiful, but not for work," says a Romanian pickpocket. The police are happy about this, but the city government is not, even though a city official says the rate of pickpocketing has been cut in half since last year.

The private citizens solve two problems faced by traditional law enforcement: The pickpockets can recognize the police fairly easily, and out-of-town tourists do not stick around to testify.

It strikes me that this sort of vigilantism would not work so well in the United States because of guns. Rightly or wrongly, I suspect that the citizens who would volunteer would be inclined to carry guns, which would cause problems. The notion that pickpockets or the citizens apprehending them might be armed and violent does not even seem to occur to anyone in Venice (or at least to Slate's writer there).

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