A massive gang took over São Paulo, and weirdly, the murder rate tanked. It turns out one big gang is 'safer' than a dozen small ones.
We usually assume that organized crime brings more violence, but this study reveals that the PCC gang acted as a 'shadow state.' By institutionalizing their own bureaucratic courts and hiring 'enforcement bureaucrats' to settle disputes, they replaced chaotic street violence with a structured justice system that successfully lowered homicides.
<p>Rest Your Trigger Finger: How Governance Over Illegal Markets Promotes Welfare</p>
SSRN · 6357759
This paper examines how the consolidation of criminal governance by the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) reshaped illicit markets and coincided with a sustained decline in homicide in São Paulo beginning in the early 2000s. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, internal documents seized by law enforcement, and newly assembled city-level data, we argue that the PCC institutionalized governance functions typically associated with the state: monopolizing coercion, providing informal dispute