 Thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to comment on this very interesting research. My recognition to the three presenters and thank you again to the wider conference for giving me this opportunity. So I think some key questions came to my mind when I heard the presentation and I want to share some of them with you and obviously we can discuss them if time permits. As a former public servant that had to deal with issues of security and organized crime in the city of Cali for instance, which is very different from from Aegean and we can talk a little bit about that but just to give you some context Cali has a much less organized organized crime and therefore a much higher level of violence and I think one of the key insights that I gather from the presentation is this tradeoff between the levels of violence versus the control of organized crime in a city or in a country even. So I think policymakers face a terrible choice, I think Chris Blatman has called it a terrible choice between fighting and organized crime and reducing the influence of organized crime like Giancarlo mentioned. It's been done in Italy versus the level of violence that may generate. So even before getting into that the key question I have and one of the key conclusions that I have as a former public servant in Colombia is what sort of strategic level intelligence capabilities do states have regarding organized crime and gangs and I think my point of view is that we have a very poor understanding. Intelligence in general have a very poor understanding at the strategic level of organized crime and gangs and I think researchers like Chris Blatman, like Santiago, like Ben, like Giancarlo help us understand better organized crime but I think researchers cannot fully fill this gap, this void. I think we need much better intelligence on the side of the government to understand the capacities, the way of gangs, how they operate and their strategic interests and I think governments in general tend to be a little bit naive in terms of understanding how they operate and how they function. So what sort of information we need to evaluate and analyze different policies? I think Giancarlo pointed to some very interesting examples of how to analyze and how to measure the effectiveness but in general I think we as civilian leaders need much better tools to evaluate the balance of power for instance between organized crime and national police and one key problem we have is the source of information for civilian leaders is the police itself so how objective is the police going to be in informing civilian leaders of the balance of power between these sort of the tools of the state to guarantee security basically the police forces versus organized crime. Another thing I wanted to mention is how do we help bridge the gap between the traditional point of view traditional tactics and methods which I think are favored by public opinion and therefore favored by politicians but unfortunately as Ben discussed there's very little evidence that they are effective so the traditional point of view of repression, incarceration, criminalization of the drug trade etc is still much favored by the public opinion and therefore by politicians but as the research shows there seems to be significant questions of how effective they are in actually fighting organized crime. So how can we take a better look at a more nuanced approach in terms of fighting organized crime and gangs? And like I mentioned before one of the key questions that also comes to my mind is should governments focus on reducing violence or should they focus on dismantling organized crime and I think Santiago rightly points out that it's usually not a black or white answer it's probably going to be somewhere in the middle but I think we lack the tools and we lack the framework to fully analyze and fully discuss exactly how. An example from Colombia comes to my mind and it actually has a lot of political relevance right now because one of the two leading candidates for president his name is Federico Gutierrez he's a former mayor of Medellin and he has faced criticism because during his tenure the murder rate in Medellin started to climb again after decades of reducing and he has claimed that it's because he decided to face combos and razones and to at least attempt to dismantle part of their power but that generated in fact a higher level of violence in Medellin and likewise previous mayors of Medellin have been accused quote unquote of making packs with the with the with the combos to reduce violence so at what cost in terms of state legitimacy etc and I think the the contrast between Cali and Medellin illustrate that point of a city like Cali where organized crime is much less organized much less powerful we have fewer documented cases of extortion compared to Medellin but at the same time we have a weaker city government and a much higher level of violence so I think it's very interesting how Ben made his question that traditional point of view of crime flourishing where states are weak where in fact we see comparing different cities and even parts of the city in Medellin that actually they they are not they don't replace each other they actually coexist and complement each other which I think is rather interesting and the the conclusion that Ben presents how criminal governance is actually useful to states it's something very provocative that I personally had not considered before I agree with Santiago that we definitely need more research and organized crime but again like I said before we need more and better capabilities from from the states from the government to do better analysis and have strategic intelligence on the way these organizations operate and finally I also wanted to point out that what Jean Marco mentioned about Italy's moderate being half of Finland's I to be honest with you I had to look it up because I was I had a difficulty believing it and it turns out it's not half it's like almost a third of Italy's I think yeah of Finland's Finland's is close to 1.3 1.5 in the range and Italy's is 0.5 and and that again brings us to the previous question that I brought up which is what do we prefer do we I it's difficult to take to make a decision do we prefer I I would say many many people would say a situation like Finland's is better than Italy's you would argue but at the same time you have tripled the level of violence so of course Finland's is still very low for even for for European standards but but it's interesting how this trade-off between violence versus criminal control is there and it's something that politicians avoid talking about it's something the public probably doesn't is not fully aware of but it's something that has to be I think a key part of the discussion and when we discuss the legitimacy and also the welfare of communities and of course violence plays a huge role in in in the establishing and the level of welfare that citizens experience so I hope these questions are a good starting point for a discussion and I think we have some some time to discuss thank you thank you very much so I can feel and see maybe we'll just get the panel to sort of sit up here and then we'll we'll take the questions right we've got plenty of time so I'll just sort of start maybe here at the front and then work our way back through let's take them in batches of three and I'll make sure I get to all of you thanks so much for can you all hear me yes thanks so much for an excellent panel and I have a question for Ben so Ben your question is why don't states retrain their capacity to curb criminal governance and you don't talk much about the demand side which is something that Andres just mentioned which is the overwhelming support for what you may call penal populism or hardline public security policies and I'm wondering how you think that plays into the story that you're trying to tell in Brazil we know that citizens overwhelmingly support policies that are ineffective but that make them feel like the government is is taking action and mass incarceration is one of those military policing is another there are all sorts of there's a collection of policies that citizens despite the fact even learning that they're ineffective will still continue to support thanks just introduce yourself Michael I'm sorry I'm Michael wine trap when you were said the Los Angeles I'm part of the Colombian combo here okay thank you and then the lady here in front please in the second row hi I'm Marina I'm from Alto University my question is for Benjamin so I was wondering if you could provide some thoughts on how the rise in the number of militias especially in the state of Rio de Janeiro is changing the dynamics in organized crime in Brazil because one can argue that the militias are quite different from these previous criminal factions that you showed like comando vermelho and PCC they have stronger ties to the Brazilian state you know their members are mostly composed of policemen either retired or not and also they have like this alternative sources of revenues not only coming from the drug traffic but also from charging fees from the population that lives under their controlled areas and maybe how this translates into violence indicators in the country thank you very much one more the gentleman in the green jumper behind you thank you I'm Andy Hinsley from the UK's foreign Commonwealth Development Office so I'd like to ask about the implications for economic development we heard in the Italian case that employment growth was stronger when when the law was applied but in Colombia and Brazil what are what are the implications of these tolerance equilibria that you can see for economic development so you could definitely imagine that the high violence equilibria and the crackdown case would be very negative for investment and growth how constraining are the the tolerance equilibriums for for growth and investment and what what are the sort of longer-term implications for the trajectory of economic development if that's allowed to continue thank you very much so there were a couple of questions for Benjamin over to you yeah great thanks for those great questions so Michael yeah I mean there's a huge demand for hardline policing it's part of how this whole thing a hardline policing mass incarceration of course drug repression and that and I wouldn't deny that at all I think it's it's part and parcel of how this works I would say two things first of all you know there's demand for all kinds of policies but that doesn't make those policies sustainable over time people would love like helicopter drops of money but that would lead to inflation and so you can't just keep doing that so part of what I'm trying to talk about is how this is sustainable over time but also it's important to be clear that the hardline policies is part of how this system of criminal governance it is stable it's hard it's part of what keeps the criminal groups it's part of what gives them incentives to govern so you know you're not going to get prison based criminal governance unless you have a huge prison population overcrowded prisons which is partly driven by this demand for lock them up you know throw them away throw away the key long prison sentences terrible prison conditions and it's precisely the kind of demand for the policy the political popularity of the kind of policies you're talking about and part of what gives drug traffickers incentives to govern in the in the favelas is the violent policing around the drug trade so they know that if they if police get called in there's likely to be shooting violence against them and so it gives them all the more incentive to govern so I wouldn't say that I think the two things go hand-in-hand but the milice is you know this is a fascinating and terrifying development where I you know I showed you on that map all the red dots are the commando vermelio the traditional prison-based drug gangs and all the blue dots are these police link milice is the fastest growing form of criminal government of organized crime in Rio and probably spreading throughout Brazil while we're not even aware of it that way that I showed you that the factions the prison gangs spread through Brazil in 2010 to 2020 everybody denied it all the officials denied it until it was too late my 2018 you know officials governors were saying we don't have these gangs they don't exist they only exist in Rio they already existed in their states and so before anyone knew it the whole country was factionalized well I believe the milice is are probably spreading right now but a people you know officials will still tell you oh no milice is that's a Rio thing it's a terrifying new model because milice is our active duty police officers who are extorting marginalized populations you know when they're sort of off-duty so it's a it's very much a nightmare they're very hard to combat because these are you know actual active duty members of the police that said you'll notice that they're not very active where there's high-value retail drug markets so it does seem like there's a kind of equilibrium where the traditional demonized sort of very marginalized groups who are make up these come on the remedy drug factions often from much more lower-class backgrounds much more poor backgrounds often racialized as well are left to deal with the dirty job of extracting money from the drug trade which then gets paid through corruption up the ranks while these police link milice is are left to govern the sort of less lucrative more spread out zones of the city where they have to live off of extortion of the local population thank you very much and so on the third question on the sort of tolerance to vote or towards violence I'd like to yes thank you so just like a couple of comments there while if you think about like local economic development like on one hand I guess having a criminal organization that regulates violence and controls the territory might actually induce some sort of development because of like violence reduction might lead to kids being for instance more able to go to school people more able to go to work or maybe more incentives to maybe open some sort of businesses but on the other hand what we have seen not only Medellin but also in Rio de Janeiro in El Salvador and this seems to be a pattern is that these groups the main aim of this combos imagine for instance is to like sell drugs at the beginning and to do that you need to be able to enforce a local monopoly so you need to be able to develop enough coercive capacity to protect that monopoly and then once you have like territorial control the marginal cost of diversifying into other businesses is very low so you can start for instance to monopolize legal markets on gas canisters on cable TV on even like dairy products X and many other like consumer goods and that's what they're doing in Medellin that's what we have been also observing in some service that we've been running in Rio de Janeiro for instance that's also been happening in El Salvador and this is just a restriction of competition right so we've been observing for instance these groups imagine colluding with distributors of gas canisters to protect monopolies so a distributor of gas canisters would arrive to the to the street gun to the combo and would offer them some money in exchange of the combo protecting the monopoly for this group so there's like this like very gray and shady kind of hinder on local economy development that's actually hard to observe how to how to like tailor and track and and potentially it has like long-term very damaging impacts so it's it's a good question with like very like difficult answers I think okay so thank you so I'm speculating here but I think after the stories about state capacity so if you look at the level of homicide in Italy at the beginning of the 90s was similar very similar the same to Mexico in 2006 2007 in Mexico the drug war starts and this is an extra escalation of violence that is still nowadays we see like a linear increase in the number homicide in Mexico and now it's much much higher than it was in 2006 so there is a lot of debate or whether the Mexican drug war was successful or not conversely in the Italian case there was this big crackdown at the beginning of the 90s and as I said now the homicides rate is very low and criminal organization have not been defeated and I think the difference at least the part of the difference it's about state capacity so if you look at those two indicator homicides was the same in Italy and Mexico in those two periods the capacity was very different if you look at the you know intern World Banker indicators and so on and I think this could be an important element to understand why crackdowns might might work or not in different scenarios because there are other different also because the two countries and the way criminal organization work but I think in this morning presentation Tom was saying this state capacity it can matter a lot thank you so I'll go to the left now yeah just yeah just Eric just wait for the mic thank you Eric Eric worker from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver where we're one of the most liberal cities in North America for drug policy and thanks for the fascinating papers I wanted to pick up on the question from Michael on the exchange with Ben you've all described a relationship with drug repression and the existence of formal gangs basically and and my question is and and you've also talked about the trade-off between violence and legitimacy and I guess why not consider the trade-off between legitimacy that comes from having a war with gangs versus legitimacy from decriminalizing drugs and you know you have on the one hand drug users but then the state's response to drug users is harm reduction and education which would seem to be further legitimacy enhancing activities and then a sort of a matter question is do we as researchers on these things have a responsibility to model perhaps off-equilibrium policy alternatives to make those more realistic in that in the context thanks anybody else from this side yeah hi my name is Ranjan from the University of Kent I had a question for Jen Marco I think you thanks for your presentation I so what I understand from what the Italian government did was dissolving local municipal assemblies and then basically in interim setup controlled by technocrats until the next electoral cycle happens but I would like to know a bit more about what were the fundamental conditions that were changed during that interim setup because you know usually when you look at elections you have an electoral cycle the interim government is just there to hold new elections and nothing really fundamentally changes on the ground because they don't have the mandate to do anything apart from holding the next elections so with regards to local propensity for conflict or local propensity for gang violence for instance what were these bureaucrats doing during the interim period that made a difference to you know the new regime coming in so to speak or was it a case that some other shock happened around the same time of these the solution which is really driving the result anybody else over there I saw the hand up at the very back there thank you my name is Jackson from conflict research Network West Africa I want to ask a general question from the presentation I observed that it implies that both in stronger states and fragile weaker states like we have in Africa gang wars and gang governance issues are there so in that case does it have anything to do with the regime type and regime system that is been practiced across across the the zones then secondly if all the policy initiatives the the government have been using like for instance the incarceration approach or removing public officials from office you know if it's if it's not effective enough idea any alternative contextual community based approaches that can be applied as against top-bottom states based approaches which hasn't addressed the issue thank you thank you very much who would like to start on this yeah thank you just like a couple of words on legalization because I do think that let's just think about Europe in general right so most likely in every city in Europe and probably here in Helsinki will find a market for cocaine right and the problem of this market being illegal is that regulation has to come from some illegal organization so I think that keeping drugs illegal is just a permanent incentive incentive for organized crime to grow stronger right what would happen if we legalize drugs it's hard to think that all these groups will just move to the legal sector some of them might just remain in the illegal sector by exploiting other sort of opportunities but it would certainly reduce the size of the pie because the rents are going to be smaller and most likely that's my speculation the problem of organized crime will be less like damaging and and and and hard this all like has another side which is what it's related to what Michael mentioned before which is like public support for legalization is it's it's hard but I do think that we need to think of that path as a potential solution I can't imagine like like the war on drugs for instance has been I don't know ongoing for 50 years and and the only thing that has happened is that we now see more drug use all over the world so it's hard to think that if we continue doing this in 50 years there's going to be I don't know no market for drugs most likely it's going to be more demand and if it remains illegal then the incentives for these groups to regulate these markets using violence is going to be there as well so yeah I guess that's those are my my two points there thank you very much so let me just pass over thanks yeah I have some comments on legalization as well I mean I agree with everything Santiago just said I would personally be in favor of drug legalization but you know a couple of points first of all you know legalization or decriminalization that actual real-world decriminalization has mostly been about marijuana maybe mushrooms or someone you know psychedelics it's not really about cocaine or heroin and those are the drugs that cause organized that's where the profits are that's where organized crime is that's where organized crime violence is and that's where criminal governance is for the most part so I'm not that hopeful and I don't see proposals to legalize cocaine I don't see countries that are like yeah what's that sure sure sure but you know I don't I don't see and I don't see Latin American countries having the political autonomy to say we're gonna legalize cocaine I'm not saying it shouldn't happen we shouldn't work towards it I'm just saying in the short term I don't see that happening the other thing I want to say is that in part of what I'm trying to get at in this book and I also have a companion piece that's like a formal model that talks a little bit about the political economy here you really I think one thing we miss about this is that by illegalizing markets like cocaine and heroin very lucrative markets already we know from sort of classic economic models like Becker you know if you if you if you repress and you reduce supply for a good that has inelastic demand as drugs do you increase the revenues and potentially the profits of that market there's almost no doubt that these drug markets are vastly more profitable because they're illegal right and those profits what do they go to well they go to competition among drug gangs if they're not competition among them they compete away all the profits if they have monopolies like local monopolies like corner street corner gangs do then they get to keep some of those profits but a lot of those resources in my argument go into local governance that's what those are the resources that gangs use to govern these urban peripheries so we have a system that has taken a market for illegal illegal drugs demonized it associated it with impoverished informal urban neighborhoods it's fostered criminal organizations that are able to administer that market profit off of it and ultimately channel those resources into governance over areas that the state would just as soon not have to deal with that is a very entrenched problem it's not just a question at this point after 30 or 40 years of simply okay well it's legalized drugs and we can wash our hands of this problem I would say it's a good deep structural problem about the way that industrialization and urbanization has played out at least in Latin America and I think we need to also start looking around the world at other places where this phenomenon may be happening at local levels that aren't even being perceived right well who are the criminal organizations that provide low-level local governance in the urban peripheries around the world have people gone to those peripheries and found out are there criminal gangs that are resolving disputes for people I don't know the answer to that question I think it's an important research agenda especially as the drug trade moves into Western Africa and other parts of the world in the last 10 or 15 years let's just stay on the topic of drugs and then come back to the other questions so I think there's a big difference between decriminalization and legalization and my understanding is that a particle has decriminalized the personal use of drugs yeah or drugs but it's not legal you can't go and legally buy it yeah sell it or produce it yes there's a big difference so let's keep this in mind in our in our discussion here and I think Portugal has been a lot in the headlines we've got quite a few Portuguese here you could help us out on this but my understanding is that actually before the decriminalization came in there was a de facto non-prosecution already in force and that is actually the case in a lot of other countries as well on personal possession not dealing thank you yeah I also wanted to bring my two cents on the decriminalization or legalization discussion and I think part of this comes from it's a vicious circle between governments and public opinion I think unfortunately there's a widespread conception of drug use as something that is extremely horrendous and destroyed lives etc and it's it's it's uncomfortable to say this but the reality and the evidence from a public health point of view shows that the great majority of drug users are functioning normal people just like most people who drink alcohol are not alcoholics most people who use cocaine or heroin are not in fact addicted or have horrendous life so we feed this narrative and we feed this sort of alternative reality and we sell it to public opinion and since most people in public opinion do not use cocaine or heroin or opioids etc they buy into this narrative and they push for governments to keep drugs illegal etc etc and it feeds off itself it's a close loop and I think academia has to play a role in this to sort of broaden the discussion and the reality that from a from a public health point of view a public health perspective of what drug uses really like and and of course link it in with with the horrible the horrible impact of organized crime in terms of violence etc so I think we really need to expand the discussion and it's not something that's going to be easy but I think I think we need to make the push for this and on this you can read Carl Hart who has done some research on this okay everybody got very excited about this question but let's move on to some other question one was addressed to John Marcus specifically about the on the ground conditions that change yeah yeah so what the commissioner do is to for instance in the case of infiltration into public procurements is to change the condition so if the public procurement was assigned to firm related to mafia that's an action that they are under taker for instance so the management or the public budget is important a second I think there is a symbolic value especially in cases where the infiltration of the mafia is more recent and cities and are not a totally hopeless it's an important sign to see that the state the national government took a decision on very specific community you know to send technocrats so I see I think for some citizen this this as a value and then there is also an police related aspect so if there are evidence of ties between a politician or more than one and mafia's of course they will start an investigation that will take you know years but that show that you know the state the police is more present actor in that community so that can also have you know a deterrence effect on the presence of a criminal organization in that in that city and then I wanted to reply also another question about the more bottom up approach so in Italy there was this a bigger crackdown at beginning of the 90s following the murder of two judges and this was also the start of widespread social movements in Sicily against mafia and nowadays there are many NGO working on anti-mafia in Sicily so for instance they are very successful in the promoting small shops to join an anti-racial movement displaying a sign saying that you know they don't pay to the mafia so this is extremely important it's about the cultural change and it's related also to what they were in their presentation they were talking about the support of the population for those cultural changes of course are extremely difficult and they take time but the Italian experience on this is that a big shock that was the murder of two important judges fighting the mafia was a turning point on this and another issue all the lead all those policies are clearly limitation because they deal with these long-term problems so there is a cultural aspect that I mentioned and then there is an economic one that is the fact that those are poor area with the high level of unemployment so there is a kind of rational if I have no alternative you know I go after of those organization so those are you know long-term issues thank you let's hear from Andres and I think then we'll have to draw to a close I also wanted to address what the gentleman brought up about the grassroots and bottom-up approaches and another uncomfortable truth we often overlook is that many of these gangs are in fact sort of grassroots organizations themselves and in many cases they at least I experienced this in Cali when in my tenure as a secretary of security in Cali but I think in Medellin is true and probably true in many other cities around the world is they they operate and they provide significant services for for the community from a grassroots level so I think it would be interesting to see how and that's partly the approach we took in Cali how do we instead of seeing gangs as necessarily evil or necessarily negative try to bring them into the sort of social fabric and see how they can we can reduce the harm that they that they that comes from for instance the violence associated to gangs etc and see how we can make them part of the social network and sort of the social fabric of the community and and try to build legitimacy from the bottom up and I think we can just like we see governments usually taking steps from the from the top to to the bottom likewise I think we we also approach the the solution to violence from from a top bottom approach like dismantling drug cartels or signing a peace deal with the FARC but that usually even when that happens it generates a huge void that oftentimes is filled from the bottom up so it'd be interesting to see if we can take a more alternative approach to see how we can make or understand the the grassroots components of these organizations and try to weave them into the social fabric and and sort of empower the positive aspects that they bring and try to limit the harm that they they generate as well okay one quick comment this is just something to add on to that it goes back to the legalization thing again I agree that we're very very far from true legalization but a piece of legalization that's being discussed in Brazil it's being discussed in the US has to do with reparations to people who were drug traffickers and once drug trafficking becomes legal right so you were imprisoned for dealing pot and now pot legal you deserve some reparation well there's a case to be made that in a world like that some of these people their abilities as provisioners of local governance taking care of their communities should be taken advantage of right and those people should be you know in a recruited and incorporated into government local governance structures as part of some kind of reparations package and that's way politically out of the pale right now but it's something to think about for the future