A couple of people sent me this article on google executives visiting Juarez in order to study some sort of techno fix for the violence…below is a comment from Tim Dunn…

They were looking for violent criminals. 

So, the techno-wizard billionaires who created GOOGLE think the federal police in Mexico are the good guys. When every man woman and child (maybe especially the kids on the street) in Juarez and the rest of Mexico know that the federal police are the kidnappers, killers, torturers and thieves, etc …  If google thinks they can keep this technology away from the bad guys…who of course, ARE the police and have much more $$ (thanks to the Merida Initiative and our US tax dollars, not to mention their own HSBC and Wells-Fargo laundered narco-dollars) to acquire whatever technology they want… well, if I had Google stock I would sell it in a flash.  Sadly, I think that the narco-rich of Mexico and the world already probably have a lot more google stock than you or I can imagine….

Molly & Listeros,

See Washington Post article by 2 senior Goggle executive who recently visited Juárez, with an idea for how to reduce violence there. They propose some sort of ill-defined, yet hopefully better method of anonymously reporting crime problems and generating some sort of justice response. Seems to rely on a bunch of (seemingly naïve) assumptions that may not apply to Juárez context, though. But who knows, maybe they are on to something (& not just technological fetishism)?

Key paragraph:

“In a sense, we are talking about dual crowdsourcing: Citizens crowdsource incident awareness up, and responders crowdsource justice down, nearly in real time. The trick is that anonymity is provided to everyone, although such a system would know a unique ID for every user to maintain records and provide rewards. This bare-bones model could take many forms: official and nonprofit first responders, investigative journalists, whistleblowers, neighborhood watches.”

Would “crowdsourcing” include or promote vigilantism? Would “official first responders” respond if they were made more aware of crime incidents? Lack of awareness among Juárez authorities of crime is not the problem many times, as Molly et al.’s posts have made abundantly clear for years now…

Tim Dunn