kerkko.fi

http://youarelistening.to/irene

Why is there so little looting in Japan? The explanation is a robust system of laws that reinforce honesty, a strong police presence, and, ironically, active crime organizations. The Japanese legal structure rewards honesty more than most. The high rates of recovery have less to do with altruism than with the system of carrots and sticks that incentivizes people to return property they find rather than keep it. If you find an umbrella and turn it in to the cops, you get a finder's fee of 5-20% of its value if the owner picks it up.

If they do not pick it up within six months, the finder gets to keep the umbrella. Japanese learn about this system from a young age, and a child's first trip to the nearest police station after finding a small coin, say, is a rite of passage that both children and police officers take seriously. At the same time, police enforce small crimes like petty theft, which contributes to an overall sense of security and order. Failure to return a found wallet can result in hours of interrogation at best, and up to 10 years in prison at worst.

Japan has an active and visible police force of nearly 300,000 officers across the country. Cops walk their beats and chat up local residents and shopkeepers. Police are posted at ubiquitous kobans, police boxes manned by one or two officers, and in cities there is almost always a koban within walking distance of another koban. A survey in 1992 found that 95% of residents knew where the nearest koban was. Police are good at their jobs: The clearance rate for murder in 2010 was an unbelievable 98.2%.

At the same time, members of the Yakuza are also enforcing order. All three major crime groups -- Yamaguchi-gumi, Sumiyoshi-kai, and Inagawa-kai -- patrol the streets to make sure looting and robbery does not occur. The Sumiyoshi-kai claims to have shipped over 40 tons of humanitarian aid supplies nationwide and that is probably a conservative estimate. One group has even opened its Tokyo offices to displaced Japanese and foreigners who were stranded after the first tremors disabled public transportation.

Gunmen kidnapped a 28-year-old woman who was the sole police officer in the Mexican town of Guadalupe, close to the violent northern border city of Ciudad Juarez. Unidentified gunmen set Erika Gandara's home ablaze before abducting her. She was the last police officer in Guadalupe after her colleagues either resigned and fled or were killed. Guadalupe, population 9,000, is in an area used by traffickers to smuggle drugs into the United States. The town is just up the road from the town of Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero, where a 20-year-old college student and mother named Marisol Valles took over as police chief in October.

Police in Taiwan arrested a man for stealing a bicycle and planned to lock him up for theft charges. However, the officers discovered that the man was so poor that they not only did not prosecute him but instead decided to donate a bike to him.

The man stole the bicycle from a high school near his home to help save his daughter time in walking 10 kilometers from her vocational school to take care of him in the hospital. The man has often been ill and has had to be hospitalized.

Police said that the man originally told his daughter that he had bought the bicycle second-hand. However, later the former owner of the bike recognized it. Both father and daughter were taken in for questioning by the police.

Police officers learned that the man had no access to water or electricity and was living in an empty shipping container beside a graveyard. Police officers decided not to press charges against the old man and jointly bought a new bike for the girl.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/09/11/taiwan.poor.bike.thief/

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/north_bay&id=7639987

A mechanic died violently in police custody in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, shortly after he refused to continue paying bribes. The police reportedly started extorting money from the victim after they seized the auto-rickshaw that he operated and the two men he hired to drive it. The man was delivered dead to a hospital shortly after police picked him up, bearing signs of torture. The hospital has refused to release his medical records. The case shows how Bangladeshi police are able to trade on justice, to arrest persons at will, and to kill with impunity. The wife and nephew of the dead man have been threatened repeatedly by the officers involved in the case.

Thousands of people across the UK might have been stopped and searched illegally, figures released by the Home Office suggest. Powers under section 44 of the Terrorism Act were used in "error" after the proper authorisations were not given. Section 44 allows police to stop and search someone without suspicion that an offence has occurred. Critics say the rules unfairly target some ethnic groups and increase community tensions.

In an action that was cleverly psychological, ice cream music was blasted through the loudspeakers of a Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) armored Land Rover after the patrol came under attack from about 15 teenagers last weekend on the Twinbrook estate on outskirts of west Belfast. The music stopped bottle-throwing teenagers.

“An officer used the vehicle's loudspeaker system to play music to the youths in an effort to use humour to defuse the situation. The youths stopped throwing the bottles. However police accept that this was not an appropriate action. The officer has been spoken to by a senior officer in order to establish the circumstances of the incident.”

“It was a very immature way for police to deal with a very serious problem,” said Sinn Fein councilor Angela Nelson. "I would have expected the PSNI to have a more mature outlook and not to come up and play ice cream tunes. Where in the world does a police service say that their way of dealing with anti-social behavior is through humour?”

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Police-use-ice-cream-music-to-embarrass-teen-rioters-in-Belfast-95103964.html