I’m not sure what this has to do with anything.

Similar, but not exactly the same as what I call the “restaurant effect.” A restaurant always appears more popular to customers than it actually is, simply because there are more customers to observe it when it is busy.

Wow – what a waste of money! How convenient of Giuliani to claim credit for the NYC reforms which predated his tenure. Then there were the terrorist attacks and once again Giuliani claimed credit where none was due. If he’s really advising people on security policy in Rio, those po’ folk are screwed.

The World Sport events finally awakened the political will to do something about it, and their choice is the one you are discussing now. Similar actions have been done in the past, but not on this scale. Rio even hired Rudy Giuliani to help them with security policy. They want to impose law into lawlessness and free citizens from terror. Now, is this the best possible way to do it? Will cleaning up the slums solve the problem? Aren’t the drug policies, the ones who fed millions into the gangs, responsible for feeding up the violence? These are valid questions. I don’t think cleaning up the place will solve the problem in the long-range, it will merely disrupt and tone down violence for a while, until the next generation takes over. The systemic problems won’t be addressed, the underlying basis of crime will remain, and while the traveler and the resident will probably feel more secure during the World Cup/Olympics, this will be at the cost of maintaining deadly force in the slums.

At one town the local council decided that the indigenous people living in the dry river bed were a bad image so before QE2 arrived they were rounded up and shipped them elsewhere [not sure of the details] and they allowed to return when QE2 had left.
Similarly when she was due to visit my home towm the local bigwigs of the council and the major employer [it was/still is a one employer town] decided to clean up the place and the manager of the big company ordered an underling to collect shovels, rakes and the like from the company store [I’m talking large industrial warehouse here] and send out gangs to tidy up the streets, clean up weeds etc.

But the store was empty.
There should have been hundreds of shovels and the like but apparently workers had ‘borrowed’ them.
So the manager declared an amnesty on the return of the implements which duly arrived back in their proper place, the gangs went out and cleaned up the town and the implements were duly ‘borrowed’ again straight after.

Doubtless QE2 was duly impressed with a desert mining city being weed free.

atheists, weâ??re gonna cut off your headsâ?¦

Will it be OK to attend the Olympics in Rio if, say, five or six innocent bystanders are killed during a major police action to arrest a few dozen bad guys? What about a dozen innocent bystanders? A hundred? Will it depend on how bad the bad guys are?

Ten days before the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, at least 44 people (hundreds by other accounts) were killed in the Tlatelolco massacre, where police forces (upgraded for the occasion with equipment supplied by the U.S.) cracked down on a student/union movement that had arisen in protest of the strains the government’s ambitious olympic plans had put on the country. There was some discussion of canceling the event, after that, but ultimately it went ahead as planned and without further incidents. Based on that depressing example, I’d say that the Brazilian government is in the clear unless the piles of bodies rise above rooftop-levels.