Global Report on Human Settlements 2007 - PoA-ISS

46
Urban crime and violence
Box II.1 Nairobi: A city under siege by murderous gangs
They shot my 19-year-old nephew Jaimeen last week.
I don’t know who ‘they’ were; but I do know they
were young men barely out of their teens who felt
no qualms about killing someone for a few shillings, a
mobile phone or a car.‘They’ are the face of Kenya
today: ruthless, lacking in compassion or ethics, totally
devoid of feeling, worshippers of only one god –
money. The bullet entered my nephew’s intestine,
where it left 16 gaping holes, finally lodging itself in his
thigh. Luckily he survived. But though the wounds
have been stitched and he is healing, the trauma of
the event has left him permanently scarred.
The same day that my nephew was shot,
‘they’ invaded parts of Nairobi’s Kangemi slums, not
far from where my nephew lives, and tore down
mabati shacks so they could steal the few possessions
of Nairobi’s dispossessed. This was a less ambitious
group of criminals; but sources tell me that the fear
they instilled in the slum was so widespread that no
one slept that night. Neither the near-fatal shooting
of my nephew nor the slum robbery was reported in
the press. Nor were the cases of the many women
and girls who have been violated and tortured by
robbers in front of their husbands, fathers and sons in
the last few years. Their tragedies are being played
out every single day in this city gone mad. And no
one, except maybe the Nairobi Women’s Hospital
and some good cops, cares.
Every day, and today is no exception,
someone somewhere in this city of dread will be
killed, raped, robbed or carjacked. It wasn’t always so.
When I was growing up, most people in the city
didn’t have askaris guarding the gates to their homes.
The windows in houses lacked grills and the remote
alarm was something we only saw in James Bond
movies. Dogs in those days were pets, not man-eating
beasts trained to maim intruders. Most children
walked to school without ever wondering if they
would be raped or molested on the way.
In my family home in Parklands, we often left
the house door open, even at night. People drove
with their car windows open and their car doors
unlocked. If your car broke down in the middle of the
road, someone would stop and give you a lift, and
even take you home.
The security business was virtually nonexistent.
There was crime, but the benign kind: an
odd jewellery snatching here, a pick-pocketing there.
The men with guns had not yet arrived. Then it all
changed, suddenly and without warning. A financial
scandal of monstrous proportions was revealed. It
emerged that the people we feted as heroes were, in
fact, thieves, smugglers and con men. Kenyans lost
faith in the system. Overnight, the money they
carried in their pockets wasn’t worth the paper it
was printed on. Inflation soared, banks collapsed.
Middle-class Kenyans moved to slums. Slum dwellers
struggled to survive. Kenya joined the ranks of the
most unequal societies in the world.
As neighbouring Somalia descended into
anarchy, a culture of impunity set in. AK-47s were
being sold openly in Nairobi’s Eastlands for less than
500 Kenyan shillings (US$7.58) each. Police officers
looked the other way. Well-off Kenyans sent their
children abroad in the hope that they would never
return. Skilled professionals left the country in
droves, to the US and Europe. The brain drain
became an epidemic.
Meanwhile, back home, security firms flourished.
Night guards became mandatory in all housing
estates. Construction companies began building
homes with window grills, barricades and electrical
fences. Gated communities became the norm rather
than the exception. Nairobians began to believe that
it was normal to have ‘safe havens’ in their homes,
three locks on their front doors and alarms next to
their beds.
Fear, the biggest inhibitor to freedom of
movement, ruled the streets and invaded our houses.
We became hostages … of the thugs who roamed
freely on the streets with their guns. One foreign
correspondent even compared Nairobi to
Mogadishu, where lawlessness and violence were the
order of the day.
Nairobians have now learned to live in fear.
They envy people in other cities who can walk alone
at night or who sleep without worrying about the
safety of their children. They dream of escape – to
Europe, America, Australia, even Asia, where living in
a city does not mean always wondering if or when
you will be killed or maimed. The ones who get away
never come back. Those of us who stay out of
misguided patriotism, lack of resources or just plain
bad luck do the only thing we can in these circumstances
– we come home from work before dark,
lock ourselves in our homes and pray.
Source: Warah, 2007
crime and violence rates among both young males and
females. Furthermore, the globalization of markets threatens
employment opportunities for many young people, especially
in transitional and developing nations. The deportation of
criminals to their countries of origin, particularly from the
US to Latin America and the Caribbean, accounts for increasing
levels of youth crime and gang-related activities in the
region.
The transition towards democratization often brings
social and economic disruption that may be associated with
increased crime and violence, at least in the short term.
Findings suggest that some nations undergoing transition
from autocratic governance to democracy have had significant
increases in homicide rates. These include countries in
Eastern Europe and in the Latin American and Caribbean
region.
This part of the report also addresses the impacts of
urban crime and violence, from the local to the global levels.
Findings suggest that in 2000, more than 500,000 people
across the globe were victims of homicide. Crime negatively
affects economic and health systems at the national and
regional levels. It has been identified as an impediment to
foreign investment and a cause of capital flight and brain
drain. High homicide and violent crime rates are also associated
with increased healthcare and policing costs. The
collapse of the Brazilian public hospital system during the
1980s and 1990s has been attributed to large numbers of
homicides and criminal injuries.
Local impacts of crime and violence include the flight
of population and businesses from central city locations.
There is also evidence that rising levels of crime tend to
depress property values – an important economic variable
bearing on investment decisions and the creation of wealth.
The impact of robberies and burglaries in cities of developing
countries manifests in the growing demand for private
security and the proliferation of gated communities. In
South Africa, for instance, the number of private security
guards has increased by 150 per cent since 1997. 1 The
increased privatization of security and public space is an
indication of the loss of confidence in the ability of the
relevant authorities to cope with the growing levels of crime
and violence. When confidence in public authorities and