Rio de Janeiro has a crime problem. While street crime in the Brazilian city may not be a new phenomenon, with an influx of visitors set to descend on the city when the World Cup kicks off in two months, there’s a new sense of urgency to get a handle on it. And, as NPR’s Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports, it’s not exactly working. “According to the police, cellphone robberies in Rio have gone up 121 percent since last year. Robberies on buses have spiked 118 percent. In one popular area called Santa Theresa, street robberies have gone up 93 percent. Murders in Rio de Janeiro state have jumped 18 percent this year,” according to NPR.
So, as news channels often do, Brazil’s Globo TV hit the streets to do a story about the city’s persistent, and troubling, crime rate. When the correspondent begins an interview with a woman on a busy intersection about the problem of street thieves, as if to prove a point, a young mugger brazenly dashes through the background of the interview and rips the woman’s necklace off her neck—on camera.
