A massive gang took over São Paulo, and weirdly, the murder rate tanked. It turns out one big gang is 'safer' than a dozen small ones.
March 27, 2026
Original Paper
<p>Rest Your Trigger Finger: How Governance Over Illegal Markets Promotes Welfare</p>
SSRN · 6357759
The Takeaway
We usually assume that organized crime brings more violence, but this study reveals that the PCC gang acted as a 'shadow state.' By institutionalizing their own bureaucratic courts and hiring 'enforcement bureaucrats' to settle disputes, they replaced chaotic street violence with a structured justice system that successfully lowered homicides.
From the abstract
This paper examines how the consolidation of criminal governance by the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) reshaped illicit markets and coincided with a sustained decline in homicide in São Paulo beginning in the early 2000s. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, internal documents seized by law enforcement, and newly assembled city-level data, we argue that the PCC institutionalized governance functions typically associated with the state: monopolizing coercion, providing informal dispute