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Laptop stolen at Bogota crime prevention conference

By Manuel Rueda, Editorial Director

Friday, April 16, 2010

A high ranking official from the Inter-American Development Bank lost his laptop during the first session of the Ibero-American Public Security Conference on Friday. 

Luis Guillermo Echeverri said he briefly left the room, as participants took a break from a conference delivered by Bogota Mayor Samuel Moreno, only to come back and discover his laptop had disappeared. 

More than twenty mayors from Latin America´s largest cities are attending the event, in which representatives of NGOs, the Private sector and police forces are discussing strategies to curb crime and promote peaceful coexistence in the region. 

Issues under discussion include the growth of youth gangs, controlling homicide rates and the role of education in decreasing crime rates. 

The Inter-American Development Bank or IDB is the main sponsor of the event and argues that security poses obstacles to economic growth in Latin American cities, while organized crime weakens democratic institutions. 

The event also attended by officials from African and European countries, such as the former mayor of the Sicilian city of Palermo, who came to Bogota to talk about strategies to decrease corruption in government security forces and judicial institutions.

One of the main speakers at the conference is General Oscar Naranjo, the director of Colombia´s National Police.  

Naranjo says that city governments in Latin America are mistakenly operating under the belief that crime arises mostly from poverty, stating that this assumption stigmatizes low income citizens and has led local policy makers to mistakenly sacrifice investment in security in exchange for greater investments in social programs.

General Naranjo also argues that crime rates soar when police and other security forces are inefficient and underfunded.  

He told journalists on Friday that Colombia requires 80,000 to 100,000 new police officers in order to achieve an “ideal ratio” of police to citizens that would help Colombia reduce current crime rates by significant levels.