Richard Hanania covered some of the tradeoffs between due process for young men with tattoos and a murder rate of 51 per 100,000. The Invisible Graveyard of Crime Followup: The Midwit Meme and the Denial of Tradeoffs Mentioned at Marginal Revolution.
In a first world country where crime is manageable, maybe you can tolerate such blatant mockery of the larger society. Are you really going to arrest a guy for a tattoo? What about freedom of expression? If you have evidence that he’s committed a crime, carefully gather the evidence and then go to a judge and get a warrant. Vox complains that there aren’t enough public defenders in El Salvador to advocate on behalf of all the accused criminals. Should a country therefore let gangs roam free until it sets up a few more law schools and finds enough money in the budget to hire the new graduates? How many young people with energy and ambition are going to try to become lawyers in a crime-infested El Salvador rather than simply do whatever it takes to get to the United States? Does being a public defender for MS-13 seem like a more fulfilling and less stressful life? More attorneys also means you need a more professional police force since lawyers will catch more mistakes the cops made, so add that to the list of things you need to do before you’re allowed to have a functional society. The point here is that much of what sounds like reasonable advice in a first world nation is simply unrealistic in a country in the position of El Salvador.