PERU is far from being the most violent country in what is the world’s most violent continent. But even more than other Latin Americans, Peruvians feel unsafe, according to polls by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), based at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. With reason: 28% of Peruvian respondents in the 2012 poll reported having been a victim of crime in the previous 12 months, second only to Ecuador. Robbery is common, and extortion is growing fast. This has become so prevalent that construction companies routinely buy protection from criminal “labour unions”, paying them in jobs, “ghost jobs” and cash on building sites in Lima and several northern cities. “Extortion is growing for a simple reason,” Gustavo Carrión, a former commander of the National Police, told El Comercio, a newspaper. “Businessmen prefer to make the payments demanded because they know the police are ineffective. The situation is so serious that criminal organisations are replacing the state in the public function of security.” Peru is a sad case of police corruption and inefficiency. A determined attempt to reform the police a decade ago failed for lack of political support. Salaries are low (around 1,500 soles or $540 a month). The police are allowed to double as private security guards under a scheme in which they work 24 hours on and then have 24 hours off. The pernicious effect of this arrangement is that many police now expect to be paid by the public for anything they do.

The day-on, day-off routine has left a vacuum, which has been filled by a Peruvian innovation: a municipal watchman service known as serenazgo (a Spanish colonial term). Uniformed but unarmed, the serenos patrol on foot, around the clock; they can draw on police hired by municipalities for support. The serenazgos now operate in all large cities and towns, and employ a total of around 25,000, according to a survey by Ciudad Nuestra, an NGO. It is the municipal security departments, not the police, that deploy close-circuit television, data mapping and other crime-prevention technology.

Because of the highly visible presence of the serenazgo, the better-off districts of Lima are reasonably safe. But in poorer districts of the capital, it is a different story: Ciudad Nuestra found a tenfold variation in spending per resident on serenazgos among the 48 districts of greater Lima (a city of 8.5m).

Prospects for reform of the police’s on-off working arrangement look dim. It was introduced as an emergency measure in the early 1990s when the state was bankrupt, but has become permanent. Interior ministers come and go with bewildering rapidity, lessening the chance of reform. Walter Albán, an interior minister who had promised to phase the system out, lost his job last month. His replacement, Daniel Urresti, is a former army general who on appointment brushed aside reform in the following terms: "I leave the discussions to the lawyers, the experts. My place is in the streets, fighting the criminals." Mr Urresti may not be there for long either. A senior prosecutor is weighing whether to ratify a charge of murder against him, concerning the killing of a journalist by an army patrol in 1988 during the war against the Shining Path terrorist movement. He insists he is innocent.