My brother-in-law worked in São Paulo, Brazil for a couple years, right at the turn of the millennium. Here is an article from 2007 in Vanity Fair titled City of Fear. It talks about a very dangerous series of events that happened there five or six years after he returned to Mexico. There was a continuous string of attacks on the police that created chaos that caused a panic, shutting the city down for days with people locked in their homes cowering in fear with traffic jams everywhere until people got home. It is an interesting read about a scary situation. Peter Grant from the Bayou Renaissance Man blog makes the case that all the stars are aligning that could allow the same kind of event to happen here in the United States. In his article titled US cities are becoming much more dangerous places, he talks about how the BLM movement, the influx of illegals from many chaotic and violent places and the way the law enforcement community has had to respond to what is a no-win situation for them means some version of this kind of chaotic event could arrive in large cities in the US. Read the article. He makes a compelling case.

Update: Turns out, my brother-in-law was on a business trip in São Paulo when this was all happening. I cannot wait to get together with him and hear the story.