But that harmony has often been missing from the city's streets, plagued by increasing violence in recent years: sectarian blood baths, criminal score-settling, militant atrocities and the bloody rivalry among the city's ethnically divided political parties.
We are starting to see episodes of criminal score-settling, groups of hitmen... but we are not aware of anybody who died because of marijuana consumption," explains the head of the National Drug Agency, Julio Calzada.
The government's reliance on forensic evidence and the standards of criminal law scored one success today: the murder conviction of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi.
On Monday, Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, said in a statement that he questioned a system "that allows a vile and violent career criminal with scores of arrests for violent offenses to continue to walk our neighborhoods".
At ProPublica the duo's scoops included the revelation of discriminatory advertising practices at Facebook; algorithmic bias in criminal risk scores used in bail, sentencing and parole decisions; price discrimination toward minorities in car insurance rates; and cybersecurity holes in the President's home-away-from-home, the Mar-A-Lago country club.
These are now the questions being asked in dozens of criminal investigations and scores of lawsuits.
There are also reasons to worry about scoring criminal defendants rather than relying on a judge's discretion.
China Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group, said last week that at least 23 people had been detained for criminal investigation, and scores of others for no stated reason.
Last week, an investigation was disclosed of allegations that narcotics officers in Brooklyn South used drugs to pay off confidential informants, officials said, causing criminal charges against scores of drug suspects to be dismissed.
The expanded scrutiny, which is being conducted by the agency's civil division, parallels a narrower investigation by the Justice Department's criminal division into scores of wealthy American clients with hidden offshore accounts run by UBS.
