The article discusses urban violence and crime in Boa Vista – Roraima, taking death analyses from murder, prison data, organised crime, human trafficking and records of occurrences in delegations as conductors. As part of the research results of the doctoral thesis of the Post-Graduation Programme in Geography of the Federal University of Ceará, it appears that the increase in crime in the northernmost capital of Brazil is largely due to the inertia of the public authorities due to the lack of policies aimed at improving the living conditions of the population and, as a result, reducing situations of social vulnerability. Such inertia, followed by the lack of control and mismanagement of public security actions, especially in times of globalisation of violence and specialisation in the forms in which criminal actions are established, leads to a growing feeling of fear and search for personal security appearances.