So ... how do you deal with criminals that scratch your car if you don't pay $8 for a parking spot or more if you have a fancy car?

The police knows this is happening and blame judges for not giving these criminals more than a night in jail ever.

Central government knows this is going on and sends police from afar to "help" occasionally but that's isolated operations not making a dent in this specific crime which is common across Chile wherever there is high parking-turnover.

The municipality concessions the street side parking business but in the most interesting streets, nobody wants to take it as they get intimidated, too.

I assume the car scratching is just the tip of the iceberg and businesses in party districts are paying whole different sums to appease the mafia but it's pretty clearly organized crime.

Now nobody ever scratched my car even though I don't pay and my theory is that they only scratch enough cars to make the threat plausible and they openly yell their conditions at you and smack the car - demonstrating little restraint but that's still very taxing when going out with the family.

So while "free" parking where parking obviously has a high value is the problem here, driving a market for a very unpredictable kind of business, I'm struggling to see how to fix this without arming a stronger mafia that's hopefully more predictable.