Crime sensation and real crime! opinion
- Thread starter lamarque
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I think if you actually researched in depth "most dangerous cities" you would find many major cities far riskier then BA. Problem with finding definitive info on that of course is that "dangerous" is perceived differently by different people (this thread case in point), so how do you measure it?trennod said:
Nope. One was simply heading home from work, another time later on a night out. I'm from Perth to originally so yeah, quite a shock when he told me that. But money attracts crime, and Perth has been booming for a while now, all that mining money.
My perceptions come in phases, according to what I know, balanced by a counterweight of acknowledging at first that much is unknown when one is new somewhere, or at doing something, and may not understand everything that's going on. One must be wary of people who's perceptions never change, but you hope than when perceptions do change, that it happens based on reasonably solid facts, not assumptions and general fear-mongering.
My perceptions have gone through a number of changes while I've been here. As far as crime goes, in the last two years it has ratcheted up a few notches in terms of wariness related to what's going on in Buenos Aires.
When I first came here, I didn't feel much danger. I was wary - I'd traveled the world for a decade and seen many things in that time. I saw the dirty streets and shabby buildings mixed with nice parks and beautiful architecture and at first worried simply because the rougher places seemed truly rough, until I understood that was just the way it was - things didn't get kept up, cartoneros threw trash all over the place and people often didn't think twice about throwing a napkin or a cup on the ground even with a trashcan nearby. I realized that many of the places were just fine security-wise and learned which places may have a little bit of danger.
I knew very few people that had been victims of anything more serious than a pickpocket and that only a couple of people.
But as things started descending a bit over the last couple of years, I began to see the level of crime that affected the people I knew to be either on the rise, or the last 4 years previously were some sort of statistical fluke.
I not talking about things I've heard other people talk about. I'm talking about family members in the house, crying and traumatized after being held up at knife point or gunpoint - my brother-in-law once showing where one of the little pricks that robbed him had stuck the knife literally in his ribs a bit too hard and sliced him pretty good, or my sister-in-law being robbed of her money for bills when she was on the way to RapiPago to pay, sitting in our house crying so hard she couldn't even tell us what happened for a while. I'm not going to go through all I've seen and written about - it gets tiresome.
I will write about one incident, I'm not sure if I have before (I think so) but it bears directly on why I am wary of crime here and why I feel it gets worse, in combination with harder financial times.
About a year ago, I was in my office (in my apartment) working when I noticed there were a bunch of lights bouncing off the parking lot walls across the street. I went out on the balcony and looked down (I'm on the second floor on a hill - it's less than two stories up so I had a great view) and saw 8 kids, varying ages (from 14 to 17 I found out later), both male and female, sitting on the ground, their backs against our building, handcuffed wrists behind their backs. A couple of cop cars were parked in the street and on the car closest, on the trunk, the officers were filling out a report and had some evidence bags filled with a couple of revolvers and a couple of 6-inch blades in the bags.
They sat down for about three hours. I looked out every once in a while to see what was going on. I could see that the cops had placed the kids' cellphones near their legs, and every once in a while a phone would ring. The cops would go up to the phone and answer it. Sometimes I'd see the kids try to put the phone under their legs so the cops wouldn't hear it ring, it seemed.
I assumed that the cops were waiting for police transport to come and take the kids to a holding area for processing. It was obvious they had done something wrong.
A few hours later, everyone was gone. I went down on some errand and stopped to ask the portero what the deal had been. He told me it was a juvenile gang that the police had chased and caught after the kids had robbed a group of people nearby. My first thought was "wow! The police actually caught someone robbing!"
I then asked the portero what took so long for the police transport to come and get them and he laughed.
They weren't waiting for transport, they were waiting for their parents to come get them.
According to my portero (obviously, not a legal opinion backed up by legal education, but rather his understanding of the law as a citizen) the police don't do anything with kids because they can't go to jail, at least not for something as "light" as armed robbery if no one was hurt.
So parents send out their kids to do the stealing because there are little or no consequences for doing so.
That same portero told me one day about his brother who bought some hectares somewhere outside the city to the west. It was a pecan plantation if I remember right, and he was growing other produce such as tomatoes, had chickens and collected eggs, etc. He'd come from Entre Rios more than twenty years ago and had been producing that land for most of that time.
About a year ago, the brother was taking his product to market in his truck. Bandits stopped him on the road, something that had happened before, but he didn't have much to give. They didn't want produce, they wanted money. When he didn't have it, they told him calmly that next time he better be carrying something to make them happy or he wouldn't make it back home. The brother decided to sell his land and move back to Entre Rios.
I haven't written about a cop acquaintance of mine who was stabbed by a neighbor kid next door where he lived multiple times in the gut and his throat slashed - he managed to live but his quality of life right now sucks. That happened last year. Or my friend who has had had break-in in his apartment this year, in which he was tied up and threatened by two guys with guns, beaten, pistol-whipped and the pricks left with half his clothes and his cell phone because he didn't have anything else. Or his girlfriend who was assaulted twice, raped one of those times, within two weeks and "accidentally" fell off my friend's balcony two floors up after she had managed to make it to his apartment after the second robbery. She's still in the hospital.
This place is still not a horrible place to live. It IS getting more dangerous, and I don't exaggerate even a little what I KNOW has happened to my family and friends.
People can say whatever they want, whether it be government statistics proving that the country is safe, just a perception problem, and Cristina is perceived as doing a great job by bringing crime down, or whether it be that stepping out of the house means your death.
I see neither of those two extremes, but I see a lot of problems all over the place and I know what I know.
My perceptions have gone through a number of changes while I've been here. As far as crime goes, in the last two years it has ratcheted up a few notches in terms of wariness related to what's going on in Buenos Aires.
When I first came here, I didn't feel much danger. I was wary - I'd traveled the world for a decade and seen many things in that time. I saw the dirty streets and shabby buildings mixed with nice parks and beautiful architecture and at first worried simply because the rougher places seemed truly rough, until I understood that was just the way it was - things didn't get kept up, cartoneros threw trash all over the place and people often didn't think twice about throwing a napkin or a cup on the ground even with a trashcan nearby. I realized that many of the places were just fine security-wise and learned which places may have a little bit of danger.
I knew very few people that had been victims of anything more serious than a pickpocket and that only a couple of people.
But as things started descending a bit over the last couple of years, I began to see the level of crime that affected the people I knew to be either on the rise, or the last 4 years previously were some sort of statistical fluke.
I not talking about things I've heard other people talk about. I'm talking about family members in the house, crying and traumatized after being held up at knife point or gunpoint - my brother-in-law once showing where one of the little pricks that robbed him had stuck the knife literally in his ribs a bit too hard and sliced him pretty good, or my sister-in-law being robbed of her money for bills when she was on the way to RapiPago to pay, sitting in our house crying so hard she couldn't even tell us what happened for a while. I'm not going to go through all I've seen and written about - it gets tiresome.
I will write about one incident, I'm not sure if I have before (I think so) but it bears directly on why I am wary of crime here and why I feel it gets worse, in combination with harder financial times.
About a year ago, I was in my office (in my apartment) working when I noticed there were a bunch of lights bouncing off the parking lot walls across the street. I went out on the balcony and looked down (I'm on the second floor on a hill - it's less than two stories up so I had a great view) and saw 8 kids, varying ages (from 14 to 17 I found out later), both male and female, sitting on the ground, their backs against our building, handcuffed wrists behind their backs. A couple of cop cars were parked in the street and on the car closest, on the trunk, the officers were filling out a report and had some evidence bags filled with a couple of revolvers and a couple of 6-inch blades in the bags.
They sat down for about three hours. I looked out every once in a while to see what was going on. I could see that the cops had placed the kids' cellphones near their legs, and every once in a while a phone would ring. The cops would go up to the phone and answer it. Sometimes I'd see the kids try to put the phone under their legs so the cops wouldn't hear it ring, it seemed.
I assumed that the cops were waiting for police transport to come and take the kids to a holding area for processing. It was obvious they had done something wrong.
A few hours later, everyone was gone. I went down on some errand and stopped to ask the portero what the deal had been. He told me it was a juvenile gang that the police had chased and caught after the kids had robbed a group of people nearby. My first thought was "wow! The police actually caught someone robbing!"
I then asked the portero what took so long for the police transport to come and get them and he laughed.
They weren't waiting for transport, they were waiting for their parents to come get them.
According to my portero (obviously, not a legal opinion backed up by legal education, but rather his understanding of the law as a citizen) the police don't do anything with kids because they can't go to jail, at least not for something as "light" as armed robbery if no one was hurt.
So parents send out their kids to do the stealing because there are little or no consequences for doing so.
That same portero told me one day about his brother who bought some hectares somewhere outside the city to the west. It was a pecan plantation if I remember right, and he was growing other produce such as tomatoes, had chickens and collected eggs, etc. He'd come from Entre Rios more than twenty years ago and had been producing that land for most of that time.
About a year ago, the brother was taking his product to market in his truck. Bandits stopped him on the road, something that had happened before, but he didn't have much to give. They didn't want produce, they wanted money. When he didn't have it, they told him calmly that next time he better be carrying something to make them happy or he wouldn't make it back home. The brother decided to sell his land and move back to Entre Rios.
I haven't written about a cop acquaintance of mine who was stabbed by a neighbor kid next door where he lived multiple times in the gut and his throat slashed - he managed to live but his quality of life right now sucks. That happened last year. Or my friend who has had had break-in in his apartment this year, in which he was tied up and threatened by two guys with guns, beaten, pistol-whipped and the pricks left with half his clothes and his cell phone because he didn't have anything else. Or his girlfriend who was assaulted twice, raped one of those times, within two weeks and "accidentally" fell off my friend's balcony two floors up after she had managed to make it to his apartment after the second robbery. She's still in the hospital.
This place is still not a horrible place to live. It IS getting more dangerous, and I don't exaggerate even a little what I KNOW has happened to my family and friends.
People can say whatever they want, whether it be government statistics proving that the country is safe, just a perception problem, and Cristina is perceived as doing a great job by bringing crime down, or whether it be that stepping out of the house means your death.
I see neither of those two extremes, but I see a lot of problems all over the place and I know what I know.
Crema Americana
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The crime problem is real. I don't really care what the statistics say when there is enough anecdotal evidence to know that it happens, and it happens often. Not just to people on this forum, but to the people I deal with on a daily basis. 
I realize that crime happens everywhere and that there are plenty of cities in the US and elsewhere with high crime, but usually if you stay out of certain neighborhoods you're okay. In Buenos Aires crime is everywhere... and not just purse snatching, pick pockets, or your run of the mill cat burglars, but muggings on the street with weapons and armed home invasions. So you take precautions. All those bars on the windows aren't just for aesthetics!
And while the news does sensationalize certain crime stories, how many do we really hear about? Chances are if you get held up while walking down the street it's not going to make it on the evening news unless you die, at which point they'll start debating over whether you fought back or not and if that caused your death. Many times they go unreported.
All that said I'm not scared to leave the house and I don't live in a state of paranoia, but lots of daily decisions do revolve around safety.
I realize that crime happens everywhere and that there are plenty of cities in the US and elsewhere with high crime, but usually if you stay out of certain neighborhoods you're okay. In Buenos Aires crime is everywhere... and not just purse snatching, pick pockets, or your run of the mill cat burglars, but muggings on the street with weapons and armed home invasions. So you take precautions. All those bars on the windows aren't just for aesthetics!
And while the news does sensationalize certain crime stories, how many do we really hear about? Chances are if you get held up while walking down the street it's not going to make it on the evening news unless you die, at which point they'll start debating over whether you fought back or not and if that caused your death.
Many times they go unreported. All that said I'm not scared to leave the house and I don't live in a state of paranoia, but lots of daily decisions do revolve around safety.
trennod said:
Had a dig around, and found some interesting info on a site called latinobarometer. You can download a report on victimisation across Latin America here: http://www.latinobarometro.org/latino/LATContenidos.jsp
Based on that report - Argentina ranks third in the region by direct experience of crime, slightly below Mexico & Peru. Yikes...
And this shows how misleading those reports are when country based rather than city based. I've been living in Cusco for the past 2 months, and you really couldn't imagine a safer city for the most part. I think it really does need to be city/regional based to truly identify the "risky" places.jp said:
bomber said:
Sure, reports like these can only ever give an average impression of city life. I'm sure Cusco has its bad spots and safe areas. I know Lima has plenty of both. But equally, Argentina has plenty of relaxed towns and cities where crime isn't that much of a problem.
Also, with averaged reports like this one part of the city could get very much worse, and another could improve considerably. The changes would be felt acutely by the local residents, but the average crime levels would indicate little change.
End of the day - if you don't feel safe in Buenos Aires, no statistic is going to change that. I've never personally been a victim of crime, neither have many people I personally know. I know plenty of friends of friends who have had horrible things happen to them. But then I could say that in my home country too.
Overall I think Buenos Aires has a serious problem with crime, ineffective policing and bizarre policies governing youth crime. Its a real issue, but I knew that coming here. I never expected it to be safe. This is Latin America, the most violent region in the world.
Given the fact that the city has poor security, an ineffective legal system, a vast unsurpassable gulf between abject poverty and obscene wealth, proliferating inner city slums and a crack epidemic - I think Buenos Aires manages surprisingly well. All things considered I expected crime to be much worse.
cbonanni
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While not the perfect solution , I am having installed a security door by Pentagono. I am also having an alarm installed by Lojack. Both expensive options , but it makes my wife feel better. Either option in itself cannot prevent you from becoming a victim , but adds some peace of mind.
