Guestpost by Justin (real name withheld)
I’ve been in Barcelona two years and have been robbed/mugged four times on the street, twice successfully.
On one occasion, though we live in a nice part of town, we were burgled and this while we were in our apartment. The robbers left when they were discovered, without showing a single sign of concern. The police just shrugged their shoulders!
If theft, particularly on the street or on the underground, was an olympic sport Barcelona would be Gold Medal winners. In fact, this city would be in a league of its own…
Foto: sim00n
I heard somewhere that for UK and US citizens, Barcelona is consistently No.1 and No.2 in the world for the number of stolen passports. Could this be true? I mean shouldn’t there be a developing or war-ravaged country that is worse?
I have now twice heard of investors who were in Barcelona looking at possible investment opportunities and were mugged near their hotels. Of course they left without investing in the city. It’s unbelievable that local people don’t understand the severe damage this is doing to the Barcelona and the Catalan economy at a time of acute economic stress.
Plainly the politicians are getting paid off. They must be! Otherwise they are total imbeciles! They claim that the ridiculously stupid laws on theft can’t be changed and that the current crime wave is simply due to the ongoing economic crisis! True, pickpockets exist everywhere but not on this scale. Everyone who travels knows this.
It was no problem to change the law on nudists though – poor old nudists – not my thing, but they are being constantly harrassed these days while the robbers laugh. One could actually argue that Barcelona’s previously liberal view on nudity was a kind of freedom that is now being taken away, while at the same time thousands of thieves are free to wreak the greatest oppression on this city since Franco.
Everyone knows where the robbers are, right down to the buildings they live in. You should see the thieves and some of the stuff they’ve stolen… visit the open air market beside the round-about at Glories… there you can see suitcases full of mobile phones, all manner of stolen cameras and other electronic goods. You can even get a phone you’ve stolen scrubbed of data and re-programmed.
Barcelona has long had a reputation for crime but so did New York City before Rudy Guiliani. I would start with mandatory life prison sentences for anyone holding political office found to be benefitting in any way (be it 10 euro or 10 million euros) from the thieves and go from there… and jamon might fly!
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Indeed and I wonder how many civilians in Barcelona are even aware of the severeness of it all… or maybe they are still used to the time when asking to many questions was not good for your health. Cause I only hear foreigners complain about this issue.. I wonder when the catalans wake up.
Dont ever back chat the police here, or question them for anything as they will normally respond with a wack around the ear hole !
The catalans are aware of it, at least in my neighbourhood of Barceloneta. I’ve talked to them about it, arguing that if they let “petty crime” continue to thrive in such a way, the “petty criminals’ will soon graduate to house breaking and worse. I’ve robbers on the street graduate from going about on foot, to ever swankier bikes, dressed in ever swankier clothes. The other day I saw one of the robbers who used to be a foot soldier plying his trade lifting wallets from peoples beach bags, climbing out of a brand new car, unloading bag after bag of labelled shiny card shopping bags. How long is he going to be able to fund that habit by snatching a few bags? Anyway, the locals shrug and say, they are not robbing us, so why bother to make a fuss about it. There is the reality of course that the robbers are now so totally integrated into local soceity, that to speak up might involve denoucing their neighbours or the parents of their kids school friends. As a lone foreigner speaking up, as many of you have no doubt experienced, you are treated as a madmen with a deathwish. BUT I have a suggestion that may get people thinking. The other day I was siiting on a terrace, while a toursit was robbed right in front of the waiter without the waiter lifting a finger. When I and the tourist complained, the waiter just shrugged, saying, “I’m not a policeman, what can I do?” and wandered off with a contemptuos grin. Well there is something WE can do. Refuse to pay for whatever we were consuming when that happened. And I don’t just mean if you are robbed. I mean if you saw somebody else being robbed while you were in the place. The bars and restaurants on the beach charge an exorbitant surchage to let us consume anything on their terraces, so we the customer should, at the very least, expect to be safe from robbers while we are there. I tried it on the day I have just mentioned, with very satisfactory results. The contemptous grin was wiped from the waiters face and was replaced by one of dumbfoundment. I calmly said (speaking calmly rather than furiously is always a good thing in such circumstances) that the management at the best had failed to protect us while we were there, and the worst were complicit in the robbery, and as that a result wenot going to pay for what we had eaten. One of the cliches about the catalans that is generally true is their interest in money, so if we start hitting them in thier pockets, they’ll soon start demanding their councillors do something about the problem. Otherwise, it’ll be shrugged off for eternity as a problem that only effects stupid guireys.