Barcelona is leading the fightback against smart city surveillance
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
Just two weeks ago, 3 hours before ending my vacation in the city, Me and my wife were robbed off roughly worth $10k USD in a car tire puncture scam.
http://tourist-scams.com/tourist-scam-destinations/barcelona...
Example: one of the safest places in Spain I've seen are libraries in Universities. People leave their laptops and go to the toilet/for lunch and nothing happens. The unsafest places I'd say are beaches, clubs and main statios.
* which happens all around the world. I never thought I'd be scammed like this, being from Spain, but I was scammed in Vietnam!
You even see this dynamic in in college towns where the college town and associated services are generally ok but all the surrounding communities run speed traps like their going out of style in order to skim a few bucks off of all the people passing through as a result of the college and the commerce it generates.
A healthy local economy generally prevents too many people from trying to make a dishonest buck.
It is generally only the tourists that are targeted, to the point where some people will tell you to yell at the assailant in Spanish to guilt them into giving your stuff back to show you're not one of the people they should be stealing from.
To show how bizarre this can be, on a purely anecdotal level, I was jumped in Barcelona more than once, and even with the opportunity to take my wallet and cash they ignored it and went only for the phone. Physical violence is avoided, more often than not.
Barcelona in particular has had an anti-tourism mentality for quite some time (and not without good reason) so a lot of this petty crime appears to exist as a result of that. This is just from experience of living there a few years, though.
Surveillance and police presence won't really solve this because of how sneaky the theft can be (e.g. knifing your pocket or rucksack while you sleep on the metro and sliding your phone out), the best deterrent is your own awareness. Good luck with that if you're out there to party.
Of course, the same can be said for any country enjoying its influx of wealthy tourists. Barcelona isn't unique in this.
I can talk a bit about the typical robbing that occurs in the more touristic places in the city. The police is very much aware of who the robbers are, and in fact most of them have been caught dozens of times, if not hundreds; they simply don't get punished, except with a small fine, so they keep doing it. It's disgraceful.
Violent thieves (robbers) get punished. Non-violent theft is treated more lightly unless is done on a big scale. This gives criminals a high incentive to not be violent.
I have heard that the theory is that if you hard punish any thief, then thieves are going to be more violent to not get caught. If you focus the police force on violent crime, then violent crime goes down.
Most criminals know that if they give themselves in when caught, they will get a more favourable sentence that if they resist.
The goal is to keep people safe first, then property. To punish criminals is a means to that goal, but just that. I think that in the USA there is a moral component where punishing criminals is a moral imperative, even if this causes worse crime or if people get wrongly punished. Or, at least, that is what I interpret from the news.
In SouthEastern countries they get 1, 2 or up 4 years in jail. Guess, what? There is less of them in the streets and if they are less likely to do it again.
So, being too lenient in crime creates the nightmare that Barcelona is, and draws in criminals from the rest of Europe (it is still a very beautiful city to visit).
Really? Of course only anecdotally, I've always had a worse impression of this 'street crime' in SEA than in places like Barcelona.
When you compare Bucharest (the capital city) with Barcelona, Barcelona fares a lot worse.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Rom...
Index Info Bucharest | Barcelona
Crime Index: 28.48 | 45.08
Safety Scale: 71.52 | 54.92
I know, by reputation the Balkan Region doesn't look good, but when you look at the data it paints a totally different picture. My hunch is that a lot of petty thieves types have moved into Western Europe as the business is more lucrative there.
Position ... Murder rate per million
74 Romania 19.6 2009
102 Spain 8.69 2009
Your numbers are not in contradiction with my reasoning. More pretty thief is more crime, but it is less violent crime.
Camera’s are not a solution to stop crime!
One thing I gotta say though is that it helped with figuring out what got stolen ;)
Enjoy your time there, it's a beautiful city! Just make sure to minimise your risk by limiting what you carry around with you and never take your eyes off it. That way if you do get unlucky, you can still recover from it.
I would argue that only more police force would help with that.
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
> WITTES: The exact quotation, which is from a letter that Franklin is believed to have written on behalf of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, reads, those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
> SIEGEL: And what was the context of this remark?
> WITTES: He was writing about a tax dispute between the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the family of the Penns, the proprietary family of the Pennsylvania colony who ruled it from afar. And the legislature was trying to tax the Penn family lands to pay for frontier defense during the French and Indian War. And the Penn family kept instructing the governor to veto. Franklin felt that this was a great affront to the ability of the legislature to govern. And so he actually meant purchase a little temporary safety very literally. The Penn family was trying to give a lump sum of money in exchange for the General Assembly's acknowledging that it did not have the authority to tax it.
> SIEGEL: So far from being a pro-privacy quotation, if anything, it's a pro-taxation and pro-defense spending quotation.
> WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.
Even nicer everyday items can quickly amount to over $500 USD. E.g. shoes (150), 3x wool socks (45), 3x dress shirts (180), jeans (100), sunglasses (150).
But if it's just a couple on vacation? Please do not create such incentives for the robbery tourists. Leave the $5k timepiece and bail money at home.
The nice thing out of this incident was that I was able to transfer my Apple Care from my Apple Devices to my new replacement devices.
https://www.worldnomads.com/travel-safety/europe/spain/barce...
The low level crime is absolutely insane in barcelona to the point I would recommend not going unless you are ready to get in shoving matches with attempted thieves.
That is insane. I'm not like some country bumpkin either, I am from New Orleans and so was my entire group. We didn't get robbed because we had to become physically aggressive with these groups of people and get in shoving matches and shit. It was ridiculous.
I have never experienced so much rampant theft in my life and I am fairly well traveled.
There are beautiful sights in Barcelona, but I doubt I will ever go back because it is completely lawless.
I have had gun fights happen right outside my house in New Orleans, almost everyone I know was mugged at some point growing up, there was an attempted rape in my driveway once, but it still has nothing on the volume of crime I witnessed in Barcelona.
So, now Vodafone AND the city government has this data about the citizens. How is this fighting against surveillance? Am I missing something? :/
I also wanted to add how deeply involved into surveillance Vodafone seems to be. I've started noticing it since some Snowden and Wikileaks revelations back. Helping governments enable surveillance on their populations seems to be kind of Vodafone's side-business.
They paid Vodafone and Vodafone used the data. "Fair enough" (so to say). No they pay Vodafone and Vodafone and they use the data. "backslash".
You are indeed missing something. The same as I am.
Metaphorically, you go from a criminal with a gun at your head to a criminal and a friend both with guns at your head.
Turns out it's just the government getting its piece of the cake.
Reminded me that there's a cool monthly magazine [1] on other such projects, called Research EU. All 71 past editions are available in multiple languages, and downloadable.
The magazine "features highlights from the latest Results in Brief and project news from the world of European research and innovation" ... "where each issue covers a specific topic of interest to researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders in the research field."
And that next government may decide not to honor the citizens in the same way the present one does.
If the public doesn't care enough about these issues, then how can we expect politicians to care?
I just wanted to add a little update. This “direct democracy” voting system has already been put to test. The citizens voted against Colau’s party proposals. The official comment is that they “will take that into account”, but controversial plans still go forward.
I love most cities, but that's the one place where I had a strange feeling -- I think I was afraid?
Everywhere else, the touristy places are well policed. Seemed the opposite in Barcelona.
All the same, the only time I didn't have that weird feeling of dread was when I went off the beaten path and away from the touristy areas.
There's not much violent crime, so just keep your wits about you; You'll be fine :)
I’ve had worse problems in London, which has plenty of surveillance.