Feeling safe in Brazil

One thing that people from the UK often ask me is whether it is safe to live in Brazil. The image most foreigners have of living here is of the favelas… in particular the international success of the film City of God didn’t help very much.

At face value, the crime statistics are much higher than Britain and the police in São Paulo alone shoot someone dead everyday, but on a day-today basis I don’t feel any unease living here.

When I first arrived, I was endlessly surprised by the amount of security people use to feel safe. Windows have steel bars, shops and banks have armed guards, every police officer is armed, car showrooms offer bullet-proofing as an option…

It all becomes normal through osmosis, but I still question the need for all this security. It would be nice to see a house with a garden, rather than a steel cage “protecting” the residents.

As this Reuters article states, there is an obsession with security in Brazil, but there are also some encouraging signs. The murder rate in New Orleans is five times that of São Paulo and bank robberies across the entire country dropped from over 3,000 a decade ago to 343 last year.

The Reuters article points out some anecdotal evidence, such as people freely using devices such as iPhones on a bus, something unthinkable just a few years ago. In many ways the freedom to use expensive devices such as a smartphone, laptop computer or iPod in public now feels just as it would in any other major city.

Would you walk around an unfamiliar street in New York or London late at night with your senses dulled by music from an iPod and gazing into the GPS-powered map on your iPhone? It’s pretty much the same here these days.

I was with my wife in a local bar the other day and she was telling the bar owner about our plans to move to the coast. Not just for the beach, but also because a smaller town would be safer than the city. He said he can only remember hearing of one robbery in the entire neighbourhood this year so how do we define ‘safer’ than that?

Maybe he just wanted to keep us as good customers. We are the only customers at his bar that run a slate with credit, paying him advance rather than him chasing us to settle the bill, but he sounded genuine.

As with city life anywhere, you can be a victim of crime through sheer bad luck, but most of the time you make your own luck through choices about how much wealth, gadgets, and jewellry  you display.

São Paulo may well have more crime then London, but I’m not scared to ride the bus or walk down the street. I still get unnerved by all the armed guards at banks though. If I am ever nearby when a bank robbery kicks off then I’ll be more scared of the guards than the criminals…

Noise pollution

São Paulo is a big city, the largest in both the western and southern hemisphere and almost 20 million people if you include the suburbs. That means it’s also quite a noisy place, but one thing about all that noise that still annoys me is the alarms.

Shops, banks, cars, motorbikes are all alarmed and therefore “protected” from crime – at least that is the assumption.

But walk down the streets here and you will hear alarms going off all the time. It’s a cacophony of sirens that are entirely ignored by the population. The endless sirens have been normalised and are just a part of the background noise of the city.

Near to where I live there is a Chinese restaurant with a delivery service, meaning quite a few guys on motorbikes will be hanging around outside waiting for an order – so they will get the food and jump on their bike to deliver it. The bike alarms are always going off without anyone ever making any attempt to steal them.

So the alarms are faulty, and when they do go off, they are just ignored – so the alarm serves no purpose. There is a parrot living in a house nearby and he now imitates the alarms on the motorbikes. Even to the point that he copies the siren noise *and* the automatic voice saying “this bike is being stolen, please call this phone number…”

An alarm that is ignored, yet it gives out an automated message with a phone number to call. A futile gesture indeed.

Take a look at this video of a branch of Itau bank near to where I live. This was in the morning today at about 10.30am. The alarm had been screaming out for over 5 hours according to the people in the shops around there.

Five hours. Nobody from Itau did anything to shut down the alarm. No police or security paid any attention. What is the point of an audible alarm like this if nothing happens when the alarm goes off?

Here is a radical suggestion to the mayor of São Paulo… ban all the audible alarms. Bank and shop alarms could send a message to the security people. Cars and bikes would just have an immobiliser instead of an audible alarm.

The alarms would be a lot more effective in protecting against crime, and the people in the city would be able to marvel at their new-found peace.

The mayor did something similar with his Cidade limpa legislation in 2006 – where all billboards and public advertising were banned and removed. How about dealing with the aural, as well as visual, pollution?