Polack Post: Caribbean Safety Comparison
By Peter Polack
Peter Polack
Like most things, safety is a relative concept that careens between the outright dangerous like a country under attack and the innocuous cocoons such as a walled tourist resort. This factor can be broken down by area, country, city, town and even neighborhood.
A dangerous area would be the Middle East, a country such as Mexico, a city like Port-au-Prince and the Catia neighbourhood of Caracas in Venezuela. Regrettably there are many choices for each category.
Many visitors of the Caribbean come from areas, cities and countries that are regularly pronounced as dangerous, usually based on a crime metric.
There are other ways to sniff out the areas that require close protection by armed escort or being armed themselves. Large swaths of beautiful North America can be viewed in many mediums but videos tell a tale of more dangerous predators than man, the polar or grizzly bear and other large animals.
It is not how few attacks there are, but how you live with such an open and protected threat. Criminals are neither open or protected.
The many residents of rural areas in Alaska and Northern Canada are frequently observed travelling on foot or vehicle accompanied by weapons to deter or kill large wild animals that may attack. The people of the Caribbean, many of whom are armed, do not have such openness in the display of arms or killing of predators without sanction. Killing a large wild animal, for the most part, does not involve law enforcement or the courts especially when self survival is at play.
Some places prohibit the locking of doors to enable safe haven for anyone surprised by a polar bear. In the Caribbean, doors and windows are locked to deter predators.
When we determine danger or security, it should not only be against the background of crime but environmental risk like the wild animals of North America, South America or Central America also.
The Caribbean is devoid of snakes, cougars, pumas and generally, few poisonous insects. There are hotel rooms in Central America with signs that warn you to keep doors closed to prevent the entry of snakes and insects. These signs you will never find in the Caribbean islands.
Another safety factor is the prevalence of mass shootings, so frequent in North America and Europe, but not in the Caribbean except the occasional gang war in some obscure area, not Main Street. There are no school shootings or hostages during robberies and even kidnappings are a rare event. There are no attacks on government buildings or the residences of leaders to mention.
Violent demonstrations there are on the rise.
You will never find a fast food robbery in the Caribbean turn in to a mass hostage or shooting event. Our criminals have a tighter schedule and less bullets.
It is not only an unfair assessment to find parts of the Caribbean unsafe because of crime, it is nonsensical, given the travel warnings from areas, countries, cities and even neighbourhoods elsewhere that have their own complete set of hurtful problems.
Many threats are not open like a man in the street but hidden in the bush.
Balance is called for in travel warnings assessment.
Notes
https://www.globalguardian.com/global-digest/most-dangerous-countries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rate
https://www.tripsavvy.com/snakes-of-central-america-1490991
Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer from the Cayman Islands for several decades. His books are The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War (2013), Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017) and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution (2019). He was a contributor to Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013). His latest book is a compendium of Russian espionage activities with almost five hundred Soviet spies expelled from nearly 100 countries worldwide 1940-88.
His views are his own.
