This is very important in Brazil, I do not know what the violent crime rate is but I guess that it is astronomical. Wikipedia puts it as 10th in the world for the homicide rate. All the top ten, apart from South Africa, are in Central and South America and the Caribbean. It is encouraging that the rate of crime has been decreasing in recent years.

A couple of weeks ago one of Flavia’s friends mentioned that earlier that day masked gunmen burst into his brother’s house, locked everyone in a room while they stole whatever they could sell. Nobody was hurt. Three months ago the boyfriend of one of her friends was missing for a few days and a ransom paid. The method used was as reported here by the BBC It concentrates the mind wonderfully when the danger is so close.

Flavia’s apartment block has a pedestrian entrance which is guarded 24 hours a day. Nobody gets in or out without the permission of the guard who will remotely unlock the two gates as you reach them. The garage has another electric gate which is also manned. If he recognises you, the guard will open the gate. All the blocks I have seen have at least this level of security and often have video cameras as well.

Houses have high walls, alarms, sensors and are very hard to protect. Some people who could afford to live in a house prefer to live in apartment for the better security. It is very expensive indeed to properly protect a house.

Flavia constantly tells me to be careful, do not carry my iPod, do not look rich, do not look foreign (how can I do that? Or look rich ) to take care, be alert, don’t carry a camera, don’t talk to strangers and so on. To be fair I have never felt threatened and have been perfectly happy to wander around. There are areas where it would be foolish to enter but they are so obvious that it is not a problem. Rio sounds very dangerous indeed. Inland in the countryside it was very carefree and easy going.

I am not sure I would fancy walking home a few blocks in the middle of the night. Especially since when we drive home late at night I noticed that nobody stops at red lights. Flavia was very cautious about crossing green lights checking for traffic coming the ther way. I asked why and she told me that it is too dangerous to stop at night. There are few police on duty and there is a danger of being hijacked if you stop.

On a similar note it is interesting to see the precautions the shops take to protect themselves from their staff, customers and robbers. Often quite small transactions require you to deal with two or three people. An assistant will deal with you and help you choose your goods. She will pass these to a supervisor who will bag them, write out a ticket and pass the goods back to the assistant. You take the ticket to the cashier who collects the money, stamps the ticket and returns it to you to give to the assistant in exchange for the goods.

We went to several high quality kitchen utensil shops and they all had their doors locked. An assistant will let you in if she likes the look of you. This is normal in Spain for jewelers and some banks and uncommon in the UK. In the shopping mall up the road there is a bank. To get in you have to insert your credit card and enter your PIN. Other banks I have noticed have a guard at the door who unlocks it for each customer.

The supermarkets operate in a similar way to Europe but at the Walmart subsidiary a guard checks your till listing against the contents of your trolley before you are allowed to leave the store. There are lots of guards but they are not armed. Your shopping is always put in a bag for you and usually taken to your car.

There are a lot of shopping malls and many people prefer to shop in them because of the better security. They always have secure parking, plenty of guards and the obviously undesirable characters are not admitted.

All this is a complete contrast to Europe. There the most important thing is to employ as few people as possible to reduce costs; they accept relatively high losses as it is cheaper than prevention. The main security is through video surveillance but there are some security guards. Sometimes there are  extra guards behaving like ordinary shoppers and so are hard to spot. I have often left a store in the UK because there was nobody to help me or the staff are so poorly trained that they are unable to give advice.