Posted: Sat Jul 24, 2010 6:47 pm
I didn't intend to write this much, but once I started, more came. It's really more than I expect people are going to want to read, which is fine. It's pretty much for myself anyway. Oh, by the way, someone sometimes asks what my point is. There is no point, just pointless thoughts I had while reading the thread.
From where I see it, the problem isn't that a tourist was murdered. There's problem on STT that has been there for years and a tourist passed through it. It's the same problem that's found in U.S. cities and around the globe. Even North Korea has substance abuse problems. Problems like these eventually spill over. Murder is a hideous act. The death of a child is a horrible tragedy. The murder of a child is an abomination. Witnessing the murder of your own child would be devastating beyond all comprehension.
There's bad stuff happening on STT and STX. It's been going on for a while. The murder statistics are shockingly high. A pretty dangerous culture/climate has developed. But aside from local residents, no one was paying much attention to what was going on until a tourist was killed. If the problem had been solved at its roots, a tourist wouldn't have died. But in what way is the death of a tourist more significant than the lives of all the others? There have been a whole lot of posts about this one murder, but there were none about the previous 20+ murders on STT and the 20 murders on STX. Who were they? Were any of them innocent bystanders? Were they victims? Were they criminals? Don't know. Didn't hear much about them. On one scoreboard, they really didn't count. And on the day that the young tourist was killed, a young local man was also killed. But there hasn't been much reaction to his murder. Taking action to protect tourists will not touch the problem.
So there's been a problem for a while. Most local residents, like most local residents of most places don't want it to be like it is. And they don't know what to do about it. They've tried. And just like the residents of any U.S. city, they get frustrated and discouraged because things stay the same. Somehow posters think that very simplistic solutions can be successfully applied in the VI and all it would take is for the local residents to demand action. It seems to presume that "authorities" are capable of stopping all of it, but just don't. For one reason or another. We don't find these sort of solutions being proposed to the residents of Detroit or St. Louis or New Orleans. There is sometimes an insulting paternalism shown to VI residents that would never be shown to residents of U.S. cities. There aren't any posts on the Chicago or Memphis forums wondering why the residents just don't put pressure on the authorities to stop gang and drug activity . Occasionally there's a post warning that if residents don't stop the crime, tourists probably won't come anymore. I'm sure that residents of the VI would like crime to stop, just like residents of Boston would and they'd like it for their own quality of life. II'm sure the residents of the VI are as concerned and as frustrated as the residents of Boston. And I expect they've tried as hard and as long as the Bostonians to change things.
Periodically there is a high profile crime in the Caribbean involving a tourist. There are dire predictions that tourism will die. It seems to take a particularly gruesome or sensational incident to really affect tourism. There have been a few incidents in the VI in the last few years where there were dire predictions, but they've pretty much been forgotten. Most tourists don't pay much attention. Millions come to the VIs every year. Most don't get involved enough to find an online forum. Most learn about a place from a travel agent.
Gangs, drugs, guns. Crime. Murder. Every U.S. city struggles with gangs, guns, drugs, crime, murder. These are very complex problems. Some posts suggest that if local people "put pressure" on the authorities, these problems could be managed. Other posters put the blame pretty squarely on corrupt police. The assumption seems to be that in the VI it could all be brought to an end if people would just do their jobs. But U.S. cities have been fighting these problems for decades with really no success. There have been all sorts of approaches and strategies and none have worked. Nobody knows what to do.
We live in Boston. Over the last three decades there have been any number of new approaches tried, none with any significant success. This is extremely complex and all strategies have fallen short. It's clearly not a simple problem of better policing. Unlike the VI, we have a serious police force that tries seriously to do their job. There is an occasional rogue, but mostly it's serious cops who are very serious about their jobs. Here the police are assisted by state police, DEA, parole and probation departments and an active U.S attorney. They haven't been able to bring it to a halt, or even have much impact on it. Guns, gangs, drugs, murder, prisons. And like this recent tragedy on STT, there's not a whole lot of reaction until it spills out of the neighborhoods. And one way or another, it eventually does spill out of the neighborhoods. Maybe a tourist is murdered or an upper middle class honor student from the suburbs overdoses on heroin. And still no one knows what to do. It's all been tried before. It's a virus that no vaccine has been able to touch. Nobody knows how to stop this. And in many cities this has become generational. It's deeply frightening and depressing to consider that for decades, the best resources and strategies available haven't made a dent in the situation over the long term. People try, everything has failed and no one knows what to do. That poor girl was a victim of these failures, just as were the 20+ other murder victims on STT, the 20 on STX, the 27 in Boston and on and on.....
Crime, drugs, gangs, guns appear to have become pretty entrenched on STT and STX. Some gang conflicts are rooted in drug trade but some are just territorial. STJ remains relatively untouched. There certainly has been a steady increase in crime, particularly in major crimes. We started going to STJ in the 1980s and it's so very, very different. It used to be that most crime on STJ was crime of opportunity. Then crime began to increase, but for a while it was episodic. Some bad guys would come to the island, do some crimes, then slip off. Now it appears to have become chronic. Crime there now seems more intentional than opportunistic. There has also been a notable rise in major crimes.
I still find STJ very, very safe. We haven't been there recently but that has nothing to do with crime/safety issues. Whenever I read crime threads here, I often feel like I'm from another planet. We're urban dwellers. We've lived in a large U.S. city for over 20 years. Most forum members seem to be upper middle class folks from the suburbs or from smaller towns. For a long time I puzzled over how people could feel that STJ was unsafe. I guessed that I had become so numbed to city reality that any place else was really nothing to worry about. More stuff happens here in a morning than happens on STJ in a year. Some things happen here that have never happened on STJ.
But as I thought about it, it dawned on me that for many visitors, STJ really is a more dangerous place than their home is. For many people, there probably actually is a greater likelihood of being the victim of a crime on STJ than in their secure home environment. They're much less insulated. They're perhaps in much closer proximity to people who make them uncomfortable or suspicious than they're used to. We're always on alert, usually low alert, but it never gets totally shut off. And I go onto high alert real fast. So when people post about "taking normal precautions", I probably have a very different set of precautions than many other people. And if my precautions have served me adequately in Boston, they'll be more than adequate on STJ. To live here, I've needed to resolve that I may be the victim of a crime. Unlikely, but possible. For many folks that isn't something they consider, or need to. We belong to the neighborhood crime watch. Most members of the forum probably don't have a crime watch group, nor is there any reason to have one. How many murders have there been within a three mile radius of your home this year? Most forum members would answer none. We have a different answer. How many murders have their been within three blocks of your home this year? Again, most forum members would answer none. Again, we give a different answer.
STJ seems so safe to us. Our last Caribbean trip was to Virgin Gorda, which we loved. We'll go back to VG. Not sure if we'll be back to STJ anymore, but it has nothing to do with crime/safety concerns.I can't imagine why I'd go someplace on vacation where I felt less safe than at home. Vacations are supposed to be times when I can leave my worries behind. There are a few places that I visited earlier in my life that I'd love to return to, but the political situations have changed. STJ has always felt so safe to me that it puzzled me that other people didn't feel as safe there. As so it came almost as a shock to realize that for some people STJ actually is more dangerous than their home. Not just that it feels more dangerous, but that it probably really is more dangerous. It's still hard to get my head around STJ being dangerous.
But even on vacation we always stay on low alert. Sometimes people can be lulled into believing that they really are in paradise and nothing bad could happen. We keep in mind that even in paradise there are snakes.
Oh, and to add---one way that tourists get themselves in trouble is going looking for illegal substances or illegal activities. In trouble with police, if caught. But also if some local guy can actually get some tourist to follow him down a dark street, why not just keep the product (if he actually has any) and just try to take the tourist's money?
From where I see it, the problem isn't that a tourist was murdered. There's problem on STT that has been there for years and a tourist passed through it. It's the same problem that's found in U.S. cities and around the globe. Even North Korea has substance abuse problems. Problems like these eventually spill over. Murder is a hideous act. The death of a child is a horrible tragedy. The murder of a child is an abomination. Witnessing the murder of your own child would be devastating beyond all comprehension.
There's bad stuff happening on STT and STX. It's been going on for a while. The murder statistics are shockingly high. A pretty dangerous culture/climate has developed. But aside from local residents, no one was paying much attention to what was going on until a tourist was killed. If the problem had been solved at its roots, a tourist wouldn't have died. But in what way is the death of a tourist more significant than the lives of all the others? There have been a whole lot of posts about this one murder, but there were none about the previous 20+ murders on STT and the 20 murders on STX. Who were they? Were any of them innocent bystanders? Were they victims? Were they criminals? Don't know. Didn't hear much about them. On one scoreboard, they really didn't count. And on the day that the young tourist was killed, a young local man was also killed. But there hasn't been much reaction to his murder. Taking action to protect tourists will not touch the problem.
So there's been a problem for a while. Most local residents, like most local residents of most places don't want it to be like it is. And they don't know what to do about it. They've tried. And just like the residents of any U.S. city, they get frustrated and discouraged because things stay the same. Somehow posters think that very simplistic solutions can be successfully applied in the VI and all it would take is for the local residents to demand action. It seems to presume that "authorities" are capable of stopping all of it, but just don't. For one reason or another. We don't find these sort of solutions being proposed to the residents of Detroit or St. Louis or New Orleans. There is sometimes an insulting paternalism shown to VI residents that would never be shown to residents of U.S. cities. There aren't any posts on the Chicago or Memphis forums wondering why the residents just don't put pressure on the authorities to stop gang and drug activity . Occasionally there's a post warning that if residents don't stop the crime, tourists probably won't come anymore. I'm sure that residents of the VI would like crime to stop, just like residents of Boston would and they'd like it for their own quality of life. II'm sure the residents of the VI are as concerned and as frustrated as the residents of Boston. And I expect they've tried as hard and as long as the Bostonians to change things.
Periodically there is a high profile crime in the Caribbean involving a tourist. There are dire predictions that tourism will die. It seems to take a particularly gruesome or sensational incident to really affect tourism. There have been a few incidents in the VI in the last few years where there were dire predictions, but they've pretty much been forgotten. Most tourists don't pay much attention. Millions come to the VIs every year. Most don't get involved enough to find an online forum. Most learn about a place from a travel agent.
Gangs, drugs, guns. Crime. Murder. Every U.S. city struggles with gangs, guns, drugs, crime, murder. These are very complex problems. Some posts suggest that if local people "put pressure" on the authorities, these problems could be managed. Other posters put the blame pretty squarely on corrupt police. The assumption seems to be that in the VI it could all be brought to an end if people would just do their jobs. But U.S. cities have been fighting these problems for decades with really no success. There have been all sorts of approaches and strategies and none have worked. Nobody knows what to do.
We live in Boston. Over the last three decades there have been any number of new approaches tried, none with any significant success. This is extremely complex and all strategies have fallen short. It's clearly not a simple problem of better policing. Unlike the VI, we have a serious police force that tries seriously to do their job. There is an occasional rogue, but mostly it's serious cops who are very serious about their jobs. Here the police are assisted by state police, DEA, parole and probation departments and an active U.S attorney. They haven't been able to bring it to a halt, or even have much impact on it. Guns, gangs, drugs, murder, prisons. And like this recent tragedy on STT, there's not a whole lot of reaction until it spills out of the neighborhoods. And one way or another, it eventually does spill out of the neighborhoods. Maybe a tourist is murdered or an upper middle class honor student from the suburbs overdoses on heroin. And still no one knows what to do. It's all been tried before. It's a virus that no vaccine has been able to touch. Nobody knows how to stop this. And in many cities this has become generational. It's deeply frightening and depressing to consider that for decades, the best resources and strategies available haven't made a dent in the situation over the long term. People try, everything has failed and no one knows what to do. That poor girl was a victim of these failures, just as were the 20+ other murder victims on STT, the 20 on STX, the 27 in Boston and on and on.....
Crime, drugs, gangs, guns appear to have become pretty entrenched on STT and STX. Some gang conflicts are rooted in drug trade but some are just territorial. STJ remains relatively untouched. There certainly has been a steady increase in crime, particularly in major crimes. We started going to STJ in the 1980s and it's so very, very different. It used to be that most crime on STJ was crime of opportunity. Then crime began to increase, but for a while it was episodic. Some bad guys would come to the island, do some crimes, then slip off. Now it appears to have become chronic. Crime there now seems more intentional than opportunistic. There has also been a notable rise in major crimes.
I still find STJ very, very safe. We haven't been there recently but that has nothing to do with crime/safety issues. Whenever I read crime threads here, I often feel like I'm from another planet. We're urban dwellers. We've lived in a large U.S. city for over 20 years. Most forum members seem to be upper middle class folks from the suburbs or from smaller towns. For a long time I puzzled over how people could feel that STJ was unsafe. I guessed that I had become so numbed to city reality that any place else was really nothing to worry about. More stuff happens here in a morning than happens on STJ in a year. Some things happen here that have never happened on STJ.
But as I thought about it, it dawned on me that for many visitors, STJ really is a more dangerous place than their home is. For many people, there probably actually is a greater likelihood of being the victim of a crime on STJ than in their secure home environment. They're much less insulated. They're perhaps in much closer proximity to people who make them uncomfortable or suspicious than they're used to. We're always on alert, usually low alert, but it never gets totally shut off. And I go onto high alert real fast. So when people post about "taking normal precautions", I probably have a very different set of precautions than many other people. And if my precautions have served me adequately in Boston, they'll be more than adequate on STJ. To live here, I've needed to resolve that I may be the victim of a crime. Unlikely, but possible. For many folks that isn't something they consider, or need to. We belong to the neighborhood crime watch. Most members of the forum probably don't have a crime watch group, nor is there any reason to have one. How many murders have there been within a three mile radius of your home this year? Most forum members would answer none. We have a different answer. How many murders have their been within three blocks of your home this year? Again, most forum members would answer none. Again, we give a different answer.
STJ seems so safe to us. Our last Caribbean trip was to Virgin Gorda, which we loved. We'll go back to VG. Not sure if we'll be back to STJ anymore, but it has nothing to do with crime/safety concerns.I can't imagine why I'd go someplace on vacation where I felt less safe than at home. Vacations are supposed to be times when I can leave my worries behind. There are a few places that I visited earlier in my life that I'd love to return to, but the political situations have changed. STJ has always felt so safe to me that it puzzled me that other people didn't feel as safe there. As so it came almost as a shock to realize that for some people STJ actually is more dangerous than their home. Not just that it feels more dangerous, but that it probably really is more dangerous. It's still hard to get my head around STJ being dangerous.
But even on vacation we always stay on low alert. Sometimes people can be lulled into believing that they really are in paradise and nothing bad could happen. We keep in mind that even in paradise there are snakes.
Oh, and to add---one way that tourists get themselves in trouble is going looking for illegal substances or illegal activities. In trouble with police, if caught. But also if some local guy can actually get some tourist to follow him down a dark street, why not just keep the product (if he actually has any) and just try to take the tourist's money?
