Some more on ROP statistics

Rather than drone on and on about how bad the driving is here, and how it is scary (but it really is) to have to drive here when you look at the statistics, I wanted to write about robberies in the Sultanate today.

There is a general belief that "there is no crime" in the Sultanate, but really, there is. I read with amusement (I'm nasty like that) that a man had his 1996 Honda Civic nicked in Mawaleh - he was a PRO for a company and had left his wallet, but more incredibly, a passport of someone in the company he works for, in the car over night. What a tool! Why on earth would you leave someone else's passport (or even your own) in a car overnight? The words "lazy" and "muppet" spring to mind.

The article in question which prompted this blog today though, is the statistics of burglaries in Oman in the first 3 months of this year. 1,342 thefts happened in the first 3 months this year, compared to 1,208 in the same period last year, an 11% increase. It's a general trend as it seems, the population is getting older, there are more people out of work and so I guess it is inevitable that crime will rise. We all know someone who's had their house broken into, car damaged or even simply just been ripped off by an unscrupulous retailer/mechanic.

It'd be interesting to get the data from, say, 10 years ago and compare it to todays data and see how crime rates have changed when compared to population change. And of criminals that have been caught, how many are local and how many are expatriates.

Perhaps the papers here are reporting on crimes more frequently now, or perhaps we really are in the grip of a crime wave here - what do you think? Do you think that there are particular crime hot-spots? Wadi Kabir? Azaiba? MQ in the summer? Mawaleh?

le fin.