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POLL REVEALS RISING FEAR OF CRIME

Date Reported: Tuesday, March 07, 2000
Incident Type: SECURITY
Country: NATIONWIDE, COLOMBIA

Incident: Reuters reported that a poll conducted in Colombia revealed that almost three-quarters of Colombians are frightened to go out at night and most avoid talking to strangers because of a rising wave of violent crime. Most of those polled believe the situation was getting worse.

Colombia, with some 40 million inhabitants, is widely recognized as the kidnap capital of the world, with 2,787 abductions last year, according to police statistics. It also has one of the highest murder rates in the hemisphere with 23,172 homicides last year -- only about 3,500 of them a direct result of the civil conflict. In 1998, the United States, with a population of about 270 million, had 16,914 murders.

Colombian police said most categories of violent crime rose in 1999 from 1998. "Going out on the street is an odyssey. Citizens of Bogota are hounded by the fear of suffering express kidnappings in a taxi, being robbed on the bus, attacked in the street, of being mugged," the leading El Tiempo newspaper said in its Sunday edition. "And if you go out in your own car, you could also be robbed of the vehicle or your belongings," it added.

In a poll entitled, "Fear On The Street," 71.75 percent of those surveyed in Colombia's five largest cities said they were now frightened to go out at night as often as before because of rising crime. Among respondents, 57.3 percent said they no longer went out at all at night in order to stay home and guard their houses. Almost 60 percent said they believed the crime rate had spiraled over the past three years, and 38 percent said they had been attacked or mugged in the past 12 months. More than 85 percent of those polled said they no longer talked to strangers, while about half said they had put bars on the doors and windows of their houses and apartments to reduce the risk of break-ins.

The Feb. 19 poll of 1,005 adults, carried out by polling company Solutions Factory for El Tiempo and the RCN TV and radio network, had an estimated margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.