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I got the locks changed,
not THAT one in the end. |
I'd heard rumours that there was a lot of crime in Hungary. A few months ago in Denmark, my Hungarian friend was laughing at one of the bike locks, "In Hungary that lock wouldn't last five minutes" he joked. He seemed to suggest that anything not bolted to a building or streetlight would be automatically stolen. Also, I have to admit that it didn't actually make me feel particularly safe that I had an iron gate as well as the regular door for my apartment, bars on the windows and a total of 5 locks. I asked one of my colleagues whether it's normal to lock all the doors when you're at home - her reply was "The devil never sleeps". I couldn't help but wonder whether that meant that God was often asleep ... Anyway, admittedly I can't understand the news reports, so maybe lots of crime is reported, which heightens this fear, but I decided to try and find some statistics, so that at least I could compare Budapest to other European cities.
According to a report from 2006 (see 1), I discovered that Hungary has a similar number of police officers (under 300 per 100,000 people) as England, Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland and a few other countries. In comparison to other European countries it's not that many. Other countries, such as Greece, Portugal, Italy, Russia and Cyprus has many more (over 400 per 100,000 people). But then again, maybe this fact doesn't tell us all that much, how about crime statistics ...
