Boca Chica is a tourist destination, but without sufficient protection against crime.
Boca Chica, DR
“There is no particular time that robberies happen here; it is all day long,” this is how a resident of the Andrés sector, Boca Chica, defined the lack of citizen security that reigns in the streets of this tourist area.
The man identified only as Samuel told this newspaper that authorities so ignore the residents of this sector and all the surrounding areas that they have to survive as the saying goes: “here we are constantly in the middle of the night,” he said.
“Unfortunately, there is no particular time that robberies occur. My mother, a 70-something-year-old lady, was asked for an address, and they took the earrings she was wearing”, said Samuel, adding that it was approximately noon when the incident occurred.
He also pointed out that the evil people who lend themselves to these assaults are “youngsters” who, without any consequences, go out into the streets to look for “easy money without working.”
From inside his door and window repair business, he explained that neither he nor his employees had been victims of assaults; however, rumors of criminal acts resound daily.
During a visit made by a team of Listín Diario and during a conversation with another young man of approximately 25 years of age named Rolfi Díaz, he said that in the vicinity of the sector there is police surveillance, but it is not enough, because “there are too few of them.”
“When there is a robbery in a neighborhood they (the police) move to those streets and the delinquents then move to another side where they are not, so they back up one side, but neglect another,” said Díaz, arguing that the number of agents is limited for the municipality and that the patrols should be everywhere, not only where an event occurs.
He also said that the assaults in “Boca Chica entera” occur daily two or three times in a day “conservatively counted” and that the subjects are always on motorcycles and sometimes with firearms.
He also pointed out that they are afraid to leave their vehicles parked in commercial or any other place because, on several occasions, unscrupulous persons steal them from the parking lots.
He mentioned that a friend of his was the victim of the theft of his motorcycle when he was in a parking lot of the Boca Chica prosecutor’s office, and the municipal authorities have not been able to find the thieves.