The Crime in Spain Stays Mainly in the Plain

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, what's on your mind, buddy? Well, you know, I'm
thinking about Spain being such a unique place. Yeah, and
and Door to throw that in there too, and Andorra. Yeah,
so I'm thinking what was that thing about Andorra in
Spain that ultimately you start to explain and then you
just kind of end up saying you just have to
you just gotta go, you gotta be there. I can't

(00:21):
fully explain it, Like, what's that thing that like, is
so Spain is so Andorra that you got to experience
that is always going to stick out in a sort
of like unique cultural aspect or geographical aspect. So, so
I have a couple here for you. I'm going to
show it to you in photos and you can find
these on my social media if like, like if you
haven't seen them, I don't know if you've seen them

(00:42):
or not. I'm going to show you what it looked
like out my back window in Andorra at the Airbnb
that we were having. Okay, nobody out there can see this,
but you can, wow, look at that. Yeah, it's a
nice backyard. Describe you're saying there, it's a it's a
mountain side with lots of trees, just a rolling hill.

(01:05):
Looks like a rustic rural scene. I'm sure there's plenty
of vineyards sucked away down in there. Did you were there,
like trails down there? Did you get to walk down there?
Ons of tons of hiking areas and you're panning over
looks like a little village as well. Yeah, nice little village. Yeah, yeah,
how about that. Here's a let me find you another

(01:28):
one here. This place is honestly just absolutely incredible. Here's
here's another little thingy that I took. Let me fast
forward for you, like just look look look at look
at what's going on there. Look at all those mountains.
You're high in the Pyrenees. This is a higher spot
than Denver, Colorados, right like, it is high in the air.

(01:52):
I was kind of getting a little altitude sickness, I
think by the end of the second day I was there,
But it was awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
Man.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
You can't see this unless you're there. Yeah, my pictures,
my videos, pictures online, they'll never do it justice andorra.
You just have to go, You just have to be there.
It is honestly one of the most beautiful places. Absolutely
no one talks about for Spain. Barcelona's beach is incredibly underrated.
You don't think of Barcelona as a beach place. It

(02:21):
was so fun to be on the beach. They have
a ton of stuff going on there all the time,
awesome water, They always are encouraging activities. I felt safe.
I felt safer there than I felt anywhere in America.
I'll be honest with you. A lot less homeless people,
No disrespect to homeless people, but they have a lot
of stuff infrastructurally figured out. I felt safer in Spain.

(02:42):
You know how big Barcelona is. You know what a
comparable population is, Like, what city do you think is
about the same size in America as Barcelona. I would
think it's like a couple million maybe, yeah, like Philadelphia, Phoenix, Arizona.
It's about that size population wise. So it's a big city.
It's a big city. You know how big. Madrid is
probably a little bigger. Maybe it is larger than Chicago. Wow,

(03:04):
it is about in the middle between the population of
Chicago and Los Angeles. That's a huge. So it's huge.
It's really big. It's over three million people.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
Guess what. I felt safe. Every time we went out
doing anything. I watched a video once. And this is
not me telling you you'll not experience crime in these places.
But what are they doing that's different? I watched a
video of this person. They got a phone like mine.
It's not one of these nice new phones that's kind
of big and bulky, and they put it in their

(03:34):
backpocket where like it's half hanging out, kind of like
half of the phones hanging out their back pocket. You
can see it. A pickpocket would have no problem just
walking by and just taking that thing and they'd never notice, right.
And they were doing a like a social study in Barcelona.
Guy's got this brand new phone and there's a guy
about thirty feet away kind of watching on a camera

(03:56):
in a very busy pedestrian traffic area of Barcelona that
they say, hey, this is kind of if there are pickpockets,
this is the spitpot you're gonna get got right, Yeah.
Three hours of being there, they had at least eight
people tap them on the shoulder and say, hey, put
that phone away. Nobody tried to steal the phone. What
did I tell you? It makes you want to wonder,

(04:18):
you want to investigate what are they doing different? What
is going on there in cities? The size of Philly
and bigger than Chicago, where I can feel safe for
wandering the streets daytime, nighttime, downtown, out of town. I
feel more safe doing that in a country I don't
even speak the language very well. Then I feel in

(04:41):
my own city. Sometimes that's a fraction of that size.
Did they have like a death bought police or you
know that just rolls around on wheels with oozies and stuff.
I did see police, but the presence the police had
is kind of invisible in a lot of ways, right,
like they're around, but I very rarely saw police officers
on the ground. I saw their vehicles more often. And

(05:03):
then I went to a real Madrid game. Lots of
police officers that are just kind of dotting around there.
Seventy five thousand people there at that stadium. There's a
police escort of the bus as it comes by with
the players on it. I tell you what, dude, it's
incredibly organized getting in and out of there with like
the police kind of helping. This is the one of
the largest soccer stadiums in the entire world. Over seventy

(05:26):
thousand people can be in there at one time in
an incredibly highly populated area. I got in and out
of there so fast. I got on the metro train
from the stadium. This is a subway in a country
I don't live in. I got on the subway and
I got to my stop, no problem at all. I
was back at our hotel within like fifteen minutes. Wow.

(05:49):
It was insane, dude. What are they doing with their
public public transportation in Barcelona. There's the underground metro subway,
there's a above ground tram cable car. There is the
bus system that you can just take buses right like
public transport buses. They have those bikes. Only citizens can
use the bikes. I couldn't even use the bikes. The

(06:10):
bikes were just for citizens and they use them. Okay.
They have no ubers, they have taxis only. There are
so many different ways to get around Barcelona. No matter
what your preference is, you can find something that's right
for you. They have the high speed train that goes
between the two major cities two and a half hours
to cover that much at one hundred and eighty miles

(06:30):
an hour each direction. Dude, what are they doing there
and why aren't we doing that here? Not to say
that they're perfect or anything, I'm just saying, there's a
lot of stuff that would be a lot easier. I
would like to feel safer here. What are they doing
over there? We're not doing over here. It's just an
investigation i'd like to go into. I don't know, four
o'clock hour, I got a weird parking ticket from the

(06:50):
city of Omaha. I want to talk to you about
if you've had one of those, coming up right here
on news radio eleven ten kfab we were averaging like
twenty one thousand steps a day and so like that.
We walked over seventy miles during our our trip. Wow. Yeah,
I was a lot of walking. But you know what,
I felt great. It was a great experience. And I
told you one of the things that really stuck with
me while I was in Spain and Andorra is that

(07:13):
I didn't notice crime. I didn't feel in danger. I
was in the subway, in metro stations in two giant
cities the size of Philadelphia Barcelona, a city that has
six hundred thousand more people than Chicago does in Madrid,
and didn't feel at all threatened at any point while
we were wandering around in different spots of town at all.

(07:34):
It was great. I feel more threatened by Iberia having
my luggage still than I feel like, you know, Iberia,
the flight, the airline, because they don't have my suitcase.
Long story, if you missed it in the two o'clock
I can go revisit it in the podcast. But we
had a caller Phil on the line at four two, five, five,
eight eleven ten. Phil, Welcome to the show. I hear
you've been to Spain.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
Hey, Emory, I just got back from Spain with my
wife on a business trip. Nice normally doesn't like to
go out by herself, but while I was working, she
was all over Barcelona walking around. She felt extremely safe.
We went down to probably to the area the tourist

(08:15):
area you were talking about with their pickpockets.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that big that big kind of boulevard
pedestrian area. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:22):
Then the taxi driver said, hey, just watch out. But again,
even walking around there, I felt safer than San Francisco
when I go there and work, or Chicago when I
go there and work. Super great people, super safe feeling.
I mean, the beaches are incredible.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. Yeah, No, Barcelona underrated beach town.
We did a lot of research so I kind of
expected like I was going to be careful about my
stuff because these are big cities and we hadn't been
to Europe before. But there was after like the first
day of us just kind of wandering around and seeing
stuff and then seeing how the people interacted with each

(09:01):
other and how the cities, you know, kind of were
set up. We really didn't ever feel, at one time
ever feel like there was going to be anything weird
or bad that happened to us. Now, we were still guarded, right,
because you don't want to like let your guard down
and have somebody, you know, like try to mug you
or something. But that's just not a thing that you
hear happen that often. They what are they doing? Right?
And I had a person send me an email here

(09:23):
and I hear this and thanks for the call, Phil,
I really appreciate you listening to us. All right, Yeah,
you too as well. I had somebody say, hey, one
of the differences is the gangs and gangs just kind
of like existing, especially in a lot of major cities
around the United States. And that's true. Gang violence certainly
is a major feeling of like, hey, you don't want

(09:46):
to go in these certain neighborhoods and stuff like that
in major cities. I get that. At the same time,
it's a little bit more than that, right, Like, I
can go down to old market down here in Omaha,
and this again, I'm not trying to sound like I'm
villainizing people who have it worse off, and I do.
But you walk around an old market and you see
people like I want I want to reiterate before I

(10:06):
even say what I'm about to say the second caveat folks,
I do not want anyone to think that I am
villainizing these people. I don't know where they came from
or what their situations are, but there are a lot
of people sleeping under blankets on the very outside of
businesses that are closed in the middle of like peak
foot traffic time. In this area, I saw very few
areas where there were anybody sitting or sleeping on the streets.

(10:29):
There are pockets of spots in Barcelona or Madrid where
you could tell these guys probably don't have a place
to go live in, but it's not dirty. You don't
feel threatened by them. They clean out like there's nobody
like that in the subways at all. Isn't that like
the number one spot for somebody like that is like
the subway stations. Yeah, I didn't see a single person

(10:49):
sleeping in a subway station. I went to a lot
of them, dude. Over over ten days in Spain and Andora,
I saw a lot of subway stations. I didn't see
any homeless people in any like in any of those stations,
Like there are people coming through there and making sure
that that's not happening. They are incredibly clean. Okay, drugs okay,
Smoking's a big thing there, like you read about that.

(11:11):
Like Europe, they just look at smoking differently than we
do here. It's kind of a cultural thing. There's a
lot more of that going on there. Like I would
say probably fifty percent of the adults that I saw
were probably smoking something just walking down the street. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's definitely a thing for sure. I didn't hear or
see anything about trucks there, not to say that that's
not happening. And I'm not excluding marijuana here for a second,

(11:33):
because I'm sure there was plenty of that going on.
But people like they're getting they're going to the coffee shops, okay,
they're going into bars and they're having drinks and cocktails,
They're going to restaurants. There's a big scene for restaurants.
They're all sorts of different kinds, right. I didn't see
a lot of people that were seemingly impaired on like
narcotics or impaired on amphetamines or Opiate's a big problem

(11:56):
that's here, you know what I'm saying. It's an unfortunate
problem that we have, but it's a real So I
guess my overarching thing is it's not just the gang
violence that I noticed being not prevalent in Spain. What
I also noticed was that it seemed like the people
who run that country, in those cities really care about
cleaning up that stuff. They don't want people sleeping in

(12:17):
highly trafficked areas of pedestrians that don't have places to go.
They don't have people that seemingly are addicted to illicit
substances and drugs. They don't have just a lot of
general crime when you compare it. I'm sure they have
their own sets of issues, but for me to be
in Philadelphia sized town, or a town bigger than Chicago

(12:38):
and not feel like any of that was something I
had to pay attention to is crazy to me. I
did pull a quick stat okay, so will this proved
me wrong?

Speaker 2 (12:46):
No?

Speaker 1 (12:46):
This is this is murders specifically. Yeah, okay, Like I
just I basically just googled crime in Spain versus United States,
and this is the first stat I saw. Spain comes
in at twenty six twenty six for murders in the world,
with point six per one hundred thousand people, whereas the
United States sits at number one hundred and thirty seven
with six point three murders per one thousand people. So

(13:09):
that is a murder rate in the USA of over
ten times higher than Spain. So Spain is what you're saying,
is like twenty second safest, twenty sixth twenty sixth safest.
I don't know who the twenty five are ahead of them.
I could tick that up, but the United States is
much lower on that list. And say one hundred and
thirty seven out of however many countries there are in
the world, there are one hundred and thirty seventh. Do

(13:31):
we have like a number of murders? Like how many murders?
Let me just how many crows does it take to
make a murder? That's what I wow. Come on, somebody
had to make a joke. Okay, homicides in Spain, let
me see here. Yeah, is this tough? You gotta click
on the right stat According to this in twenty twenty one,

(13:54):
there were zero. That can't be right right, Well, that
was COVID. It was just indoors. Maybe they blamed all
the murder on COVID. You get the numbers. Ze, Oh,
come on, you got stabbed with co He got stabbed
by an eighteen inch COVID knife. Doctor Fauci was over
there stop it anyway, So I don't know, point being

(14:14):
it was. I felt very safe there, And anybody who's
been there or has an idea of why that may be,
I'd love to hear from you. Four oh two, five, five,
eight to eleven ten more on the way on news
radio eleven ten kfab. And were you songer on news
radio eleven ten kfab. You were looking up kind of
like homicides in violent crimes in like Philadelphia and Chicago,

(14:37):
which are similarly sized places to Barcelona and Madrid. Did
you find anything? Did you Did you see anything there?
Because you know, I got a few numbers up myself.
I found some numbers.

Speaker 3 (14:47):
I finally found a site that was able to compare
Chicago versus Madrid.

Speaker 1 (14:52):
Okay, and that's that's pretty comparable. Madrid does have about
six hundred thousand more people than Chicago, so Chicago is
smaller by quite a bit, but that's about as close
as Madrid is to any one city in America in
terms of size. So what did you see crime index?
Chicago is at sixty six point six. That's not good,
three sixes and sixty six point zero six, oh, okay,

(15:16):
and Madrid is in at twenty seven point three five,
so like half of the crime less than half. And
then the safety scale, which is the inverse of that,
Chicago clocks in at just under thirty four. Madrid clocks
in at seventy two point five on the safety scale.
So it's according to this, based on the numbers that
we have crunched, Madrid bigger than Chicago by six hundred

(15:37):
thousand people. Like that's bigger. Like imagine the city of
Omah getting picked up and dropped into Chicago. That'd be
bad for a lot of people in a lot of
different ways. But that's the only like that's pretty close
to the size of Madrid. If you picked our city
up and dropped it in Chicago, and you're telling me
Chicago by itself is twice as dangerous as Madrid is.

(15:57):
At least this The crime index and the safety index
were based on a survey taken off of five things.
General perception of crime levels, perceived safety, concerns about specific crimes,
and then the property crimes and violent crimes. So it
is people's feelings about and also the number of crimes,

(16:17):
and that is what goes into this. These indices for
both Madrid and Chicago. Do you have a way to
do that for Barcelona and Philadelphia? Yeah, let me tuck
that in here, okay, because those are basically the same size.
Philadelphia and Barcelona are very similar in size. There you
have to ask hearing this, And I know Chicago maybe
is a bad example because we know how crime ritt
in Chicago specifically is. But that's as close to the

(16:41):
actual size of the city that we're talking about, and
I'm trying to compare it as closely as possible. I
shouldn't feel, realistically, I should not be feeling safer in
a place the size of Madrid. Six hundred thousand more
people in Madrid than Chicago. Then I sometimes feel in
downtown Moine or downtown Omaha, right, And I know that

(17:02):
things are a little bit different here. You know, Like
you walk on the street in like Boston, you're gonna
if you accidentally bump into somebody, you know what you're
gonna get? What's where are you going walking here? You
think you're better than me? Yeah, And if that were
to happen in the very tight quarters that you're in
in Spain when you get on the subways, if you're
coming out of one of the stations, you're on a
highly you know, pedestrian street or area, nobody's like that there. Nobody.

(17:27):
Everybody's pretty tolerant of each other. And like, unless you're
really pushing the issue or trying to fight with somebody,
they're not trying to do that with you. I didn't
have one bad interaction with anybody there. It was awesome. Uh.
You got those numbers, so.

Speaker 3 (17:39):
At with the crime index, Philadelphia clocks in at just
about sixty six. Barcelona is fifty one point eight, so
just about fifty two, so definitely better, but a little
bit closer than the last two week compared Madrid. In
Chicago and then safety scale pretty similar Philadelphia thirty four
Barcelona forty eight. Okay, so well, Barcelona is like fifty

(18:01):
percent more safe with very similar population.

Speaker 1 (18:05):
How is Madrid so safe? That's crazy, right, Like as
big as that place is, like over three million people.
I don't know, man, bottom line is it is safe,
and I don't know. To me, you have to look
at what they're doing, like what is going on there? Besides,
I mean there's a lot of stuff that you could
go to, and I mean illegal immigration is one of it.
Drugs is another thing, gang violence is another thing. Lack

(18:27):
of trustworthy public transportation in most American cities, I mean
there's that too. Public transportation was incredibly clean and incredibly
safe in both of those places. I shouldn't feel safer
in places that large than in downtown Omaha. I shouldn't
feel more worried about my wife going on or run
by herself anywhere in the downtown area of Des Moines

(18:47):
per Se not to throw Allmaha entirely under the buzz
or Lincoln and feel like she's in more danger there
than if she did the same in a place like Barcelona.
It's crazy to me, I don't know. Just to muse
by a man who comes back from vacation, and that's
like the one thing I noticed more than anything else
that in the dogs. Everybody's got dogs there. Maybe everything
is so friendly for dogs, Like literally Andra, which has

(19:11):
like zero crime by the way, and it's small, so
like I'm not even gonna compare that to anything, but
it's like everybody's got their dog, and everybody's you can
take your dog anywhere. There's like very few stores you
can't take your dog into. People take their dog to
the mall and the dog is just hanging out in
the mall with them. Like what a cool place. I
saw Dogs in restaurants, Dude, that might freak some people out,

(19:31):
but I had no problem with that. They're even giving
the dogs bowls and stuff that they can drink out of.
It's really cool. Normalize dogs in restaurants, That's what I say. Yeah,
he's gonna be that restaurant in oh Mah. That's like, yeah,
you know what, screw what the public perception is. Dogs
can come in here and hang out. What you're gonna
do now, Oh, I'm gonna go and probably eat out
at your restaurant every three days every time I go

(19:52):
out to eat. Like that's when of my first place
to go to because they can bring my dog. I
know some dogs that maybe shouldn't go to restaurants. Yeah,
you got it. Probably, Yeah, that's a good idea. Not
everybody's a responsible dog owner, but the people over there
are responsible dog owners. The dogs are real any dog
that's off a leash, which there are a lot more
there than here, and I don't recommend that, but they
were very well behaved. There was no dog trying to

(20:13):
get into the space of any person or other dog.
Those dogs are incredibly well socialized. And everybody that had
their dog out on these walks on urban areas, we're
carrying the little water bottle. The dog go to the
bathroom on like a fire hydrant or a tree or
on the sidewalk or something, and they'd immediately like spray
their water onto that on the street. Nobody does that
in America. By the way, you get in big trouble

(20:34):
if you don't pick up after your dog over there.
I found out, not because I had my dog there.
I didn't, but I saw one of the things that
was like in Spanish talking about what happened. If you
don't pick up after your dog, you get big trouble. Ah,
because they're like real careful about like the disease that
the dogs who could be carrying around. They got like
a bunch of CCTV over there, whole lot of closed circuit.

(20:54):
Is that the close TV? Yeah, I don't know. I
guess that's what they know. So I don't know. If
I let Fido go and he goes and nobody's around,
or I don't pick it up right, if nobody's around,
I don't know, you probably get away with it. Got
a big brother up there watching, Yeah, but nobody does
that because they have common decency, something that I think
a lot of us in America don't have these days.
We're too busy hating each other for different reasons and

(21:16):
different things. Yeah, over there, that's not a thing. It's
just like I'm sure they have differences on stuff like
Real Madrid versus Barcelona. It's a big football rivalry over there.
I mean, I didn't get the vibe that you know,
and I know their politics are different than ours, but
it's just like I didn't get the vibe that people
were just inherently using identity stuff like that to get
mad or hate other people, which is right, like here

(21:36):
in America, like we're looking for that. It feels like
we're looking for reasons to get angry or to be
divisive against other people, and that goes for people across
the entire spectrum, politically and otherwise