Increasing incidents of crime prompt expats to use caution
Just because it's coming upon the holidays, don't forget to moderate your holiday "cheer" with safeguards against those who don't wish you well. For example, the criminals among us small-fry hoods and their older siblings. To say nothing of the possibly more "organized" types of muggers and robbers and wannabe syndicate folks.
Some of this is obvious: lock your doors, guard your valuables. That goes double for when you're en route to somewhere, in your car or on a tram or bus.
Agnieszka Morawinska, a former ambassador to Australia who's the curator at the Royal Castle, was coming back from a celebratory showing of the "Romanticism" exhibit one snowy night in early December. The corporate sponsors were delighted, even if half of the guests had been snowed out.
It was after 8:30 p.m. when Morawinska was in bumper-to-bumper traffic on ulica Pulawska with the snow still falling.
"Someone opened the back door of the car and grabbed my handbag, with everything in it not just money and cards but two pairs of glasses, which makes the loss not only troublesome but expensive," she said.
She saw next to nothing. "I felt that the door had opened; I just saw the hand and my handbag disappearing out the door. It was like a Chinese theater. I didn't even move. I knew I had no chance. I drove another two meters and then stopped and the man in back asked if I knew that my purse had been stolen."
But some of the larger-scale crime is more difficult to strategize against. Especially if you live in one of the upscale suburban towns such as Konstancin, which is great for fresh air and spas but also has a mix of baddies in with the elegant newcomers.
And it's not just Konstancin. Towns and small cities a half hour to an hour from Warsaw have houses and yards. They're a magnet for expats. They also may have many "families" who were brought in by the communists in the past 45 years to occupy the large houses that had been seized from their owners in the years after World War II. Today, some of those "group houses" are filled with several generations of no-longer-connected people who find their income from a variety of criminal activities. And who, apparently, are hostile to the very idea of rich newcomers moving in and possibly, down the line, being able to move them out.
One Polish-Finnish couple was giving a party for their teenage daughter in their spacious house with a large yard and a very secure gate, in a town 40 minutes west of Warsaw. The father went out for more ice cream and left the iron gate open at the driveway and teenagers who obviously had been casing the joint slipped in, walked up the driveway to the back entrance. While two of them stood guard outside, one fleeced the money and keys from the dozen coats of visitors hanging right there on the hooks. It was hours later, as guests began to leave, that the couple realized there had been a break-in.
In the case of one Konstancin couple, the problem started as small-scale breaking and entering. It wasn't even that obvious at first. A few minor articles went missing early last summer. They put it down to their own carelessness. But when a sister came to visit and a day later could not find her camera, they notified the U.S. Embassy's security chief and the police.
The next two to three months proved increasingly troublesome and included threats by the older brothers of the believed breaking-and-entering youngsters. And then an ugly incident that sent their property "guard" to the hospital with a slashed arm. A final break-in ended in an assault on the woman because, they said, she had ignored their warnings and had reported the break-ins and their threats to the embassy and the cops. They made more threats if she reported the assault. After that, the couple moved back to Warsaw, on a street with a fair amount of street and car traffic.
Within a month, the Konstancin "family" had tracked them down in their new abode and one day delivered a demand for protection money.
That's supposed to happen in Russia, not in Poland.
One of the unsettling nuggets of information uncovered by the embassy was that one of the twerps had been arrested more than a dozen times but never served a day in jail. He was seen as "sick" because he's a drug user and therefore ineligible to be put in jail.
The newly established Transparency International chapter here, meanwhile, is concerned more with "political" corruption, not with the criminals on the street.
The Polish Chairman of the Board Antoni Kaminski said this was increasingly a problem and that "both sides are greedy," with no one political party wearing the white hat.
