I haven’t encountered any criminality, although everyone says there is a lot of it. As I understand it, everything is caused by the large number of police, which are found as municipal, republican, transit, national guard.

The police are found around the city, on the roads. There’s a lot of it, that’s:

1.   SUVs with machine gunners on the road
2.   foot patrols
3.   ATV patrols right down the beach
4.   roadblocks
5.   speeding Dodges on highway patrols

I have witnessed several times police stopping a vehicle and searching it.

Another case I observed was an unexpected fight in the evening between two locals, the police showed up within a couple of minutes and took them both away in handcuffs.

The police are vigilant about safety, but of course you should be careful with your valuables and not get into conflicts on the streets.

Police corruption

I read that often at checkpoints the police stop tourists and ask for a bribe. In my practice, I have not had this happen, although I was stopped 2 times, but when they saw that I was a tourist, they immediately waved for me to go on and did not search the car or check my documents.

My friend was stopped and told that he exceeded the speed limit, as the speed limit is 20 km/h. My friend asked the policeman to look at the sign, the policeman let him go. As you can see, there was no such sign on the road, and the policeman did not have a radar.