Personally I consider Spain to be an extremely safe country
Mac, I couldn't agree more with you.
(For those who not know, I was a detective in London for 30 years and for 15 years have been a voluntary translator with the National Police at a busy, tourist coastal town).
Based solely on my professional experience I can say reported crime in Spain is considerably lower than in comparable areas in the UK, and crime, involving violence against non-Spanish people, is extremely low, amost to the point of it being not worth considering. It is many months since I have been required to assist a victim of a violent crime to make a report.
I know people will say many crimes are not reported. Yes that is true but it also true of everywhere. And reported crime is the only figure usually available on which to base crime statics. So when comparing crime in one area with another it is reported crime levels that are used everwhere. However, I believe that as most tourists have holiday insurance, which needs a police report to make a claim, a higher percentage of victims are likely to report crime whilst on holiday than they would be if they were at home.
As I know many of the police in my town by sight, I am aware that in addition to the uniform officers one sees there are almost as many working in plain clothes. The number of operational officers is way above a comparable town in UK. ( I do not know about now but when I was a serving officer in the London, there were 26,000 police officers. From ‘insider information’ I can say that on a ‘good day’ a maximum of 1,200 were available to be patrolling the streets of the whole of London during the day and 600 at night).
Murder rates in Spain per 100,000 of the population are just about half those of the UK.
And please note. When reports in Spain refer to the number of people who ‘have been robbed’ that includes ‘those who have been the victim of simple theft’ which represents the majority of those cases. Robbery in UK means theft with violence or threats thereof, so one cannot compare ‘robberies’ in Spain with robberies in UK.