1

I am sorry to hear about your case. It seems like crime against tourists in St. Martin is becoming quite common, but it gets less publicity than other Caribbean islands. Still, Guadeloupe and Martinique are one of the safest Caribbean islands and you shouldn't listen to that cop's advice.

2

I'm glad you're OK. Knife attacks are scary and dangerous, indeed. That said....

I got robbed in Amsterdam one time, and....

Gendarmes are employees of the central state and get assigned to their jobs like military posts, many of them really don't want to be posted to the islands. I met one in Guadeloupe who talked incessantly about how awful and dangerous it was there before going off about welfare mothers and everything else I would expect to hear from some old racist relative.

Most cops in the US wear bulletproof vests all the time. It's pretty common in the western hemisphere, where the prevalence of guns is much higher than in Europe. It's more a reflection of the hazards of their job, or even the increasing militarization of police forces, than it is of an individual tourist or citizen's risk of being shot.

3

"Most cops in the US wear bulletproof vests all the time" is simply not true. Please do not spread misinformation.

4

Most of the on-duty uniformed police officers I see in the US are wearing bulletproof vests.

Wearing bulletproof vests while on patrol is, as far as I can tell, a common standard operating procedure in most police departments.

This is what I meant.

Now, do you seriously take issue with the above statements, or were you merely attempting to ridicule my original imprecise grammar?

5

I disagree with your assertion. Most police in the US are not wearing bullet proof vest.

This is for practical reasons. Imagine in the town where I live where the police would not encounter a single gun discharging incident in any year, either by an officer himself or by a criminal, the burden of wearing it is simply redundant.

I live in a typical quiet town in the north east.

I could care less about your grammar.

6

OK. Thanks for clarifying.

Your experience has not been mine in the places I've lived and visited in the mid-atlantic and southeastern US since, say, the turn of the century. I do vaguely recall seeing fewer bulletproof vests back in the 90's, but almost every cop I've seen in recent years has had one on. They're usually on underneath the uniform, but of course they're still pretty easy to spot. And yes, it is noteworthy, in part, because it just seems like an unnecessary discomfort in most cases. This was my real point, anyway, that just because you see a cop or a security guard wearing a bulletproof vest doesn't mean you are in imminent danger of being shot.

I suppose that there are probably statistics out there somewhere which would prove one of us right and one of us wrong, but I don't really care that much either way. It's a big and diverse country, after all, so generalizations like my original one probably aren't so useful, after all.

I'm glad to hear that things are still somewhat sane and calm where you live.