Car thief

I think we should get this in perspective. This is a very close knit community (I mean all of Rojales) and we hear of anything like burglaries, hugger muggers, attempted car thefts etc very quickly.
However, we have now lived here permanently for coming up to 9 years and have had holiday homes since 2003.
I have never seen a "hugger mugger", never had any burglary (attempted or successful) or been robbed. The only crime I've seen in all that time has been an attempted shop lifting at the old Lidl by some Lithuanians (I assume they were Lithuanian as the vanette they jumped in to had LT on the plate) who were seen off by the rather large lady who ran the place.

On the other hand, our garage in a sleepy Leicestershire town was broken into twice, our garden shed three times and the house successfully broken into once when we were here for a week. My car was stolen in UK and my wife's car was broken into with the window shattered when they tried to get her radio out. Our village was nowhere near the size of Rojales (pop of my village about 3000 compared to the about 18000 here) and in January this year alone the village had 2 burglaries, 2 criminal damage and arson, 2 arrests for drugs, 1 mugging, 1 car stolen, 2 thefts from shops (other than shop lifting) and 5 of violence and sexual offences.

Now, it's all a matter of perception. We stopped going into town at night with fights, gangs and so on seeming to be everywhere. I suppose if I'd been a victim here then I would have a different outlook but it hasn't so we feel much safer here than we did in UK. We're staying.

(Oh, and my mail gets delivered into my community mailbox with no problems).

Same goes for our area on the suburbs of London.
The crime and Petty crime, as upsetting as it is to the victims, is minimal in Quesada, Rojales and surrounding areas compared to many areas in the UK.
The problem is that these incidents in Spain are blown out of proportion by 'small town media' and word of mouth, which then makes us all more fearful ....although the warnings that these pass on has got to be good to make us all aware, even though many of us will never come across any of this crime, not least because we are more aware of our personal security.