Global Courant 2023-04-19 03:34:44
The Las Cañitas area, in the Palermo neighborhood, woke up with news of robberies that occurred in restaurants and apartments. In Báez at 200 there are two common targets of insecurity: on the one hand, merchants like Martín Moschioni, owner of the Dalchemist restaurant; on the other, the neighbors who assure that for months there have been continuous crime situations in the area and on Monday they decided to put together their own crime map to watch each other’s backs.
On Monday night, at Báez 265, a 15-year-old boy entered a restaurant with the excuse of selling garbage bags. The place chosen was the Dalchemist restaurant, by Martín Moschioni. The modus operandi was the same that Martín had already seen: put the bags on the table to distract the diners and then take their cell phones hidden among the bags.
Moschioni noticed and acted quickly to prevent the thief from escaping with a client’s cell phone. The snatcher, a minor, ended up in custody.
“We opened this place less than a year ago and this is the third time we have experienced a robbery. I know that it has happened to the area several times, and there are policemen but sometimes they cannot handle everything. You have to be coming and going between the venues, and being right at the moment it happens”, comments Martín.
“Yesterday, in the same police station there were five events at the same time with the same modality. Tamara told me this morning about the crime map that she put together and told me ‘yesterday there were ten events’. This morning it happened again here three blocks away. Besides, it’s really easy because you have the train nearby to leave, and I think they come in droves,” explains the merchant.
Martín assures that he had planned to accompany the boy to the exit and ask him if he wanted to bring food “but from a distance I saw that he threw the bags on the lady’s table. There I asked the woman if she had her cell phone and she said no. I went out running, I grabbed him and in the struggle he told me: ‘Don, let me go because I have to feed my family’. I took it to mean that he was lying to me”.
“But later a girl who works with us told me ‘his name is Martín, he is fifteen years old.’ that I didn’t want him to leave with an ugly impression, that he knew there was another option. I held back twice, until I approached him and told him I was offering him a job, and the kid shed a tear. If he comes looking for a job, don’t I know, but today he knows that he has another option, and what work there is and is always needed”.
Martín Moschioni, owner of Dalchemist, Photo Luciano Thieberger
“I had a boy without weapons, I imagine that not all cases are the same. There are other very violent cases. But I felt that this was my moment to do something, I wanted to show him that he has another option,” Martín concludes.
The collaborative crime map
“There was a Cañitas Instagram where people asked questions like ‘Where is the hairdresser?’ a WhatsApp was set up. We put together a group that is increasing, 200, 300 people. There people began to tell their facts about insecurity and I asked them if they had made the complaints, they said yes, then the idea occurred to me to make a crime map,” explains Tamara Kivatinetz, a resident of the area and creator of the community map that has received more than 21 complaints in the few hours it has been active.
“There I told the neighbors that if they knew of something, they would upload the post to the maps to find out where it was. First, because it helps you to make it visual, and to know where to walk and where not. What surprised me is that we got to ten criminal acts in one day,” adds Tamara, who has lived in the neighborhood for 6 years, on Luis María Ocampos street. At the close of this note, the reports reached 18 in 48 hours.
The woman comments that you cannot walk on Dorrego street: “It is no man’s land. There is no lighting and the trees have grown a lot. You have to remember that Cañitas was a place for bowling alleys and now it is a gastronomic center, the number of people who moves throughout the day changed. But the consistency of police officers is the same. That’s the change we’re experiencing in the neighborhood.”
Báez at 200, one of the most attacked areas of Las Cañitas. Photo Luciano Thieberger
Tamara points out that the lack of troops is an issue that harms those who live and work in the area, and that the agents who circulate through the streets are tired: “The policemen can’t take it anymore. Yesterday when the robbery occurred at the local Martín, I heard that the police said “we won’t give any more”, there were five outbursts at the same time. The Prosecutor’s Office never showed up, I waited for them here for hours, I didn’t see them. They tell you to call 911, I call 911, I call 103 when a traffic light doesn’t work, it’s all very well, but they have to give us other tools. We are in the age of technology, that’s why I put together the map. People have life, there have to be other ways to denounce”.
“The pandemic made bars need places outside. People are outside, and it is much easier to rob someone who is sitting outside than inside. The truth is that today in Cañitas you cannot sit outside. Among the what they ask of you and the outbursts is tremendous”, concludes Tamara.
“Lighting is needed”
In Vaffanculo- Cantina Italiana, Derix, the cashier in charge of the place, expresses that there is a lack of more security in the area: “You never know when you leave here, the other time they tried to rob a colleague, they broke his head here on this same block. It was about two or three months ago. But here in the business nothing has happened.”
“There are days when you see more security, and days when you don’t. A lot of lighting is needed here, it’s very dark at night and sometimes you go out and you don’t know what could happen to you. More because we close at around one in the morning, because it’s a gastronomic area”,
The trend of setting up tables in the street offers another easy target for thieves. Photo Luciano Thieberger
Sergio, manager of the local Taccount, also on Báez street, says that less than four months ago two tables, several chairs and the bronze chains that were outside the restaurant were robbed in broad daylight: “The place was open , I did not see them. First they stole a table and a chair, then after a while they stole the rest.”
In the surroundings of the stolen restaurant on Monday night, the neighbors who have lived in Cañitas for a long time give their testimony. One of them is Mila, who assures that one of her friends suffered a robbery on that block when she came to visit her: “It was a couple of weeks ago, around eleven at night. On this same block, which is Báez. We We had already said goodbye, but after ten minutes he came back and told me that his cell phone had been stolen.”
“I think they were a group of three or four people, who threatened him so that he would give whatever he had at hand. I know that the area near Dorrego should not be walked at night, because there is no light. You see the policemen here because there are restaurants but in other less crowded areas you don’t see them,” adds the young woman.
The repercussion for the video of the frustrated robbery in a restaurant revealed other facts of insecurity in Las Cañitas. Photo Luciano Thieberger
Ana, who circulates around the block with her baby and has lived in the neighborhood for several years, adds: “Now the situation is much more serious, because it seems that they are stealing a lot. The mother of one of the girls who goes to the garden with my son saw a guy around here with a blade going around last time.”
The residents of Las Cañitas will hold a meeting with the Commune and the Police Station on Thursday, April 20 at 7:00 p.m. in Cheanut and Arce. From there, they will try to deal with the acts of insecurity denounced in the last hours.
They will reinforce security in Las Cañitas
“The complaints have been adding up for a while, and this happens to us everywhere. Not only in the Las Cañitas area. Sometimes, some cases have an impact, like this one where there was an image and it drew attention due to the type of robbery In this case, there was a video and also the merchant tackled the offender, so that drew more attention. But situations like these we receive every week and we analyze them, either by the Police Station, the Public Prosecutor’s Office or 911 “, say sources from the Ministry of Justice and Security of the City of Buenos Aires.
“Due to that criminal situation of the week, the police are redeployed and the location is changed. Like this every week of the year. But there are places that have more problems than others, this area of Cañitas is not the same as Constitución, or that Villa 21-24. The reality of each neighbor matters, but we see the entire City and give the available and adequate resources to reality at home,” they add.
In the Ministry they affirm that they had contact with the different groups of neighbors that exist to be able to listen to them: “In the specific case, the complaints are there, we see the cases. The crime maps are used for cases that people do not dare to denounce But we always have more information, and in this case it is no exception.”
“We see 27,000 blocks, and we always know which ones are more affected than others. In this case, those of Las Cañitas are not the most affected in the City, and in turn, within the robberies that exist, we are not talking about very serious cases of consequences for people’s lives. These are typical cases of robberies, where there may be public outbursts in the streets or minors who enter businesses with some strategy,” they add.
The Ministry sources explain that in the Palermo area, which is the 14B Police Station, the shifts are fulfilled perfectly, but that does not mean that it is enough “because sometimes it can happen that the policeman is there and in a specific case He didn’t have the proper vigilance attitude.”
And they add that soon the area will receive prevention agents, and that this Wednesday it will have reinforcements: “The Las Cañitas area will receive reinforcement in the area starting tomorrow from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., which is the which most of the complaints occur”.
MG
