I'm gonna give my 2 cents on the matter. Im sorry to say this, I wish I could lie to you and tell you everything is gonna be ok, but things won't get any better any time soon. There's absolutely no real will on the part of the authorities to combat the problem of violence, the only thing they care about is hiding it and saving their asses, putting the blame on "perception" or dembow singers. Nobody wants to take responsability and the root of the problem is constantly being ignored, because it's far too complex to solve in 4 years and politicians only care about their vote. Meanwhile, people kind of want to make a change and everybody is disgusted by the violence that has been taking place more recently since mid December 2015 to present day, but nobody actually takes real iniciative, i still haven't seen a peace march or a marathon against violence, all i see is people comenting in the streets and on the internet, and everybody shocked about recent events. Some people do, however give their grain of sand, mainly those community leaders that help the community, some artists and random people doing random acts of niceness like giving away school utensils to poor kids, etc etc. Other than that, I don't see any improvement in the near future, no matter how optimistic I try to be. Moral is on an all time low, people are desperate, the lack of justice is stronger than ever and corruption is also very strong. I'm actually surprised that we've managed to sort of keep our sh*t together compared to Brazil, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico etc that are much more violent. But that won't last much longer unless we don't force our authorities to really create an effective strategic plan that solves the problem from the root. But one thing im gonna say, tourists being killed or falling victims by violence is incredibly rare. Tourists are very safe compared to dominicans. The ones who have it worse with the insecurity are us dominicans.
For those who give constructive criticism, kudos to you. My problem is with those who get off on bad things happening in DR and i recognise that type of people when i read them. I've never denied the truth, actually, im here to make things clear, because i've seen alot of ridiculous stereotypes and exaggerated stories being spewed all over the place in this forum. Also, some people here seriously are way too paranoid and/or have a persecution complex. The other day I was on an uber and the driver told me that he had a gringo client who f*cked up his rating because of a stupid f*cking reason. It so happens that the app was telling the drive that the route he was taking was too congested, so the driver decided to take an alternative route and stop the app before the destination so the client wasn't overcharged, but he would leave him right in front of the place the gringo was going to. Well the gringo automatically assumed that the driver was trying to take advantage of him and gave him a 0, even though he was charged 60 pesos for the whole trip, even less than the base rate that is 70 pesos, all that because the driver stopped the app before time so he wouldn't get overcharged and as a result he got undercharged, but for some stupid f*cking reason the gringo still thought that somehow the driver robbed him and gave him a 0. That driver was trying to do him a f*cking favor.
Reminded me alot of the stuff that I constantly read in this forum, people saying that dominicans are bad people, that everybody wants to take advantage of you or everybody see's you as a dollar sign. That p*sses me off because you come here and start messing around with prostitutes and sanky pankies, hanging around with the worst kind of people and then acuse 10 million human beings of being "con artists". Apart from it being offensive, it is very misleading and makes foreigners not only not want to come here, it gives us a bad name. Alot of people visit these forum to get information before booking their trip and when they read all the bull****, they get discouraged. I really don't mind it that much if they get discouraged by the TRUTH, but it really gets on my nerves when they believe things that are not true and exaggerated stories, Dominican Watch Dog style.
I don't hide the truth, on the contrary, I try to EXPOSE the truth as much as posible, especially when bullsh*t is harming us. And i know for a fact that some people here are f*cking trash and have the worst intentions. The same type of people that got ****ed over by a prostitute or a sankie and want to take it out on the whole population. Reminds me of a youtuber called "hobo traveler" i think. A sad excuse of a human being. People like that are garbage to me!!