I always love these threads, because there is always somebody who says "this kind of thing happens everywhere", in a somewhat lame attempt to excuse the Bonaire Police for the abject failure to even marginally attempt to stop the well known theft problems there. This kind of thing DOES NOT happen everywhere. You might go to Coz and 1 person in 10,000 might get something stolen out of their hotel. Or one car in 20,000 might get broken into or vandalized in the Cayman Islands. On Bonaire, it is probably alot closer to 1 in 10 or 1 in 20. For every ten people here saying they had no problem, I can show you 10 posts from people who just got back and had something stolen. The fact is that there are almost never threads on any of the major scuba boards detailing thefts as a pattern for any location other than Bonaire. The police there don't care, and as evidenced by the use of the laptop for a week, they are most likely a major part of the problem. Anywhere else, everybody realizes that crime is a major deterrent to tourism, but on Bonaire, it is accepted as status quo and nobody cares. So please...feel free to post your own personal experiences, pro or con about Bonaire, but don't patronize us by claiming it is rare or common anywhere in the caribbean, because it isn't. Jamaica and some places in the major port cities of the Bahamas may have similar problems, but even there, the crooks haven't developed such a clear pattern of targeting divers, and the population is much larger, making identification of the criminals harder. The locals and the police on Bonaire know damn well who the thieves are, and they know who and where they sell their booty. They just don't care to make any effort to fix it.
