Rio IS dangerous. Anyone claiming otherwise is either a &quot;patriotic&quot; Brazilian or is trying to generalize from personal (lucky) experience.<p>There are obviously many factors that come into play. The biggest ones are not what you expect: how &quot;gringo&quot; (foreigner) you look, and are you walking around with Brazilian friends? Negatives on both counts will increase your odds of &quot;bad stuff&quot; happening to you dramatically. Also, if you come from a safer place where people do stuff such as routinely leave cars and homes unlocked, casually hail any cab anywhere and walk around with expensive phones(or cameras), you&#x27;re in for a big surprise.<p>The best safety advice I can give is: assume there is <i>no police whatsoever in the country</i> and act accordingly, even if you do happen to see police around. They are unlikely to do anything to help you. May not even investigate if you die.<p>You should still be mostly OK, statistically speaking. The problem is that, when bad things happen, they tend to be really bad. You are very very lucky that if if is something simple as a purse snatching (as I have seen in other comments). Still very lucky if there&#x27;s a knife involved. Expect multiple armed thugs in motorcycles, even if you can&#x27;t see everyone involved, assume there&#x27;s backup for the criminals.<p>One thing that many have overlooked in the comments is that for Rio and Sao Paulo, the crime trend is down. In São Paulo particularly, I&#x27;ve even seen people casually browsing on their iPads while sitting at bar tables next to a busy road, or people talking on their iphones in barely lit streets near the city center. That was unthinkable a few years ago.<p>However, the trend for other regions is that crime rates are rising <i>dramatically</i>. Some regions, in the Northeast particularly, are worse than some war zones. Avoid, specially if you have no Brazilian friends.<p>Disclaimer: I am Brazilian, lived for 30+ years in the northeast. Fled to the very south, to a very good neighborhood, wife witnessed a drug-related execution in front of our building the week we arrived. Nothing came out of it btw, didn&#x27;t even make the news. Where I used to live, 20+ violent deaths in a weekend are not worth newspaper pages anymore. Then fled to the Bay Area.