Osaka is No. 1 in incidents of purse snatching for the third year in a row, police say. Even though stats are only available up until October, so many cases of people grabbing women’s bags and running away – or riding away as is often the case – have occurred that the city has officially clinched the standings for 2013.

Osaka’s total number of purse snatching incidents currently stands at 1,244 for this year. To put that figure into perspective, Kanagawa Prefecture came in second for purse snatching with a measly 811 cases, a mere two-thirds that of Osaka. Third place went to Saitama who had 758.

Even police are declaring that the competition is over this year saying “it’s impossible to reverse this trend now, but we hope to suppress the increase even a little by the end of the year.”

Police in the area started off the year optimistically with a campaign aimed at heightening pedestrians’ alertness to suspicious people. Unfortunately, by March this year Osaka had already acquired a commanding lead over all of Japan’s other prefectures.

This should have been the prefecture’s 38th consecutive number one spot, but in 2010 Chiba Prefecture for some reason experienced a snatching epidemic that surpassed even that of Osaka.

For the other 99.999% of people who feel that purse snatching is a menace to society, take comfort in the fact that the rate of this crime has fallen by 12 percent from the same time last year and has been steadily decreasing overall in the past decade.

Source: Yomiuri Online

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