Personal experience: spice in Moscow is sold directly at Perekrestok store

Irina Mishina

At about 5 pm my family and I decided to go to the Perekrestok store. My husband and daughter went shopping, but I stayed on the street: I can't stay indoors for a long time in a mask. I was waiting in front of the store entrance, by the New Year tree. There were few people: apparently, not everyone woke up after the feast. Suddenly I was approached by a young man of Asian appearance with a colorful purple bruise above and below his left eye. “Do you want to smoke? Do you want to have a spice?"“, - Bruise” asked quietly.

To be honest, I didn’t want to enter into polemics and explain about Art. 228 of the Criminal Code, and I just said no. But the Asian youth, walking around, returned again. "Think well, do you need to smoke spice?" Here I had to answer that illegal possession and distribution of drugs is punishable by article of the Criminal Code, and if "Sinyak" does not hide with its proposals right now, I will be forced to call the police. But the young man stood in front of me and smiled. When I tried to photograph him, he began to twist his head in different directions so that a clear image would not work. Seeing that I still took a photo, he came close and began to demand that I delete the photo in front of him or give him my smartphone, grabbed the hand.

“If you don’t give your smartphone away, it will be bad”, - the “Bruise” threatened. I realized that I had to run. But at that moment a second man of Slavic appearance rose from the ground. He was calm and confident. These two blocked my passage. I still managed to slip between them in the foyer of the Perekrestok store. I rushed to the guard and asked him for help. But a plump, tired, elderly man who spoke Russian with a strong accent replied that he only guards inside the store. Everything outside of it is not his area of responsibility.

Then I called the police at 102. I waited ten minutes. Nobody came. By this time, the husband and daughter had gone out, and the three of us, accompanied by a security guard, left the store. When we were leaving, I saw out of the corner of my eye that the man who offered me the spice and his companion were standing a few meters from us. It seemed strange: I was actually offered a drug opposite the entrance to a large store, where theoretically there should be a video recording camera...

When we returned, I called the police again. In 10 minutes, officers from the Fili-Davydkovo police station were at my house, I wrote a statement in which I told about the incident and asked to find and detain people, one of whom offered me spice and threatened me. After midnight, an operational investigation team arrived at our home. The statement, which was dictated to me by the representative of the Fili-Davydkovo Department of Internal Affairs, featured a "previously unknown man" who offered "a substance of unknown content to me, which I myself did not see".

The police officer assured that this is the order: I have not seen the drug, so there is nothing to say. As for the surveillance cameras, the police said they were not at the entrance to the Perekrestok store. “There is no camera from which the entrance would be viewed. There was a case when we tried to view from the cameras of another store, ”Ilya Sergeyevich Ye., a representative of the Department of Internal Affairs, told me calmly. Was that why they behaved so confidently?

Regarding the threats to me from an Asian-looking man, the OVD officer somehow reluctantly said that according to the law, a threat is what is confirmed by at least 2 witnesses and what is recorded on a video camera. In general, I was assured that “the villain would be found and talked to” with him that he had acted “wrong”. That's all.

...Recently I interviewed a retired police major general Mansur Yusupov. He assured me that all crimes are being solved now in hot pursuit, literally in a day. According to the general, this happens primarily because everything is viewed from video cameras, which are everywhere. As it turned out, they are far from everywhere and, apparently, the "villains" know about it - otherwise they would not have offered drugs and would not have threatened in a crowded place in broad daylight.

In order to warn the neighbors in the area, I described what happened on Facebook. I posted a photo of a person who offered me a spice at the entrance to Perekrestok. The photo was blurry, but the person in it was recognizable. People recognized my "Bruise", he chose the area in front of the store for a long time. I also learned from the comments that the space around and inside the Perekrestok is a kind of criminal zone, where incidents involving migrants have been systematically occurring for some time now. The police are either late for calls or do not come at all, reported in the comments.

Alessandra Ponomareva: “My mother and I, near the same Perekrestok store, encountered similar personalities. My mother raised such a cry that everyone began to stop. By the way, the guard then answered us in the same way. We called the militia right in front of these scumbags. We arrived when they had already left".

Yulia Subbotina: “In this very Perekrestok in broad daylight, right in front of my eyes, a company of such idle young non-Slavs pulled out a wallet from a bag in a cart, no one reacted to my cries and calls for help when they approached the guard and pointed their finger to the joyfully neighing thieves leaving the store, he did nothing from the word “absolutely”. I wrote a statement on the subject that a wallet with an abundance of all kinds of cards available there could be thrown. Nobody threw anything in, returned nothing, and the store didn't even apologize. What is there to talk about? I don't feel safe anywhere in our beautiful city".

Margarita Smirnova: “An Asian was trying to get into my car in the parking lot at this Perekrestok store, I barely managed to block the doors. My bag on the next seat, apparently, interested him".

In social networks, people warn each other: buyers are increasingly "grazing" at stores. Internet users write: be careful when shopping. In the parking lots of hypermarkets, groups of Asian people are seen looking out for "clients" who are wealthier, who "lead" these people and then rob them. Evaluated by appearance and by the quantity purchased. The new "coronavirus" bandits are, as a rule, guests from Central Asia who have been left without work after the construction stops and factories are closed. On the web they write: when shopping in a hypermarket, try to refuse large purchases, do not "shine" money and pay attention to all suspicious persons.

Why do I find out about this from social networks, and not from law enforcement officials?

It is clear that the space around the shops has recently turned into criminal "points" and has become a place of crime. Why is nobody patrolling these places? I tried to find out where our local police officer, whom none of the local residents had ever seen in recent years. We turned to our municipal deputy, Andrey Larichev. “There are no precinct, one works at two or three sites”, - he replied.

Indeed, according to sources in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, this department carried out all possible reductions back in the 2012 reform. Then the Ministry of Internal Affairs merged with the migration service and the State Drug Control Service, most of the employees were taken out of the state, and then reassigned to civilian positions with a decrease in salaries. People felt this reform right away: they had to wait longer for traffic police inspectors in case of an accident or police patrols after signals of hooliganism. If in 2008 40% of precinct officers had a higher legal education, now they are often ready to take them to the police after school. People don't want to work hard. Today, according to sources of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, there are 7 thousand people for one precinct in the city (in the countryside - 3 thousand)! At the same time, the control apparatus will never reduce itself.

Something in the work of law enforcement agencies went wrong if in the center of the capital, in a crowded place, during the day, a migrant, apparently driven to despair by lack of money, offered me a drug. And the representative of the law and order then assured that this man "did not want anything like that." What if I was replaced by a teenager who has pocket money and who cannot resist adults? Inhabitants are posting videos in the district groups, which clearly show how migrants are looking for drug "seals" near their houses. And there is no district police officer who would be interested; who could come, figure it out, start an investigation. People take on the role of investigators themselves. And surprisingly, they do it. One problem: law enforcement agencies do not care about this.