I was recently reading an interesting report on hitch-hiking in Germany by the Federal Bureau of Police there (Bundeskriminalamt or BKA in German). They make a very strong distinction between short- and long-distance hitch-hikers. Of the two they say:
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In the year 1984 the (East) Berlin police recorded 9 murdered hitch-hikers of which 7 were short distance hitchers and 2 were long distance hitchers.
My first impression was kind of like, "wow, that's a lot of dead hitchers!" And it is. Before your alarm bells start ringing wildly and you go out and burn all your hitcher's guide books, though, I should put it into context. The authors are prudent enough to observe that:
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Between April 1981 and February 1988 the Berlin Police registered 59 crimes among short distance hitch-hikers in Berlin. Of these 53 occurred after 7 pm.
The message there of course is that hitching home from the pub or disco of a night is what kills most hitchers by a long way. But I don't want here to talk about risks just yet; there will be time for that later. Instead, I'd like to turn back to the first quote, taking note that only two out of nine dead hitchers were long-distance hitchers.
Well, there are two ways you might explain a discrepancy like that. Firstly, there may be many more short-distance hitchers than long-distance hitchers, and I have to confess that's a strong possibility. The authors don't enter into any speculation on the matter though and it remains a mystery for now.
The other source of such a discrepancy might be that long-distance hitch-hikers are less likely to be killed than short distance hitch-hikers. That too is a strong possibility and let me explain why, leaning on yet another quote from the BKA. They write:
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. . . the risk of falling victim to a crime while hitch-hiking is strongly defined by the process of interaction between the driver and passenger.
What are they saying here? Well, I don't want to present pages of extracts here, and you'll have to accept my representation, I guess. Essentially, they argue that hitch-hiking crimes (with the exception of pre-planned crimes) don't just happen to you, they are much rather the product of a process of interaction between the driver(s) and passenger(s) and each of the players has a hand in the game and a chance to control the outcome. They are describing a social game here, not a physical game. It has to do with a relationship (driver-passenger) and the evolution and management of that relationship.
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