Rio de Janeiro tourist security
Most visitors seem to have at least some concern about how safe the city of Rio de Janeiro is.Difficulty with writing a guide is that I cannot guarantee that nothing bad will happen in a particular neighborhood.
Since I have been living here for a while I can, however, give you some general pointers, and I can say that Rio de Janeiro is much safer than what most tourists assumes.
First thing you have to keep in mind is that tourism is a very important part of Rio de Janeiro. Brazilians take pride in the fact that people are willing to visit their country, and in addition there are financially aspects to take into account. Because you are valuable for Rio de Janeiro plenty efforts are made to keep you safe. This starts already when arriving at the airport.
When you get to the airport you are probably carrying more valuables than you might feel comfortable with, not to mention your ID. Getting from there to your hotel or rental apartment are completely safe.
If you get into a yellow taxi they might want to charge extra for the trip but they will not rob you.
Most tourists stay in the southern zone of the city, like Ipanema or Copacabana. If you spend your whole vacation in this part of the city you will be staying in a very secure place and will probably not get into any problems if you only use common sense. If someone gets robbed it is usually by someone that was invited to the hotel room or apartment.
There are of course no guarantees, but you should be able to move around everywhere in south zone during daytime.
There is no advice that I will give you for the south zone of Rio de Janeiro that I would not give for tourists visiting Piccadilly Circus in London or Paris, and if you want to go for a walk during nighttime it is also not considered risky.
Unless you have proven that you are carrying huge amount of money ($1000s) you can relax in south zone and even get too much to drink.
You have a risk of getting pick pocketed however risk of someone trying armed robbery against you is extremely small. Risk of getting pick pocketed is also small but naturally a bit larger during crowded events like carnival.
Security advice is different when it comes to city center. You can stay in Rio for a long time without ever visiting city center. Rio de Janeiro does not have a particularly interesting history, so if you are in Rio just for a short time you can safely visit other places instead. If you wish to visit downtown anyway, this can be done with guide in combination with tours to other areas of Rio like in conjunction with a trip to Christ the Redeemer.
City Center of Rio de Janeiro
For someone who wishes to visit the city center on their own there are a few more rules. Center of Rio de Janeiro is a place of commerce. In other words you can safely walk the streets and visit the places of interest during daytime in weekdays.
Visiting city center by foot in weekend evenings is not a good idea. Early Saturday is ok, but avoid Saturday evenings and Sundays. For the most comfort take the metro there during daytime in weekdays. Best station to exit is Cinelandia, even though it is quite full of homeless people. If wish to visit Lapa to experience the more local nightlife on Thursday to Saturday evenings you should take taxi there and taxi back home. While in Lapa after nightfall you should stay in the streets of Riachuelo and Mem de Sá and make sure you do not wander off. On Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays you can visit Lapa by taking the metro to Cinelandia and just follow the crowd.
As a personal experience my credit card got copied in Lapa once (believe I know in what store, but cannot be sure), do not know if this is something common. Guess the police do not know either because they did not want to take a report on it unless I got information on where they took out the money and my bank did not wanted to provide that information (bank covered everything).
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