I'm somehow always a bit worried when travelling to the US and reading these stories just makes it worse. I don't know what the risk for a visitor is in reality

I'm somehow always a bit worried when travelling to the US and reading these stories just makes it worse. I don't know what the risk for a visitor is in reality. These cases seem to happen out of nowhere. I don't have any reason to be arrested, really, and I'll probably be fine absolutely most of the time but if something should happen and I happened to be around I'm, as a foreigner, in a very weak position to understand what's going on. I should probably read a couple of books on US legal system and how things work there but the need for doing so would usually arise from having to travel to some totalitarian developing country. In certain countries, you should expect to have some money as it might be customary to bribe the police officer or other officials but once that's settled things generally unfold fine from there. It seems that in the US, you should expect to have lots of money as it might be customary to bribe the court yet things can generally get quite uncertain from there, based on what I've read. It's hard to evaluate the risk, though: the probability is rather low but the impact can be devastating. I get the feeling that if only you're a "regular Joe", ideally white (or fit in the "good" ethnicity of your city), you don't stand out of others, and you have money, you're likely to be fine. The further you deviate from that the more unpredictable things can get.