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My girlfriend is German and lives in Berlin. I just spent 3 months there. She lives in Kreuzburg, it's a poor area of Berlin. You get the winos, drunks, and
by yequalsx 16y ago
My girlfriend is German and lives in Berlin. I just spent 3 months there. She lives in Kreuzburg, it's a poor area of Berlin. You get the winos, drunks, and junkies. There's a fair share of street people with mental issues. But one thing you don't get is fear. It's a safe place by American standards. You also don't see many cops. There are way more cops in American cities. This suggests that it really is fundamentally safer.
I don't know why this is so. Maybe it's because of the social safety system, maybe it's because of culture or a combination of both. But German elites want Germany to emulate America. The social system is under attack there and the government wants to embrace American style corporatism. It's ironic that while it is better there those in power want to make it more like America.
- bokonist 16y agoThe U.S. has always had a ~10X higher crime rate than the western European countries, going back over a hundred years. The best explanation of why comes from a writer in 1920, Raymond Fosdick who spent years studying both the American and various European systems. Read his book online for free: http://books.google.com/books?id=NGBLAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=crime+in+america+and+the+police&source=bl&ots=zxG6FtL166&sig=Rlb7gr3KGJ_c1b23YupR9BfwSVs&hl=en&ei=1_2ETLnxCYO88gauhYSDAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=NGBLAAAAMAAJ&printsec=f... His arguments are backed up by almost everything else I've read on the matter, and they still remain as true today as they were in the 1910's.
- edderly 16y agoI can't claim to have read Fosdick, but I see an immediate problem in that demographics have changed through out Europe. Take for example London has a foreign population now of greater than 30%. At the same time there are areas in the north of England which remain overwhelmingly white which have deep social issues.
- bokonist 16y agoLondon is also much less safe than it was 100 years ago. Actually, all of England is much less safe. A good treatment of the subject is Peter Hitchen's A Brief History of Crime http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Crime-Peter-Hitchens/dp/1843541483 http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Crime-Peter-Hitchens/dp/...
- hga 16y agoEngland may be something of a special case; as I understand it, from around 1,300 until sometime post-WWII it had a steadily declining crime rate. One or more things prior to the more recent wave or waves of immigration changed that. (I have my own thoughts on that, starting with e.g. the 1950's court decision(s) that effectively eliminated the right of self-defense, but that's for another discussion.)