> How does Minnesota's system work for me as a member of the public? I can walk all over my neighborhood feeling perfectly safe, and even my children can freely go out in public, walking for a radius of a mile or biking for a radius of four or five miles in any direction, without risk or fear.
I'm genuinely curious, I'm honestly not trolling, is this state of affairs remarkable in the US these days? Is this really an accomplishment? Is it worse in general?
It's not remarkable in most small towns and rural areas. Big cities are more of a mixed bag - there is always "the bad part of town" with very high crime rates, but the middle-class suburbs (where a great many HN users live) usually have rates of violent crime comparable to western Europe. Naturally the prison population comes almost entirely from those bad neighborhoods, and so our insane incarceration rates are mostly invisible to the suburb dwellers.
I'm genuinely curious, I'm honestly not trolling, is this state of affairs remarkable in the US these days? Is this really an accomplishment? Is it worse in general?