Police in the U.S. are in no sense surrounded by violence. The United States in 2014 is one of the safest, least dangerous societies the universe has ever known.
Only certain parts of certain cities[0]. It's almost entirely a result of the War On Drugs. In areas where drugs and gangs are a problem, the homicide rate is very high. In wealthy/safe parts of town, violent crime is not dramatically higher than the rest of the developed world.
Does San Francisco have a particularly large amount of "war on drugs" related gang violence? It's still 8x the homicide rate of London. And whether it's caused by the war on drugs or not, the fact remains police still have to deal with it.
> American cities are the most dangerous in the developed world, by a large margin.
Um, can you give a source on that? I rather doubt it's true, but probably depends on what you mean by "most dangerous". (And also perhaps "developed").
> For England and Wales, we added together three crime categories: "violence against the person, with injury," "most serious sexual crime," and "robbery." This produced a rate of 775 violent crimes per 100,000 people.
> For the United States, we used the FBI’s four standard categories for violent crime that Bier cited. We came up with a rate of 383 violent crimes per 100,000 people.
Sure, there's some overlap between assault, rape, and robbery. But the underlying point is sound. What makes a city dangerous includes one's overall chance of being victimized, not just the chance of being murdered. And if you look at those other categories you'll find the US is not leading the pack.
