Hmm, I'm pretty liberal but there's definitely some pretty large "slum" or "ghetto" areas outside certain major cities in Europe. Generally they're predominately unassimilated refugees as far as I can tell. There doesn't seem to be much attempt at integration really. I am unsure about whether the police will go to them or whether or not they are more or less violent than American cities.
There are certain things the US does well, I think assimilation of immigrants is a really strong point for our culture here. Maybe it's because our culture has never really been much more than a gigantic mixing pot and is a lot younger. And maybe it's cause the population is so much larger and discordant than any single European nation.
>Brice De Ruyver, who spent eight years as security adviser to then-Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, said Molenbeek suffers from a cocktail of problems. “Youths are poorly educated, attracted by petty crime, have run-ins with police, and then there is a vicious circle, which leads to recruitment by radical groups,” he said, adding that the problems are now so serious, that it is hard to find police willing to bother tackling them.
>“We don’t officially have no-go zones in Brussels, but in reality, there are, and they are in Molenbeek.”
The US has the likes of Detroit, Chicago ("Chiraq"), etc., and we're discussing San Francisco now. In none of those places, however—not during the worst of the "Fort Apache" years in the South Bronx in the 1970s, or South Central during the crack epidemic in the 1980s—did the police refuse to enter them, and thankfully they are all better than they used to be. That doesn't mean that these European neighborhoods are worse than the South Bronx c. 1975, but it does mean that the police in those places have overtly or implicitly made a decision regarding them and their own safety.