[gjm11]

Yeah! For instance, the homicide rate in Sweden is about 1 per 100k, whereas the rate in the USA is only 4.7 per 100k. (1.2 in the UK, 3.5 in Europe as a whole, 6.9 worldwide, 1.5 for Northern Europe, the subregion to which Sweden belongs.)

(Why look at homicide specifically? Because almost all cases get reported and the definition of homicide is fairly uncontroversial. With some other crimes -- rape is a particularly bad example -- definitions and reporting rates may vary wildly from country to country.)

Regrettably, how safe you feel is strongly influenced by what you see in the media, hear from your friends and family, etc., and unless you are exceptionally careful about your mental hygiene and pay a lot of attention to the relevant statistics the connection between how safe you feel and how safe you actually are is probably quite weak.

[eitally]

The problem is that looking at national numbers is not representative of most people's experience. For example, my "town" of 140,000 (Cary, NC) has only had one murder in the past five years and is currently listed as the safest city in the US with population between 100,000-500,000 (http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/10/29/3323828/cary-claims-l...). I personally mostly ignore the police but keep them in mind as a civic resource to leverage for answers about things I don't know how to find out any other way. In a small, safe city, calling the non-emergency line can be a useful source of information. Heck, the electric service powering my neighborhood is run by the neighboring town of Apex, and their off-hours emergency line redirects to the Apex police department, who presumably handle coordinating outage reports with the emergency techs and line workers. I'm not trying to claim things are Andy-Griffith-in-Mayberry, but it's certainly closer to that than the other extreme.

Besides actual skewing, you have localized situations where the relationship of the police to the citizens (and media) is personal, friendly, helpful, and generally constructive. For every "stop and frisk" type story there's a cop helping a stranded single mother change a tire, etc.