Brian Chau contrasts the relative peacefulness of China to what he perceives as the lawlessness of America:
I’m radicalized by how much of the daily problems Americans have could be solved by just two things: building housing and arresting criminals. Do those two things in American cities and no place in the world could ever compare to us again. Peter Thiel argues that it’s precisely because we’re so much better than everyone else at the other things that we can subsidize NIMBYs and criminals that would just destroy every other political order. By 2025, everybody knows this is true, but still very few people properly weight how much this is true.
I’m not sure where’s he getting his data. America is already heavily policed. It has among the best-armed police in the world, the longest sentences, and among the highest incarceration rates of any developed country. So to say criminals are not being arrested is demonstrably false.
Due to the ubiquity of smartphones and cameras everywhere, Americans are heavily surveilled. But unlike elsewhere in the world, there is much more responsiveness or attentiveness to said surveillance. This is why swatting is a ‘thing’ in America–it wouldn’t work in any other country , where the police either are much less responsive or are unarmed and nonmilitarized. Anyone can can report someone as suspicious and said individual will be required to identify his or her self despite putatively being innocent.
The issue instead is poor demographics (the so-called ’13-50 rule’) and a low-trust society. And also, how Americans have much less tolerance for crime despite having social conditions and demographics conducive to crime. I surmise, say, Europeans, Japanese, Canadians or Brazilians will tolerate more crime compared to Americans, in which in the latter the expectation is the police will respond to everything. It’s why the threat “I’ll call the cops” is taken seriously ‘here’, compared to Portugal, Mexico, or Spain in which the cops don’t come, are useless, or paid off.
In American politics, tough-on-crime proposals are very popular. Hence, why ‘defund the police’ was DOA, or how Dukakis’ entire campaign was destroyed by his perceived softness on crime. The Democratic party in the ’90s undid a string of losses in the ’70s and ’80s by pivoting to the ‘right’ on crime. Both Bill and Hillary Clinton rewrote the party playbook on crime.
True, Chinese and Singaporeans have tough policing, but it’s mostly in regard to a smaller cluster of crimes (e.g. drugs, the enforcement of Covid restrictions, or perceived political disloyalty/subversion). But unlike in America, it’s not like anyone with a phone can sic the police on someone else arbitrarily. This makes Americans especially well-behaved compared to elsewhere in the world (campus protests notwithstanding), which is even more remarkable given its bad demographics.
In America, at restaurants or stores, it’s not uncommon see miscellaneous rules posted (e.g. “no pets allowed except service animals”, “no outside food”, or “bathrooms are for customers only” etc.) These rules exist because the expectation is people will follow them–and they mostly do. By comparison, Australia has a reputation for being an outlaw country. Good luck posting these rules anywhere else. You’ll be told the foreign equivalent of ‘go fuck yourself’. Even the orderly Chinese are known for being rather slovenly, like an epidemic of using plane aisles and seats for bathrooms.
However, even these ‘high trust’ East Asian countries with their supposed superior demographics, still have a lot crime, such as South Korea’s inattentiveness to ‘digital sex crimes’. It’s just a different type of crime than the stereotypical street crime. There are entire niches in these countries of children being exploited as authorities do nothing. Like America and BLM in 2020, protests in Hong Kong raged from 2019-2020. Same for Korea. So Mr. Chau is correct in the sense that more can be done, but he needs to also have some perspective as to how much worse things are elsewhere.