Originally Posted by
Endus
With regards to the bold, it's necessarily combined with an unwillingness to consider and implement social reforms to address the underlying socioeconomic factors contributing to that increased criminality.
Western Europe and Canada and Australia don't all have lower rates of criminal offense, and particularly violent offense, by accident. And there's really nothing about the USA's circumstances that provide any insurmountable expectation, here.
And it isn't that those nations have stricter penalties for crime. Pretty typically, the opposite.
You need to be willing to discuss and implement policy to address underlying socioeconomic factors if you really want to address the problem of crime. This isn't a wild hypothesis; it's standard policy practice pretty much everywhere.
As for police culture in particular, there seems to have been a shift among American police forces from seeing themselves as serving and protecting their communities, to approaching crime as a "war" against the "enemy", said "enemy" being that same community, or at least sections of it that are indistinguishable from the rest.
In Canada, if I get pulled over by a cop while driving, he's going to saunter up, tap on my window, we'll have a conversation, he might give me a ticket, that's pretty much it. In the USA, the officer usually approaches weapon drawn, and is in many cases ordering the civilian to step out or show their hands or the like; it's presumed to be a violently hostile situation. That shift in approach matters. It means civilians are, quite rightly, afraid of the police, rather than seeing them as protectors. It means every interaction with an officer starts out negative, and is likely to get worse. It means that not only do the police see the people as their enemy, the people see the police as an enemy. Wrap that up and let it cook for 50 years, and you get the modern United States.