alt Hacker Newsi think politicians have seriously underestimated how much people don't like crime, and most people would take constant surveillance if it could actually improve feelings of safety in urban environments.
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Enforcing public safety effectively is one of the most pro-democracy things you can do. Otherwise people use democracy to elect public safety authoritarians like the wildly popular Bukele and Duterte.
It's been both normalized and suppressed. I'm old enough to remember not being to able to point out SF crime problems without being called a fascist. It's denial, it's perverse. Noah smith claims that our(USA) "solution" to it, besides just ignoring it, was basically giving up on cities and moving to suburbs.
Often what we criminalize is stupid.
Giving away food to homeless is a crime in many places. Bad capitalism.
Feelings of insecurity are manufactured relative to the danger posed:
https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...
I think it's also true that many people are wildly out of touch when they think about how "safe" their local municipality is.
The Bay Area is objectively safe, for example, yet I constantly run into neighbors in affluent neighborhoods who are afraid of venturing various places, letting their kids play outside or bike to school, or just generally exploring around.
I was at a BayFC match last weekend, for example, and ran into the family of an acquaintance from my elementary daughter's school. They have an 8th grader and are trying to get an intra-district transfer approved for high school so she doesn't have to go to the neighborhood school where a student brought a ghost gun on campus 3 years ago (he was arrested and successfully prosecuted, and no one was hurt)... and instead go to the local school where a handful of kids arranged their bodies in a swastika pattern on the football field (and photographed it!) several months ago. My point isn't that either of these crimes is acceptable, but that people tend to be irrational and ignorant of statistical analysis. Both of these are good schools with better than average student outcomes, but families consistently bring their own prejudices into analysis and it creates mild chaos & havoc across the system overall.