The streets of Dubai and pretty much any where in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam etc are orders of magnitude safer than UK, US, France, and other western European countries. Crime appears to be tolerated and reporting crimes doesn't do much, and statistics are managed in western Europe. If you get an opportunity to travel to China, do see for yourself how safe the cities feel, and how advanced (and safe) the public transport systems are.

>If society believes that crimes is utterly rampant despite it collapsing over the past few decades

After having to push for a crime to be actually registered and for others to even report small crimes because police has been so useless in Brussels I lost complete faith in this.

It also doesn't track with prisons overflowing more and more and damn near half of prisoners not having the nationality. It's safer now! But more and more people have experiences so keep your wallet in your front pocket. Watch out as a woman after dark. Avoid certain areas that your grandma described as posh and the trainstation you went to every day in your youth has stabbings now.

It feels like one of a bunch of fronts where we get some kind of hypernormalisation.

There is also plenty of social media and politicians telling you that because of some statistic that the knife wielding gang you yourself saw in the shopping centre in east London in fact does not exist