Just found this, on an older thread:
People who've not been in many places in the U.S., and who have formed their opinions of American crime exclusively from the movies or their European state-controlled media, tend to be ignorant of another fact about American crime: it is highly region-dependent. Outside of several urban areas, crime in the U.S. is very low. 80% of American counties, for example, have no murders at all in a given year. Rates of violent crime generally in these areas are among the lowest ever recorded in the developed world, year after year. Britain, by contrast, is much more urbanized than the U.S., and so urban crime problems tend to be much more prevalent national problems.
This seems like a
very useful message. "The U.S." is a broad concept, and it can be misleading. It seems more useful, and more in the interests of safety, to narrow the concept. Some counties and other sub-areas in the U.S. are dangerous; others are way on the other side of the spectrum.
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The thread touches on some other interesting points as well,
http://bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=28038