crime in third world countries vs crime in the US

a friend of mine, who is an immigrant from India, posted that claims like "the US has more crime than my third world country" are dubious. I agreed and ended up having way more to say than I thought, which I think may be insightful so I'm posting my reply here.

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the "crime in the US is worse than in my third world country" angle makes no fucking sense from a logistics perspective, provided that this is truly a third world country.

to stop crime you need equipment and manpower.

to have those things you need money.

this is a bit morbid for a lot of people to accept, and every time I mention this to stress the point it creeps people out, but: if you were driving down some remote country road at night (let's say 3:00am), saw a person walking along the side of the road, realized you were otherwise completely alone with no witnesses, shot that person in the head and kept driving — people do not realize how likely this is to go unsolved. my gut estimate is 90+% odds of no one ever catching you. I'm not exaggerating.

seriously, entertain the sequence of events in your head for a bit. even if another vehicle drove by your vehicle, what are they going to do - they'd have to see the body first to make a connection, and it would be potentially hours before anyone even *noticed* the body because remote roads are *very dark* and most drivers are trying to focus on seeing the road itself and staying on it. you could plausibly get a conviction if you had mutual GPS history, but good luck getting that when you don't even know whose GPS history to request. I guess Google could create a "GPSes also in proximity of dead person" list that is automatically forwarded to police based on an approximated time of death, but that still wouldn't be nearly enough for a conviction and tech companies if anything *avoid* implementing this kind of feature if they don't have to.

and this assumes they have a phone with GPS enabled. so if they don't, what are police going to do? start a checkpoint and get the plates of literally every driver and guess which one shot that person?

there are no cameras on country roads like that, and if you have no personal connections or witnesses or any other evidence the odds of a successful conviction are small. s m a l l.

no, really. they are small to a degree that should make *way more people* uncomfortable. forget statistics, because "successful" murders do not become statistics. they are not recorded as murders. the average person thinks they're likely to get murdered via tinder or some shit, and let me be extremely clear that this is the absolute dumbest shit you could believe. a GPS-tied messaging app with a digital paper trail is just about the opposite of what helps a criminal get away with crimes. logistically, you are safer using tinder in a big city than just about any other way of meeting a stranger. statistically, yes, a lot of homicides happen when the perpetrator knows the victim. logistically, you are *most secure* around people you know in an urban area and *least secure* around someone you've never met nor interacted with in a remote area.

this random-highway-murder scenario rarely happens because it's extraordinarily unnecessary risk and people, even sociopaths, rarely get off to killing innocent people — but my point is that this is sort of like how old people in the mid-2000s had no idea how vulnerable their computers were. the logic is similar: absolutely nothing was secured, 2fa didn't exist and way too many passwords were "password". you could walk into a home and fuck up some family's life in an afternoon - just, why would you want to?

it's unreal how much more physically secure a suburban neighborhood is simply by virtue of having cameras, witnesses, and people just walking around at night. the 1990s stranger danger mindset is *worse* for stopping crime because one of the most powerful tools we now have is the presence of ubiquitous recording technology in our phones, and I'm including GPS history here. going totally off the grid sounds great, but what a lot of people don't consider is just how vulnerable you are when you're *really really* off the grid.

and to tie this all back, some third world countries don't even *have* a grid to be off of. there's just no fucking way crime isn't going to be worse when you're at that level of development, it's logistically absurd. it might not be *reported*, so you won't have a statistic to refer to, but in terms of what is *physically possible* it's much worse, and is going to be.