When people think of America as crime-ridden society, they tend to think of violent crime and not of pickpocketing or theft. However, the Interpol chart simply adds up all different instances of crime and therefore is not really a useful illustration of differences in crime level across countries. Unfortunately, the original article does not provide such more useful statistics.

And by the way, since rural areas have relatively low fraction of the total population, their crime level (low or high) makes little difference to the nationwide crime index. Maybe Alaska is virtually crime free, but so few people live there, it is almost irrelevant compared to the crime level in New York, LA, Detroit or Chicago  I agree there are some problems with drawing too many conclusions from a set of data like this. Because I've had to find sources to argue with people who are *sure* that the US has much higher total crime rates than Europe, I've looked pretty carefully at some relevant data in the past.

It's true, there is a stark contrast between crime levels in rural and urban areas in the US - rich suburbs often have just 10% of the violent crime rate and 20% of the property crime rate of the US average. The violent crime rate is considerably higher in the US as a whole than in Western Europe though; murder is maybe 3-4 times as common. (Interestingly, the suicide rate is way higher in W. Europe than the US, ~3 times as high.) Property crime rates are similar to the US in some W. Europe countries, and much higher in others (like England - maybe it'd help if they got rid of the gun ban?).

I think differential rates of crime reporting are also important in these numbers, especially when comparing third-world countries to the US and W Europe, but maybe also in the graph above. I don't know how it is in Denmark or England, but where I live in L.A., when someone steals your radio from your car, it's pretty hard to get a cop to write a police report for that (I mean they'll do it if you insist, but they'll try to dissuade you). When my car window got smashed, I didn't even think about calling the police. Once, my credit card number got stolen (apparently because my credit card statement was mailed to my old address and wasn't forwarded to my new one), and someone ordered a laptop with it, and had it delivered to my old address (same city). I discovered the charge after the laptop was shipped out, but before it was received. I called the police and told them they could intercept the shipment and arrest whoever received the package, but they were totally uninterested. They said they had "more important things to do".