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