| Mr Khan said: But Japan achieves that by giving their police scarily broad latitude, which the police do abuse (the abuse part being mainly against left-wing protestors, leaving the screaming ultranationalists alone but locking, say, feminists up for months at a time with no charges filed) |
I don't think that's why Japan has low crime, though. It's more likely attributable to its homogeneous population and the fact that it has a shame based culture rather than a guilt based one. People are much less likely to transgress against others if they feel a sense of commonality with them. Even moreso if they fear punishment in the form of social ostracization, which tends to nip bad behavior in the bud long before it metastatizes into full blown criminality. Compare the orderly way in which the Japanese behaved in the aftermath of the tsunami last year to the looting during Hurricane Katrina.
So that's why Japan and Sweden can both have low crime rates despite taking different approaches to dealing with criminals, but I'm a lot more confident in the ability of the Japanese model to produce similarly low crime rates in the future than I am that Sweden will succeed in doing so with its mollycoddling of criminals and suicidal multiculturalism.
