No, people fixate on free speech because no other right even makes sense if you don't have free expression. It's the foundation for our democratic society.
This said, European police generally gets away with a degree of prevarication that North Americans would find unconceivable. The US constitution enshrines the rights of individuals over government, in a way that no European country can match (as far as I know).
Not to be inflammatory, but North American police generally gets away with a degree of murder that Europeans find inconceivable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enfo...
Key quote: "The victims were unarmed in 1 in 6 (753;16%) fatal shootings."
https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/fatal-police-shootings-...
For balance, this 2018 gives lower numbers - hovering around 60ish per year. Although that is still significantly higher than 9.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/fatal-police-s...
> Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate.
and some are saying it's not working now[2]:
> For the Michalskis, all this was evidence that German society never truly reckoned with anti-Semitism after the war. Germany had restored synagogues and built memorials to the victims of the Holocaust, Wenzel said: “So for a lot of mainstream, middle-class people, that means: ‘We’ve done it. We dealt with anti-Semitism.’ But nobody really dealt with it within the families. The big, the hard, the painful questions were never asked.” In Wenzel’s view, the Muslim students who tormented his child were acting in an environment that was already suffused with native anti-Semitism. “A lot of conservative politicians now say, ‘Oh, the Muslims are importing their anti-Semitism to our wonderful, anti-anti-Semitic culture,’ ” he said. “That’s bull. They’re trying to politicize this.”
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-v...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/magazine/anti-semitism-ge...
Ultimately, those life necessities must be provided by oneself or by someone else, or some combination. Freedom of speech can allow for the best ways of providing these things to be selected. The alternative is that only the prevailing view is considered or approved, often leading to much worse provision of these necessities, including starvation (feudal systems, communism, warlords, etc.).