A lot has changed. Foreigners no longer have this "superiority".
> telling a class in even the safest parts of the United States
It is just histeria, look at recent trend of "men vs bear in forest" . Many parts of US are totally safe, the worst part are dogs, car accidents and voluntary drug ingestion!
According to Washington Post [1], the US police killed 1,162 people in 2023, which is about 0.3 per every 100,000 Americans.
I.e., an American is more likely to be killed by a cop than a Japanese person is likely to be killed by a murderer.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
It's still a long ago (2015 in my case) but it happened the exact same thing in Nara to my wife and me.