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Comment by bwanab | Hacker News Reader

Having lived with young kids in Switzerland, I agree, but one also has to add that there are very few places your kids won't be safe in Switzerland. Most places you could leave your bike unlocked and have a reasonable expectation it would still be there when you came for it.

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Aside from getting run over by a car, are there that many places a kid isn’t safe in the US? Yes, there are rough neighborhoods - I’m asking about normal suburbs and white collar neighborhoods?

The school drop off line is absurd in my neighborhood. The school complex (K-12) is on a shared property. It’s less than a mile from my house. No road crossings at all to get there. Yet the kids bused or driven.

Speaking from personal experience I would do that more for the local busybodies than out of any real fear for my child's safety. There are a ton of older people in our area who never had kids but feel like they can police how you parent.

Is it more disturbing to sacrifice a child's development by isolating them 1) due to irrational fears, or 2) merely to satisfy the local busybodies?

Well when the busybodies spread rumors about you you end up isolated either way.

> , are there that many places a kid isn’t safe in the US?

It depends on what you mean by "safe".

In most of US "normal suburbs", your kid isn't likely to get like, murdered. But if they leave a bike unlocked and unattended for a few hours (the way the parent poster describes Switzerland), then yeah, it's going to vanish, even in many "nice" US neighborhoods.

The "unlocked kids bike" is a pretty good way of testing a neighborhood over time.

Maybe, but that shouldn’t preclude the kid walking places instead of being driven.

Is crime low because everyone is so well off it’s pointless to steal a bike? Or more social norms and culture like Japan?

It's because the little crime there is will be taken very seriously. Police will investigate your missing bike. And yes, culture and social expectations.

> Police will investigate your missing bike.

They most certainly will not. They won't generally investigate property-related theft and crimes, including non-violent home break-ins. They just issue an incident report for your insurance and that's the end of it.

That‘s a good one. They write down your frame number and tell you they get back to you. Then you never hear from them again.

They definitely won’t investigate your missing bike unless it is a really valuable one. If you would have any experience living in the country you would know that’s absolutely not true. We also don’t have a single police, it’s handled at the canton level and they can be drastically different.

Well, it depends of course, but in general police presence is way more attentive to "smaller" issues than in neighboring countries. As for experience, I have been living in CH for almost 20 years now.

Crime seems sufficiently low that police have bandwidth to deal with more petty crimes. However I would not expect an unlocked bicycle to be safe, there is still quite a bit of bike theft. But I would expect a simple lock to be enough, most of the time.

Similarly with motorbikes: steering lock seems to be enough, judging by the lack of extra security I see on other bikes.

Switzerland is very expensive. A stolen bike won’t bring you much money by local standards (and the crime will be investigated by police).

I spent some time in Zurich and at this point it's not measurably more expensive than SF and parts of south bay yet here we are

Not that much more than NYC or SF to be honest, I've traveled to all three in the past year and spent more money in NYC than I did in Geneva for the same amount of time (around 4 days in each).

>and the crime will be investigated by police

nope.

Well, I reported my stolen scooter to the police. They haven’t found it, but the case is open! And they helped me in other cases.

Low crime and being well off, along with good social norms and culture, likely all go together and come as a collection of traits of certain groups of people.

Its just not true. Bikes get stolen a lot even when they are locked. But There is not a lot of violent crime in Switzerland, so you can walk around everywhere without any worries.

Adults bikes get stolen, a lot. But kids bike almost never because there is no money to be made selling kids bikes.[1]

[1] I mean the regular department store kids bike, not some kids specific high end mountain bike some people would buy for their kids.

Not everyone is well off in Switzerland, the country is relatively rich and lots of rich people moved there but the wealth isn’t distributed equally among the population. It’s not necessarily as visible as other countries due to the low density.

The vast majority of people couldn’t afford to live in Zurich or Geneva.

> Is crime low because everyone is so well off

Apparently it's a controversial statement for some folks, but yes, having good material conditions basically makes it stupid to commit crimes.

Why would you risk your life or your freedom for some quick bucks when you can enjoy social comfort and 5 weeks of guaranteed vacations per year?

You can thank trade unions for that lifestyle. They fought very hard until very recently. Nowadays it's getting tougher for them and for all of us for sure...

Switzerland is seeing a huge increase in violent crime. 16.6% between 2021 and 2022. Serious bodily harm and rape were the crimes that saw the biggest rises, increasing by 17% and 14.5%, respectively.[0]

- [0]: https://www.iamexpat.ch/expat-info/swiss-expat-news/most-vio...

> Switzerland is seeing a huge increase in violent crime. 16.6% between 2021 and 2022.

2020-2023 data should be mostly ignored, especially by news websites trying to generate clickbait content.

It's like when UK politicians gloated how they reduced shoplifting/burglary rates.

Yes, it was lockdown with shops closed and people sitting at home, of course rates went down.

Same thing here, there's no point drawing conclusion in data between 2021 (lockdowns) and 2022.

> The FSO noted [...] crime rates have shot back up to 2019 levels.

It's because immigration is increasing, and more non-Swiss are in the country.

HN isn’t the place for xenophobic, racists comments like this one

But the increase is attributable largely to the recent immigrant population.

Some cultures think it's perfectly fine to assault and rape women. Those cultures are bad and good cultures are suffering the consequences by inviting them in.

I'll note you didn't say "that's not true" because you know it is.

You should be ashamed of yourself for wanting to oppose discourse that speaks truth, in service to upholding some religious incantation denouncing those that discuss truth as "racist".

Don't you care whatsoever about the quality of life degradation for people living in these countries that are suffering with this problem? No, you care more about words and labels.

They can't care. If they did, they'd lose membership in every group that they're a part of. It would literally cost them everything. Even if they were affected personally, they won't give up this ideology because without it, their entire worldview crumbles.

Are you from Switzerland? Do you have knowledge of the country from anything else than online content? Looking at your history the answer seems to be no. I was born there and lived there for 24 years of my life, I know and care deeply about the country and its culture. Your comment was obviously not true, not that you actually care about it. It was also xenophobic and racist, with no substantive content, there isn’t anything to respond in it.

>I know and care deeply about the country and its culture.

Then why would you want foreign immigrants from places with a drastically different culture coming into your country? It makes no sense.

>obviously not true

I know many Swiss people, what they say is very different from you. In say the last 5 years the composition and quantity is markedly different. I've been to Switzerland 3 times, it is a uniquely beautiful and wonderful nation. It would sadden me if it changed. The Swiss have made it a great place.

>anything else than online content

Just because it is online does not mean it's untrue. In many different European nations, immigrants from certain places are committing crimes at much higher rate than native Europeans. I don't care what label you apply to this fact describing truth.

Ok, so you know absolutely nothing about the country and its cultures. Switzerland is an extremely fragmented country with 26 cantons, 4 official languages. The country is diverse, you won’t get a unified view and understanding of it by speaking to a few people. We identify with our regions more than with the country itself. The country has almost no resources and developed itself thanks to massive immigration waves. The fear of foreigners is a pretty clear bottleneck to the development of the whole area.

When I was growing up the far right was screaming about Albanian and Kosovar coming to the country to steal and destroy it. Of course that was complete rubbish and the country continued to develop extremely well. Before it was against Portuguese, Spanish, Italian people. Since the 2000s the focus has been towards Muslims and black people, which is obviously what you’re hinting to and seem too afraid to express. The discourse is the same. It’s just standard populism: vote Swiss’ People party to be protected from all those tribal uneducated bad foreigners who don’t fit in a 1900s picture of the country!

The truth is that the traditional view of the country you’re defending is a modern lie that never existed.

I will stop the engagement here, there is no point in exchanging with someone who is too much of a coward to truthfully express what they mean - likely because you know it’s xenophobic and racist, and cannot recognize their ignorance on a topic.

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