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Comment by look_lookatme | Hacker News Reader

    "There are plenty of large cities in the world that are safe or safer without also being police states."

Can you name one?

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Luxemburg, Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Zurich, and so on. And within the US there are plenty as well:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/26/safest-cities-ten-lifestyle...

and

http://www.mercer.com/press-releases/quality-of-living-repor...

New York doesn't even enter the top 50 when it comes to safety in the second table there.

And in Canada Toronto, Vancouver.

Tokyo

It's a stretch to say Tokyo is any less a police state than NYC given Japanese weapon laws and mass CCTV survellience.

> given Japanese weapon laws

Gun rights are not the be all and end all of freedom.

> mass CCTV survellience

I see absolutely nothing wrong with the use of CCTVs to monitor public places (or the use of them to monitor private places by the owners of those places). If civilians are allowed to record the police in public, then the police should be allowed to record civilians in public too.

You have an odd definition of police state, then. People control and unchecked intelligence gathering on citizens are essential to a repressive power apparatus.

The point of cobrausn is that NYC takes this too far while other large cities do not. I'd argue the safest cities in the same class as NYC are probably as much police states. At least in regards to violent crime. Petty crime rates are difficult to compare uniformly across cultures.

That's all well and good, but does that (CCTV surveillance) fall into what cobrausn quoted (Benjamin Fraklin?) above?

I guess it's a matter of perspective or opinion. Where do you/we draw the line?

Well that's easy then -- enact weapon laws in US instead of frisking random people but only _if_ you think that it is what is making Tokyo safe.

Since NYC has about the highest level of personal intrusion, I'd say all of the ones that have a lower crime rate.

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