I was with you until you said this doesn’t happen in other countries. There are some countries (e.g. Japan, Singapore) where it doesn’t happen, but it certainly does in major European cities. There’s you way you can say London, for example, is that different from New York.
London in particular is a great example because the two cities are similar in many ways. London for sure has its share of junkies and hooligans, and I even hear people complaining about it using almost word for word identical language, but the magnitude and pervasiveness is completely different. Especially riding the tube vs the NYC subway is a completely different experience most of the time and I don’t get the feeling in London that the inmates are running the asylum that NYC has gotten over the past few years. Same story walking the streets in the west end vs lower Manhattan, sure you’ve got the phone snatchers on e-bikes now that constantly make the news and there’s random deranged people, but it’s less common for one, but more importantly it hasn’t crossed the threshold where it’s been normalized and people are desensitized, so even in these cases people are less brazen, less aggressive. London today feels more like NYC did in 2019, before it passed the tipping point. Even there I think its a lot more tranquil than NYC was back then, but at least the city hadn’t been surrendered as it is now.
