> If law enforcement is well-funded and works well - which isn't all that expensive or hard on a national scale - than what's the problem about extreme inequality?

Law enforcement in the US is insanely well funded. The NYPD, for example, has 5 billion dollars of budget for 50k employees and serves about 8.8 million citizens. In contrast, in the German state of Bavaria, a budget of 3.8 billion euros [1] supports 45.000 employees and 13 million people.

And yet, Bavaria has extremely low crime rates (the lowest in Germany with ~3700/100k people [2]), and the police stats could be even better if cops weren't forced to waste time on marijuana bullshit... while in New York, headlines referring to a lack of safety are more or less the norm [3].

The most interesting thing to me is: in absolute numbers, Bavaria had 508.000 crime reports filed in 2021 (cleaned up for cases of being in Germany unlawfully). New York reports 95.000 crimes in 2021... a sixth of the Bavarian absolute case count. What is the cause of this difference, and why is public perception of safety so immensely different?

[1] https://www.stmfh.bayern.de/haushalt/staatshaushalt_2019/hau... (page 5, table E, line "Polizei")

[2] https://www.tvmainfranken.de/auch-dank-wuerzburg-und-aschaff...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-is-nyc-safe-crime-st...

[4] https://www.newsweek.com/new-york-city-most-dangerous-year-c...