While Britons are fond of their police, Americans are generally scared of theirs, and go to great lengths to avoid coming to their attention. In 2006, I joined two constables patrolling a rough street in the London neighbourhood of Spitalfields. It shocked me to see a gang of kids shouting insults out of an upper-storey flat. The officers told me that was nothing — sometimes those kids threw things. In almost any neighbourhood in the US, the police would ensure that those kids would look back on having done that as the biggest mistake of their lives.
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