^ Lot of food for thought there, RigaCrypto!
Based on your post and your username, are you from Latvia?
You got the general area right, I am from Ro mania. It is also an ex-soviet country but culturally it is more Latin than Slavic.
RigaCrypto is the King of Mushrooms who falls in love with a girl in a poem by Romanian poet Ion Barbu about the impossibility of romance between members of different biological kingdoms:
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/adelina.gschwandtner/Cryptorex.html
I ask because I've been to Estonia. Estonia seemed to fit your description: an modestly rich country with a heavy police presence that didn't do much. When I went to Russia, I was told it was a dangerous place where I could get robbed easily if I didn't know the right people. But it felt well-policed there. In fact, I had a feeling people there were scared of the police, and obeyed the law because of this. Russia felt kind of like China and Japan in that way: a place where violence is rare, but when it does happen, it's BRUTAL, and often hidden. All of these societies felt very different to me from Mexico, where people seem more scared of each other than of the state, and minor violent incidents seemed common.
The Soviet model is all about reaching for the stars and having your rocket blow up on the launch pad. This also applies to law enforcement, and the policing of ex-soviet countries, including mine, goes somewhat like this:
1. The laws give police as much power over the population as possible. ID cards, searches, rampant surveillance.
2. Cops are low-paid, stupid, corrupt hacks. Walking through my country you seldom see cops on the street, and often police cars cruise around listening to music or park under a tree to take a nap. If you need them they try to blow you off, and if they catch a criminal he can buy a get out of jail card if he has enough money. Generally they only move their fat asses off the chair to extort bribes or if a case makes it to the news. They often collude with criminal gangs for money.
3. Regular people despise and distrust them and avoid dealing with them as much as they can, having little hope of getting justice from the state, and fearing getting framed or extorted by the police. Criminals don't give a shit about police knowing that even if they may be caught, which is unlikely given their ineffectiveness, they can buy their way out.
4. The police uses the full weight of its powers only where its private interests are at stake: to extort money from criminals and legitimate businesses alike, to use prosecution as a political or economic weapon, to protect its image if subjected to media pressure to solve a crime.
In this regard they are much more similar to Mexico than Japan or China. You are dead wrong in this respect. Perhaps there are a lot of cops in the tourist areas in Moscow, but the crime rates are many times higher than in Western countries. The difference from Mexico is that the police does have great power, but uses it only to pursue its private interests or those of its political bosses.
The US feels something in between, to me. In fact, I think I've just unearthed one of the major characteristics of the American mind: wanting to have both a culture of law AND a culture of honor, all the good parts of both with all the bad parts of neither. Of course that's impossible.
Perfection is impossible, but IMO the US have a much better compromise than most of the world, which seems to swing between the extremes.
But I always felt a deeper moral queasiness about many (not nearly all) who choose life on the fringes, and now I know why: it's an 'every man for himself' outlook on life, which I don't relate to. I don't like not being able to trust a lot of the people I meet in 'fringe' settings.
Many honor cultures are not 'every man for himself'. As I said earlier, and as you can see in your own cities, people gang up. It's rather 'every man for the group, the group for each man'. Slavic peoples for example tend to have this kind of mentality. They are indeed mistrustful of outsiders or people they don't know but once they come to know someone and accept them in their group they tend to show total trust, loyalty and kindness to that person. They have a kind of black and white view on this, 'everything between us and nothing for others', they tend to polarize the world in 'us' and 'the others', keep mistrust and aggression for the outside world and feel in their group like in a family. Latin peoples also have collectivist mentalities. Maybe the 'every man for himself' is more characteristic of your white American culture and it is only brought into more relief at the fringes of society?