I for one hope kids will always have childhoods where they are allowed to play outside. I don't think it's more dangerous than it ever was, but I don't know how to gauge how a parent should decide. There's got to be a smart happy medium between paranoia and negligence. The guy walking may have been doing just that.
Actually I believe (don't have them handy) that the real crime statistics do in fact show that this sort of crime is actually going *down* and has for the last couple of decades at least. But *more* local stories are blasted to national news and people have the *perception* that this is happening more often. People are overreacting to a hyped fear, and the hyped fear is there to sell advertising time.
This doesn't mean that parents and kids should suddenly get stupid and go around taking candy from strangers. BUT I do think that -on balance- kids are worse off for not playing outside hour after hour with the other neighborhood kids, like we used to.