With today's mobility and anonymity, not to mention wholsesale importation of cultural values inimical to our traditional ones, I'm not sure that any place, other than a well-run gated community, is safe to let your children outside of adult observation.
Given that, in my first neighborhood, the friendly guy who would give horse rides and let the kids use his pool turned into a sex offender, I am not gambling with my children's lives or innocence. I will just have to come up with some other method to teach self-sufficiency than letting my kids do a walkabout.
Part of the problem with this discussion is that you INSIST on saying that a child walking to school is simply wandering around. There is a great deal of difference in letting a child go somewhere specific and just letting them roam at will wherever. But, if you have to use such tactics to make your point, it indicates to me that you don’t really think you can make your point on its merits.
We send our children to school, and that’s as much a risk as letting them walk to school. Our oldest children were taught social studies at a middle school by what I thought was a creepy guy. Sure enough, he turned out to be obsessed with child porn. His girlfriend turned him in. I don’t know if he’s in jail now or not.