BTW, for all the Holland bashers who take such comfort in loudly declaring how black and thick the sin is over there, guess which nation has a crime rate and a history of criminal excesses which make Holland's pale by comparison. That's right. America. We're number 1!!!
The Netherlands isn't unique. But the sort of progression in crime you're seeing in Europe can be mapped to a number of things, and two of those things are minority groups and restrictive laws on guns and self-defense. All in all, EU has a rising crime rate and a tightening of "free self defense", if I remember.
I also seem to remember seeing stats that the US crime rate is actually going down. And of course, it can be demonstrated that a high level of gun ownership linked to freedom to use guns for self defense actually reduces crime. One example which is frequently used in the social sciences is teh case of Kennesaw, where crime dropped by between 80-90 % when it became mandatory that each home have a gun.
You were misled by all those comparisons of American crime rates with those of the Northern European police states.
Actually, all things considered, virtually all parts of the United States would show up with roughly the European "average" (not counting Eastern Europe). A few parts of the US have far-above-average crime rates in all categories, and that raises the national average.
Now, when we dump Eastern Europe into the Northern and Western European statistics, Europe comes off very much worse than the US - kind of in between the US and Brazil.