Sorta yes and sorta no? You're factually correct; but practically missing the point a little bit. At my relative's place, which has many tall buildings around a hub, package delivery people leave all of the resident's packages on a very exposed and busy sidewalk. People walk by these packages all day and none of them are ever stolen. Could you imagine an Amazon delivery driver just leaving all of the packages for the Flatiron building on the sidewalk in NYC? It'd be a perverse Monty Python skit because the packages would all disappear before the delivery driver even left the area.
This sort of shared expectation of courtesy and safety is more common there; and it exists because of the surveillance state. I'm not advocating to live in a surveillance state; they're oppressive—the cons certainly outweigh the pros. There's no debating that. But the silver lining in that is borne of that cost is one that I think people there enjoy.
There are plenty of examples of this kind of thing in many places that don't have a surveillance state. Japan in large part is like this. It doesn't take a surveillance state to create an expectation of security.
This sort of shared expectation of courtesy and safety is more common there; and it exists because of the surveillance state. I'm not advocating to live in a surveillance state; they're oppressive—the cons certainly outweigh the pros. There's no debating that. But the silver lining in that is borne of that cost is one that I think people there enjoy.