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On the one hand, the pattern you are pointing to, where a knowledge-producer who provided a foundational block to a lot of peoples' worldview is, yet again, revealed to have simply made it up is deeply infuriating.
On the other hand, this seems to be the quote that's being questioned:
"There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock."
...And I find that description absolutely absurd when it is applied to our modern world. Maybe it was true in Doyle's time and place. It certainly is not true now.
It is true now in first-world Asian cities. It is sufficiently true sufficiently much of the time in most European cities that the average European urbanite would find the discussion above bizarre.
America (apart from NYC) is bad at policing, in the sense that they can't convert dollars spent on policing into crime reduction efficiently. One upshot of this is that Americans keep trying to move to places that don't need policing. Others are that America is unusually tolerant of vigilantism, and that America tends to substitute harsh punishments for effective policing in the same way and for the same reasons that medieval societies did. Americans are sufficiently used to this that they don't seem to find it a problem - probably because they think it is a universal fact about what is possible - and assume that there must be some reason why Singapore doesn't need policing. Singapore does need policing, and is effectively policed. London and Paris also need policing, are less effectively policed, and while safe by American standards have levels of crime that Singaporeans would find intolerable.
Given the absence of any political faction that wants policing to be expensive and useless, I suspect the reasons for this (which are not well understood) are structural rather than being a policy choice. This excellent substack by a retired cop blames the Bill of Rights.
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Right. The statement is false now, but the break isn't where the Kitty Genovese story places it -- witnesses will call the police, but they likely won't come in time (also true in Doyle's time) and the machinery of justice is both uncertain and slow.
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