Did they just admit they can't keep/make it safe?
(We need to name the evoking of Ben Franklin's "Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither" quote... _______'s Law).
It's the latter that's the problem. The former is merely a symptom of the latter, whether or not it is common.
Walking to get places is for criminals or poor people :-(
That's the way it was where I grew up on the East Coast (minus the Chinese and Indians), and the way it was around Harvard when I lived in Cambridge, and the way it is now here in Silicon Valley.
I'm not saying that no such places exist. You might be describing those few neighborhoods that are mostly populated by wealthy retirees whose kids have grown up and left, but this is hardly the general case in American suburbs.
Gilroy Outlets are separated by roads and it's really hard to cross from one bit to the other. Part of the reason it's so hard to cross is that drivers just aren't used to seeing pedestrians at the various crosswalks and they seem to forget the rules of the road - they sort of stop and wave you over. That's nice but dangerous because other cars are not stopping unless the lights tell them too.
Sand Diego had some similarly confusing bits where walking is fien and other bits where walking was for weirdos.
So, even though this is very likited experience, I sympathise with people who say that walking as a mode of transport is an oddity.
Of course, if you get far enough from a large city and low enough density, you'll get fewer and fewer people walking around, almost by definition, but then that's not where most American suburbanites live.
So even if you think your children are reasonably safe from people doing bad things to them; the risk of the government causing you all kinds of strife makes you reconsider letting them have an unsupervised walk.
But this article is may well be doing the same thing. What have we learned from this article? Two kids, walking down the street, were stopped by police, and a social services investigation was triggered. We get virtually no information about the broader context: does this sport of thing happen often, or was this an anomaly? What will be the outcome of the investigation be?
In short, just as the strife you see on the news can make a person think the world is more dangerous than it is, the isolated examples of our culture running off the rails can have the same distorting effect.