Is it that we in North America are closer to frontier notions of self-reliance?

A shared tradition which was reflected in those statistics about lynchings, which were by no means confined to the American South; though there is only one recorded lynching in Canada, of a 14 year old boy in British Columbia back in 1884.

One difference between the local constabulary and the Nazis is that the former operates within a framework, under which a trial with evidence has to precede the punishment. Lynch mobs don't work that way round. (Mind you that notion that a trial with evidence should precede the punishment is perhaps an old fashioned one in these days of Guantanamo Bay - but that is another matter).

A lot of those lynchings, perhaps most, will have taken place in local communities which hadn't previously never had a lynching. What they did have, though, was what can be called "frontier notions of self-reliance".