Perceived safety is influenced by all sorts of things, including personal experience (one’s own or as reported by others), neighborhood characteristics, secondhand accounts, temperament, news stories, opinion pieces, social media posts, pronouncements of politicians, etc. One’s sense of safety typically varies according to time, place and circumstance. For example, residents of large US cities often feel quite safe walking alone during the daytime but not at night - at least that’s what I found when researching perceptions of crime on the crowd-sourced site Numbeo, which also provided survey evidence that big city residents in the US generally feel less safe walking alone at night than big city residents in other developed countries. Check it out:
Numbeo classifies a safety score between 20 - 40 as low, meaning the residents of San Francisco, Chicago and Philadelphia feel unsafe when out alone at night. So what’s scary about walking alone at night? Well, for starters: the possibility of being robbed, attacked, threatened, harassed, or coming across people who are mentally ill, high on drugs, or committing a crime (e.g., car theft) - that is, people who could become violent with little provocation. You looking at me?
I’ve heard plenty of folks dismiss fears about public safety as hysteria or merely subjective. They might point out that crime rates are falling, or at least are much lower than in the 1980s. As if that’s a consideration when trying to decide whether to take a quick walk to the corner market.
Thing is, subjective and objective are not mutually exclusive. If they were, humans would not exist. Fear is a useful emotion. Without it, humans would not exist. What we perceive and feel sheds light on what is happening in the world. That doesn’t mean people don’t overreact or imagine things, only that it’s rarely “all in the head”. So what in the real world might perceptions of safety be tracking? I would guess local criminal activity, including property crimes.
On a hunch, I checked out the crime rates for the US cities in the safety perception chart. Here’s what I found:
Hmmm…suggestive but not fine-grained enough. More research is needed.