Mapping fear of crime

Last month, I posted a graph and a blog about perceptions of safety. It was 13 years data from surveys of people who had contact with the police after being involved in traffic crashes. As part of a large ongoing survey process, we ask a few thousand people every year "How safe and secure do you feel in the neighborhood where you live?"

I used the data on overall perceptions of safety across time as a benchmark of a desired outcome in our proposed outcome-based budget presented to Mayor Chris Beutler last week. He asked an interesting question: "Can you break this down by area?" The answer was "Yes, we have these data broken out by five police team areas."

Back at the office, though, his question got me thinking about doing something at a finer level or granularity. A conversation with Jon Carlson, the Stronger Safer Neighborhoods coordinator, and Clair Lindquist, our Information Technology manager cooked up the idea. The result is this map (click to enlarge):


These are census block groups, assigned their color based on the average score of all the respondents within each are to the "How safe?" question: darkest red is least safe, darkest blue is most safe. Although there are some methodological issues I could bore you with (chiefly, the survey isn't random), I nonetheless think this is a pretty good indicator of where people feel safest in the neighborhood, and where they feel less safe.

The map is based on 2,517 responses for 2007 that could be geocoded to a specific location. The average scores within each census block group ranged from a high of 5 ("always safe and secure") to a low of 2.67 (between "usually not" and "sometimes safe and secure"). The overall mean score is pretty high, at 4.08, and keep in mind that of the total 1118 of the respondents were victims of crime within the recent past. Here's the statistics on the distribution:


I'm not aware of anyone who has mapped "fear of crime" like this before, but there may be other examples I don't know about. It's an intriguing use of this unique data set we collect. In the broadest sense, the map shows the same pattern that most crime displays in Lincoln: the people who responded to the survey are accurately reflecting the relative risk of crime, with a few exceptions. The area where perception of safety is lowest essentially overlays the city limits of Lincoln as it existed 60 years ago, further emphasizing the importance of taking care of the core.