IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cen/wpaper/07-10.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Resident Perceptions of Crime: How Similar are They to Official Crime Rates?

Author

Listed:
  • John Hipp

Abstract

This study compares the relationship between official crime rates and residents� perceptions of crime in census tracts. Employing a unique dataset that links household level data from the American Housing Survey metro samples over a period of 25 years (1976-2000) with official crime rate data for census tracts in selected cities during selected years, this large sample provides considerable ability to generalize the findings. I find that residents� perception of crime is most strongly related to official rates of tract violent crime. Models simultaneously taking into account both violent and property crime consistently found that property crime actually has a negative effect on perceived crime. Among types of violent crime, the robbery rate is consistently related to higher levels of perceived crime in the tract, whereas it appears a structural shift occurred in the mid-1980s in which aggravated assault and murder rates now impact perceptions of crime, even when taking into account the robbery rate.

Suggested Citation

  • John Hipp, 2007. "Resident Perceptions of Crime: How Similar are They to Official Crime Rates?," Working Papers 07-10, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    • Handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:07-10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2007/CES-WP-07-10.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2007
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    perceived crime; official rates of crime; violent crime; neighborhoods; longitudinal; census tract;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:07-10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dawn Anderson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesgvus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.