The Factors That Shape Perceptions of Crime

Bringing down crime levels alone may not be enough to make people feel safer. In fact, people’s perceptions of whether crime is up or down have not fully lined up with the actual crime trends for decades. Nationally, the crime rate — or number of crimes per 100,000 residents — fell nearly every year from 2005 to 2024. Despite this, the share of people each year saying that crime was up in the U.S. averaged about 69 percent across that period. In fact, with few exceptions, for every year from 1989-2024, the majority of the public has said the national crime rate was higher than it had been in the prior year.

Many factors influence people’s crime concerns, according to a new report from the Council on Criminal Justice.

Crime itself did influence views, but certain kinds of offenses weighed more heavily on people’s minds than others. For example, people were more likely to think crime was up if there was a rise in the property crime rate than if there was a rise in the violent crime rate. (Homicides were an exception, however, with a major rise or fall in killings seeming to shift public perception.)

And personal experiences were significant: Someone’s likelihood of being afraid to walk alone at night in their area, or of saying crime was up nationally or locally, rose heavily with each instance of someone in their household having been victimized in the past year.

The study also found that people’s political leanings, economic outlooks and neighborhood characteristics all correlated with how likely they were to say crime was up or that they’d be afraid to walk alone at night in their area. (Still, the study could not always say which factor caused the other, such as whether people approve more of Congress and the president when they think crime is down, or if having greater satisfaction with the federal government leads people to believe crime is down.)

• Political satisfaction and ideological leanings correlated with crime views. People who approve of the president’s performance were 55 percent less likely to say crime was up nationally, and 36 percent less likely to say it was up locally, for example.
• Whether someone was a Democrat or Republican had little impact on safety concerns after controlling for other factors; however, the more ideologically conservative respondents were more likely to fear walking alone at night.
• People who were more financially optimistic tended to be less afraid walking home at night and more likely to think crime was stable or dropping. Thinking it’s a good time to find a job was associated with a 30 percent greater likelihood of saying crime in the U.S. was down or the same as it was last year. People who expected to spend less money at Christmas this year were more likely to say crime was up nationally or locally and that they feared walking alone, compared to people expecting to spend the same or more.
• Personal and community demographics correlated with certain views, too. White non-Hispanic adults and people with religious affiliations tended to express more fear about walking home at night, for example. People who lived in communities with more poverty or with fewer minors also tended to be more afraid.
• Crime concerns being tied to wider social and economic factors isn’t a new phenomenon. Many of the associations the study found seem to be long-running. People’s approval of the president, level of political liberalism versus conservatism, and expectations of whether they’d have as much money to spend this Christmas had similar correlations with their perceptions of crime levels and fear of crime in 2009 as they did in 2023.