Crime Is Down and so Is Fear? Analyzing Resident Perceptions of Neighborhood Unsafety in Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Abstract

There is little research on how resident perceptions of neighborhood unsafety develop over time and how changes in these perceptions relate to decreasing crime rates. The present study analyzes and explains trends in perceived neighborhood unsafety within the Dutch city of Rotterdam, based on survey and register data collected in the years 2003–2017 (N = 148.344, 62 neighborhoods). In addition to crime, we also assess to what extent (changes in) the economic status, level of ethnic heterogeneity, degree of residential mobility, and amount of disorder in the neighborhood play a role in how safe or unsafe inhabitants have felt in a 15-year period. We find that unsafety levels steadily declined in the years up to 2007. This decrease was best explained by changes regarding the economic status, victimization rates and disorder level of neighborhoods. After a sudden increase in feelings of unsafety between 2007 and 2008, explained by the shift towards using more self-administrated questionnaires, fear levels stabilized during the remaining years (2008–2017) although recorded crime levels continued to decrease in this period.

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“…In contrast, more recent literature demonstrated that fear levels do follow crime trends ( Smeets and Foekens, 2018 ), which is coherent with the results of this paper. The drop in feelings of unsafety was underlined by Pohl and Buil-Gil (2023) , who analyzed the decrease in the worry about crime just before the pandemic, or Glas (2023) , who operationalized unsafety with the fear of crime and linked the same trend to changes in the economic status and a true decrease in crime rates.…”

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“…For example, perceptions of urban disorder appear to be unrelated to observed disorder and instead driven by other cues, such as demographic composition of the neighborhood and racial biases (Janssen et al, 2022). In the same vein perceptions of unsafety stabilize even when crime rates are going down (Glas, 2021). However, although this association is not perfect, it is generally accepted that fear of crime is related to crime rates (Pearson et al, 2015).…”