A metric of the difference between perception of security and victimisation rates.

Steven Richard Bishop,Rafael Prieto Curiel

doi:10.1186/s40163-016-0060-y

Abstract

A person’s perception of the level of security at a specific location depends on many factors, including past experiences in that location, the actual crime suffered by the population and more. Thus, when the individual perception that a location is insecure becomes the general rule is when the perception of security becomes an attribute of the region rather than the fears of some of its individuals, hence the relevance of aggregating individual perceptions of security into a single regional perception of security. Residents of two different regions, which have the same levels of crime, of a similar nature, may have different perceptions of the level of security. The perception of security associated with a particular place is relevant by itself but is much more useful when compared to the perception of other regions or when the perception changes over time and hence a ranking of the perception levels from different places would be a useful tool. A metric is suggested here to determine first the regional perception of security from a location and then to quantify its relationship with different victimisation rates. We quantify the relationship between the perception of security and different victimisation rates, based on data obtained from Mexico through victimisation surveys.

Highlights

The perception of security or insecurity might cause people to change their behaviour, for instance, by avoiding unnecessary risk when commuting back home Jackson and Gray (2010)
The Ranking Metric P(S, V (i)) can be computed using data for different types of crime and, since the ranking obtained by sorting the counties based on the victimisation rate of Robbery of a Person is different to the ranking of the other types of crime, we obtain different results for the P(S, V (i)) metric
This means that, for example, if we rank the 53 counties which we consider here based on their Murder rates and we compare that ranking to the perception of security ranking, they would display no relation

Summary

Introduction

The perception of security or insecurity might cause people to change their behaviour, for instance, by avoiding unnecessary risk when commuting back home Jackson and Gray (2010). People’s perception of the level of crime is formed by a number of factors where the first and most clear one is whether they were personally the actual victims of a crime: past victimisation almost doubles the odds ratio of a person having fear of crime Tseloni (2007). Past victimisation is not the only factor that contributes to a person fearing crime or perceiving a region as insecure and one of the main reasons is that, crime is a rare event. The International Crime Victims Survey shows that less than 3% of the population from the surveyed countries experiences a theft from person during the period of 1 year Tseloni et al (2010), and rates are low for other types of crime. More frequently a person experiences indirect victimisation via interactions with friends, neighbours or through media rather than experiencing actual crime Gilchrist et al (1998)

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