A micro-place evaluation of the relationship between ‘risky places’ and risk perceptions

Abstract

The movement towards micro-place level assessments has contributed to the growing popularity of place-based police strategies. Complementing this movement, risk terrain modeling (RTM) is a methodological approach that identifies a micro-place’s vulnerability to crime by considering the combined spatial influences of physical features of the landscape linked to criminal behavior, along with past crime exposure. Given the growing popularity of this tool, studies that explore how RTM contributes to prior knowledge on crime risk are of great value. Our study is the first to expand upon previous applications of RTM by integrating the insights from the risk and decisions sciences to consider the perspective of potential crime victims. This type of evaluation can shed light on factors related to victimization and inform police strategies. To this end, our study utilizes a mixed-method approach to examine whether participants’ perceptions of risk determined from visual inspections of micro-places correspond to statistical (or objective) risk produced from a risk terrain model of robbery in downtown Detroit, Michigan. Participants were randomly assigned to receive a low, medium, or high risk micro-place, and asked to respond to a series of questions that measured their risk perceptions. Overall, participants’ perceptions of their risk of being robbed were the inverse of that predicted by our risk terrain model. Our qualitative analysis suggests that this disconnect can be largely explained by the presence of people and lighting. In a follow-up study, we alter the levels of people and lighting at low and high risk micro-places. We found that high levels of people an lighting play a dominant role in informing risk perceptions, superseding all other considerations. We discuss the implications of our findings for crime prevention, as well as our study’s limitations and directions for future research. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2021.2001672 .