Impacts of Violent Crime and Neighborhood Structure on Trusting Your Neighbors

Abstract

The current work investigated impacts of local violent crime rates on residents’ willingness to trust neighbors. Crime has been thought to “atomize” community. Many works have considered impacts of crime on local social climate or vice versa. A smaller number of works have linked crime with general judgments about trustworthiness, but there has been little work on crime and trust of neighbors. 2002 survey data of 4,133 Philadelphia residents in 45 neighborhoods were combined with census and reported crime data to address this question. Multilevel, multinomial logit models confirmed that residents’ willingness to trust their neighbors varied significantly across neighborhoods for two response category contrasts: strongly agreeing or agreeing neighbors were trustworthy, each relative to strongly disagreeing. As expected, residents in neighborhoods with higher crime rates judged their neighbors as less dependable, even after controlling for local participation. Neighborhood crime and status impacts both depended on the contrast considered and on how status and crime were disentangled. Results align with some earlier works showing contingent effects of crime on ties, or contingent effects of ties on crime. Results extend earlier works by simultaneously focusing on one critical and central assessment of neighbors, showing important differences across response categories, and simultaneously finding extraneighborhood impacts.