Suggesting A Stochastic Measurement Tool for Determining Crime and Safety Indexes: Evidence from Turkey

Abstract

Crime is a phenomenon that disrupts the welfare and structure of society and has become an important problem in both developed and developing countries. In recent years, in parallel with the increasing rate of urbanization all over the world, there has also been a serious increase in crime rates. With the increase in crime rate, fear of crime has emerged among individual members of society. Fear of crime is the degree of anxiety an individual feels about the deterioration of the social structure. This degree of anxiety is expressed by crime and safety indexes today. In this study, a new measurement tool is proposed in order to eliminate the effects such as emotional preference, decision-making difficulty, etc. For this purpose, the Stochastic Multi-Criteria Acceptability Analysis-TRI (SMAA-TRI) method, in which the measurement can be made with interval and dispersed values, and the probability theory can be reflected as an effect on the decision analysis, has been utilized to measure the crime and safety indexes, determined by online survey up to now, because of the fact that the experts/participants had difficulties in expressing their preferences clearly during their evaluations. It was found that the index values obtained in the study are consistent with the results of the surveys conducted with thousands of people and that the SMAA-TRI method can be effectively used in determining the crime/safety indexes.