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Delineating patterns of the spatial crime perception gap (SCPG)
Thu, September 12, 2:30 to 3:45pm, Faculty of Law, University of Bucharest, Floor: Basement, Room 0.10Abstract
The mismatch between crime perception and prevalence is defined as the crime perception gap (CPG), which may result in a lack of vigilance to risks or unnecessary avoidance behaviours and anxiety. However, only a few studies regarding CPG are from a place-based perspective, namely, looking at the spatial crime perception gap (SCPG), which concerns a finer spatial scale and includes the misperception of safe areas as unsafe areas and the misperception of unsafe areas as safe ones. To investigate SCPG, we developed a digital sketch map survey tool, where the participants mapped the areas they perceived as safe and unsafe as well as their daily route lines and then answered a series of questions regarding the factors that might affect their perception (http://cpg.amk.uni-obuda.hu/survey1.php). Survey data were collected from November 27, 2023, to February 20, 2024, including 656 responses from Budapest and Vienna. Besides the factors gathered from the survey (e.g., age, gender, and perception related to crime), the spatial characteristics of the study areas (collected from open street map) and the social-economical characteristics of the study areas (collected from census data) were also examined. The study delineated the SCPG and investigated its frequent patterns in the two cities. The scope was to outline which combinations of factors (e.g., attributes of people, physical environment, and social context) were more prone to mislabel safe areas as unsafe and vice versa. Besides the frequently considered factors, we focused on the influence of spatial and geographical factors referring to SCPG. A spatial constraint-based data mining method was proposed to explore the frequent patterns both on a city scale and on more minor scales in both cities. The results can assist further research and public policy interventions to focus on the most prominent problems regarding SCPG from a geographical perspective.