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Resident Perceptions of Crime: How Similar are They to Official Crime Rates?

March 2007

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The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Resident Perceptions of Crime: How Similar are They to Official Crime Rates?' are listed below in order of similarity.

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  Whose Neighborhood Now? Gentrification and Community Life in Low-Income Urban Neighborhoods
  

  June 2024

  Authors: AJ Golio

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  CES-24-29

  Gentrification is a process of urban change that has wide-ranging social and political impacts, but previous studies provide divergent findings. Does gentrification leave residents feeling alienated, or does it bolster neighborhood social satisfaction? Politically, does urban change mobilize residents, or leave them disengaged? I assess a national, cross-sectional sample of about 17,500 respondents in lower-income urban neighborhoods, and use a structural equation modeling approach to model six latent variables pertaining to local social environment and political participation. Amongst the full sample, gentrification has a positive association with all six factors. However, this relationship depends upon respondents' level of income, length of residency, and racial identity. White residents and those with shorter length of residency report higher levels of social cohesion as gentrification increases, but there is no such association amongst racial minority groups and longer-term residents. This finding aligns with a perspective on gentrification as a racialized process, and demonstrates that gentrification-related amenities primarily serve the interests of white residents and newcomers. All groups, however, are more likely to participate in neighborhood politics as gentrification increases, drawing attention to the agency of local residents as they attempt to influence processes of urban change.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  When and Why Does Nonresponse Occur? Comparing the Determinants of Initial Unit Nonresponse and Panel Attrition
  

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  Authors: Tiffany S. Neman

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  Though unit nonresponse threatens data quality in both cross-sectional and panel surveys, little is understood about how initial nonresponse and later panel attrition may be theoretically or empirically distinct phenomena. This study advances current knowledge of the determinants of both unit nonresponse and panel attrition within the context of the U.S. Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) panel survey, which I link with high-quality federal administrative records, paradata, and geographic data. By exploiting the SIPP's interpenetrated sampling design and relying on cross-classified random effects modeling, this study quantifies the relative effects of sample household, interviewer, and place characteristics on baseline nonresponse and later attrition, addressing a critical gap in the literature. Given the reliance on successful record linkages between survey sample households and federal administrative data in the nonresponse research, this study also undertakes an explicitly spatial analysis of the place-based characteristics associated with successful record linkages in the U.S.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Federal-Local Partnerships on Immigration Law Enforcement: Are the Policies Effective in Reducing Violent Victimization?
  

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  Authors: Eric P. Baumer, Min Xie

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  CES-23-18

  Our understanding of how immigration enforcement impacts crime has been informed by data from the police crime statistics. This study complements existing research by using longitudinal multilevel data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) for 2005-2014 to simultaneously assess the impact of the three predominant immigration policies that have been implemented in local communities. The results indicate that the activation of Secure Communities and 287(g) task force agreements significantly increased violent victimization risk among Latinos, whereas they showed no evident impact on victimization risk among non-Latino Whites and Blacks. The activation of 287(g) jail enforcement agreements and anti-detainer policies had no significant impact on violent victimization risk during the period.Contrary to their stated purpose of enhancing public safety, our results show that the Secure Communities program and 287(g) task force agreements did not reduce crime, but instead eroded security in American communities by increasing the likelihood that Latinos experienced violent victimization. These results support the Federal government's ending of 287(g) task force agreements and its more recent move to end the Secure Communities program. Additionally, the results of our study add to the evidence challenging claims that anti-detainer policies pose a threat to violence risk.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Has Falling Crime Invited Gentrification?
  

  January 2017

  Authors: Ingrid Gould Ellen, Keren Mertens Horn, Davin Reed

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  CES-17-27

  Over the past two decades, crime has fallen dramatically in cities in the United States. We explore whether, in the face of falling central city crime rates, households with more resources and options were more likely to move into central cities overall and more particularly into low income and/or majority minority central city neighborhoods. We use confidential, geocoded versions of the 1990 and 2000 Decennial Census and the 2010, 2011, and 2012 American Community Survey to track moves to different neighborhoods in 244 Core Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs) and their largest central cities. Our dataset includes over four million household moves across the three time periods. We focus on three household types typically considered gentrifiers: high-income, college-educated, and white households. We find that declines in city crime are associated with increases in the probability that highincome and college-educated households choose to move into central city neighborhoods, including low-income and majority minority central city neighborhoods. Moreover, we find little evidence that households with lower incomes and without college degrees are more likely to move to cities when violent crime falls. These results hold during the 1990s as well as the 2000s and for the 100 largest metropolitan areas, where crime declines were greatest. There is weaker evidence that white households are disproportionately drawn to cities as crime falls in the 100 largest metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2010.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  How Low Income Neighborhoods Change: Entry, Exit and Enhancement
  

  September 2010

  Authors: Ingrid Gould Ellen, Katherine M. O'Regan

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  CES-10-19

  This paper examines whether the economic gains experienced by low-income neighborhoods in the 1990s followed patterns of classic gentrification (as frequently assumed) ' that is, through the in migration of higher income white, households, and out migration (or displacement) of the original lower income, usually minority residents, spurring racial transition in the process. Using the internal Census version of the American Housing Survey, we find no evidence of heightened displacement, even among the most vulnerable, original residents. While the entrance of higher income households was an important source of income gains, original residents also experienced differential gains in income, and reported greater increases in their satisfaction with their neighborhood than found in other low-income neighborhoods. Finally, gaining neighborhoods were able to avoid the losses of white households that non-gaining low income tracts experienced, and were thereby more racially stable rather than less.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Neighborhood Effects on High-School Drop-Out Rates and Teenage Childbearing: Tests for Non-Linearities, Race-Specific Effects, Interactions with Family Characteristics, and Endogenous Causation using Geocoded California Census Microdata
  

  May 2008

  Authors: Rhiannon Patterson

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-08-12

  This paper examines the relationship between neighborhood characteristics and the likelihood that a youth will drop out of high school or have a child during the teenage years. Using a dataset that is uniquely wellsuited to the study of neighborhood effects, the impact of the neighborhood poverty rate and the percentage of professionals in the local labor force on youth outcomes in California is examined. The first section of the paper tests for non-linearities in the relationship between indicators of neighborhood distress and youth outcomes. Some evidence is found for a break-point at low levels of poverty. Suggestive but inconclusive evidence is also found for a second breakpoint, at very high levels of poverty, for African-American youth only. The second part of the paper examines interactions between family background characteristics and neighborhood effects, and finds that White youth are most sensitive to neighborhood effects, while the effect of parental education depends on the neighborhood measure in question. Among White youth, those from single-parent households are more vulnerable to neighborhood conditions. The third section of the paper finds that for White youth and Hispanic youth, the relevant neighborhood variables appear to be the own-race poverty rates and the percentage of professionals of youths' own race. The final section of the paper estimates a tract-fixed effects model, using the results from the third section to define multiple relevant poverty rates within each tract. The fixed-effects specification suggests that for White and Hispanic youth in California, neighborhood effects remain significant, even with the inclusion of controls for any unobserved family and neighborhood characteristics that are constant within tracts.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Who are the people in my neighborhood? The 'contextual fallacy' of measuring individual context with census geographies
  

  February 2018

  Authors: David C. Folch, Seth E. Spielman, Christopher S. Fowler, Nathan Frey, Nicholas Nagle

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-18-11

  Scholars deploy census-based measures of neighborhood context throughout the social sciences and epidemiology. Decades of research confirm that variation in how individuals are aggregated into geographic units to create variables that control for social, economic or political contexts can dramatically alter analyses. While most researchers are aware of the problem, they have lacked the tools to determine its magnitude in the literature and in their own projects. By using confidential access to the complete 2010 U.S. Decennial Census, we are able to construct'for all persons in the US'individual-specific contexts, which we group according to the Census-assigned block, block group, and tract. We compare these individual-specific measures to the published statistics at each scale, and we then determine the magnitude of variation in context for an individual with respect to the published measures using a simple statistic, the standard deviation of individual context (SDIC). For three key measures (percent Black, percent Hispanic, and Entropy'a measure of ethno-racial diversity), we find that block-level Census statistics frequently do not capture the actual context of individuals within them. More problematic, we uncover systematic spatial patterns in the contextual variables at all three scales. Finally, we show that within-unit variation is greater in some parts of the country than in others. We publish county-level estimates of the SDIC statistics that enable scholars to assess whether mis-specification in context variables is likely to alter analytic findings when measured at any of the three common Census units.
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  The Shifting of the Property Tax on Urban Renters: Evidence from New York State's Homestead Tax Option
  

  December 2020

  Authors: David J. Schwegman, John Yinger

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  Connected and Uncooperative: The Effects of Homogenous and Exclusive Social Networks on Survey Response Rates and Nonresponse Bias
  

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  CES-24-01

  Social capital, the strength of people's friendship networks and community ties, has been hypothesized as an important determinant of survey participation. Investigating this hypothesis has been difficult given data constraints. In this paper, we provide insights by investigating how response rates and nonresponse bias in the American Community Survey are correlated with county-level social network data from Facebook. We find that areas of the United States where people have more exclusive and homogenous social networks have higher nonresponse bias and lower response rates. These results provide further evidence that the effects of social capital may not be simply a matter of whether people are socially isolated or not, but also what types of social connections people have and the sociodemographic heterogeneity of their social networks.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  An outside view: What do observers say about others' races and Hispanic origins?
  

  August 2015

  Authors: Carolyn A. Liebler, Sonya Rastogi, James M. Noon

  Working Paper Number:

  carra-2015-05

  Outsiders' views of a person's race or Hispanic origin can impact how she sees herself, how she reports her race and Hispanic origins, and her social and economic experiences. The way outsiders describe non-strangers in terms of their race and Hispanic origin may reveal popular assumptions about which race/Hispanic categories are salient for Americans, which kinds of people are seen as multiracial, and the types of cues people use when identifying another person's race. We study patterns of observer identification using a unique, large, linked data source with two measures of a person's race and Hispanic origin. One measure (from Census 2000 or the 2010 Census) was provided by a household respondent and the other (from the other census year) was provided by a census proxy reporter (e.g., a neighbor) who responded on behalf of a non-responsive household. We ask: Does an outsider's report of a person's race and Hispanic origin match a household report? We find that in about 90% of our 3.7 million (nonrepresentative) cases, proxy reports of a person's race and Hispanic origin match responses given by the household in a different census year. Match rates are high for the largest groups: non-Hispanic whites, blacks, and Asians and for Hispanics, though proxies are not very able to replicate the race responses of Hispanics. Matches are much less common for people in smaller groups (American Indian/Alaska Native, Pacific Islander, Some Other Race, and multiracial). We also ask: What predicts a matched response and what predicts a particular unmatched response? We find evidence of the persistence of hypodescent for blacks and hyperdescent for American Indians. Biracial Asian-whites and Pacific Islander-whites are more often seen by others as non-Hispanic white than as people of color. Proxy reporters tend to identify children as multiple race and elders as single race, whether they are or not. The race/Hispanic composition of the tract is more powerfully predictive of a particular unmatched response than are tract-level measures of socioeconomic status; unmatched responses are often consistent with the race/Hispanic characteristics of the neighborhood.
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