Perceptions of the local danger posed by crime: Race, disorder, informal control, and the police

How do individuals make judgments about the safety of their neighborhood from crime? Using survey, census, police, and systematic social observation data from Seattle, this work suggests that residents draw on their perceptions of potential lurking dangers-especially in the form of physical or social disorder-and on their evaluations of the efficacy of local formal and informal social control efforts. In fact, residents draw on their evaluations of local social control efforts to determine how concerned they should be by perceptions of local disorder. The results question the importance of actual disorder relative to perceptions of disorder and suggest a new and indirect explanation for the link between the racial composition and perceptions of the danger posed by crime-in particular that race colors the way people view local disorder, the police, and the capacity for informal social control.