The headlines may read like the latest homicide in Manhattan or a shooting near a Brooklyn park, but there’s much more to local crime than these events and their immediate impacts. A new report from the Pew Research Center offers a closer look at the types of local crime that make people feel anxious and worried in their communities, how they get their news about it, and what they think about the way police and other community leaders address it.
The report focuses on five topics related to local crime: murders and shootings, robberies, aggravated assaults, property crimes, and sexual assaults. It includes data from nearly 300 cities and a wide variety of offense types. The study also looks at a range of other factors, including socioeconomic status, race and ethnicity, neighborhood type, and political ideology.
Overall, the report finds that most Americans are interested in local crime news and, on average, about half say they feel very or somewhat satisfied with their sources of this information. In addition, the report finds that virtually identical shares of Republicans and Democrats (including independents who lean toward either party) say that local crime news makes them feel concerned about what’s happening in their communities.
However, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say that various sources of local crime news exaggerate the amount of violence in their communities and that these sources are unfair to some people based on their race or ethnicity.