Assessing Resident Perceptions of Physical Disorder on Perceptions of Crime

This paper investigates whether perceptions of neighborhood physical disorder—measured by vacant lots, vacant buildings, and overgrown vegetation—influence perceptions of crime and perceptions of the frequency or magnitude of crime events. We use ordinal logistic regression to analyze individual-level and contextual-level variables derived from a survey of 401 randomly selected residents in seven New Orleans neighborhoods. Findings show that as perceptions of physical disorder increase, so does the likelihood of perceiving violent crime as more of a neighborhood problem than property crime. As residents perceive greater physical disorder, their perception of crime level decreases. Finally, residents who perceive greater physical disorder are more likely to perceive crime levels to be stable to increasing over the previous five years. The category of “physical disorder” is inherently subjective, and future research should distinguish between social disorder and physical disorder in the evaluation of perceptions of crime. Our major contribution is to empirically demonstrate that the influence of physical disorder on crime perceptions depends upon the crime type and temporal scale under investigation.