A couple weeks ago, I did two posts on the link between perceptions of crime and the actual crime rate. The puzzle was why perceptions of crime were so tightly linked to reality from 1989-2001, and then much higher in 2002-2008, even as the crime rate remained stable.
One thing that occurred to me is that the decline in the crime rate in the 1990s coincided with an economic recovery. And the perceptions of more crime from 2002-2008 coincided with a weaker economy. Could the economy also affect perceptions of crime?
A provisional answer is yes: it appears that people perceive more crime when the economy is doing badly. The following graph plots the percent who believe that crime has increased in the past year against consumer sentiment from the quarter in which the survey was taken (as near as I can tell from the original Gallup data):
The relationship is pretty strong, although there are outliers. If you regress perceptions of crime against the violent crime rate and consumer sentiment, both are statistically significant, and they explain about two-thirds of the variance in perceptions.
The logic could be: If the times are bad, people must be bad too. To be sure, this is a purely correlational analysis based on a small number of datapoints. But it does suggest a possible reason why more people perceived an increase in crime after 2002, even as the crime rate remained constant.