One reason might be that some neighborhoods have a higher reported crime rate. But when the concern about crime is high in areas with lower crime rates, there must be another explanation. For example, residents of South Philadelphia west of Broad Street have a moderate crime rate by the city's standards. Yet they report the highest rate of concern about crime in the city. At the same time, Germantown has a high rate of violent crime compared to other neighborhoods, but its residents report less concern about crime than residents of most other neighborhoods.
Nobody doubts that crime is a serious concern.
But the extent of the concern may be a product, in part, of television news coverage. An analysis by the Philadelphia Compact suggests that how residents get their news shapes how much emphasis they place on crime. The more that residents watch television news and the less they read newspapers, the more likely they are to feel that crime is a problem in Philadelphia. Using crime data reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1997, we found that television news viewing is more strongly related to concern about crime than either reported property crime or violent crime by neighborhood. Education is also related to the proportion of news obtained from television.