by Terry L. Besser
Assistant professor and extension sociologist
Iowa State University Extension to Communities
One of the defining qualities of small Iowa towns is that people who live there feel safe. Ask people what they like about living in small towns, and one of the things they will mentionÑ after they tell you about the friendliness of the peopleÑis that they feel safe living there. Towns where people feel safe are different in noticeable ways from places where people feel threatened. For example, in safe feeling towns:
* People leave their cars running while they run into Casey' s for a minute.
* Car and house doors are unlocked at all times.
* Children ride their bikes alone all over town and play unsupervised.
* People walk alone late at night.
* While driving, residents give everyone, even people they don't know, the "hi" sign.
According to some political candidates and frequent national news broadcasts, we are a "Society Under Siege" (the title of a continuing episode on CNN News). If it is true that Americans as a whole feel continuously threatened by crime and wanton violence, then the nation might learn something from small Iowa towns. In this article I will use research findings from a recent Iowa State University study to shed some light on what small towns do to generate feelings of safety.
In 1994 Iowa State University conducted a study of residents of 99 small towns (one in each county) to determine people's attitudes toward their community. Among the questions we asked were two related to feelings of safety. We asked respondents if they thought their town was threatened by an increase in crime and later in the survey we asked them to describe their town on a 7 point scale from safe to dangerous. Based on people's responses, we are able to compare communities with different levels of "feelings of safety" with each other. In that way we can learn what features communities with high feelings of safety share that communities low in safe feelings do not exhibit.
All of the communities in the study were small, i.e., from 500 to 10,000 in population. Still, the smaller the community, the safer the town's residents felt. Part of the reason is that people in smaller towns are more likely to know each other by name, and knowing the other people in town is highly related to feeling safe.
Acquaintanceships between people are important, but equally significant is the quality of the relationships people have with others in town. In the towns where citizens reported that "living here is like living with a group of close friends," feelings of safety were higher than in places where the level of friendship and trust was lower. The larger the number of townspeople who agreed with the statement "every person for themselves is a good description of how people in this town act," the lower were the feelings of safety in that town. Communities whose residents think people in town look out for each other will feel like safer places to live than towns where people look out for themselves only.
What role does government play in whether or not people feel safe in a community? After all, the usual official response to citizen fear of crime is strengthening police departments, the criminal justice system, prescribing harsher sentences for criminals, etc. Our findings show that the perceived responsiveness of local officials was associated with safe feelings, but the quality of police protection was unrelated. Where people reported that they usually got a quick response when they called a local official with a complaint, feelings of safety were higher than in towns with less responsive officials.
Surprisingly citizens' evaluation of local police protection was not related to feeling safe. That is to say towns where people felt safe were just as likely as towns with lower safety feelings to have poor quality police protectionÑat least in the eyes of their citizens. To summarize, towns where people feel safe are places where:
* More people know each other by name.
* Citizens feel that they are living with a group of close personal friends.
* Local officials provide prompt response to citizen concerns.
* People look out for each other.
These survey findings are not conclusive since most of our questions dealt with residents' attitudes toward their community and not directly with feelings of safety and fear of crime. Even so, the message seems to be that the social climate of a community, the relationships between people, are more important in creating feelings of safety than size of town (although all our towns were less than 10,000 people) or police protection.
Contacts:
Terry L. Besser, ISU
Extension Sociology, (515) 294-6508
Del Marks, ISU Extension
Communication Systems, (515) 294-9807
