Opinion | Is Fear of Crime a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?

And as people become reluctant to shop or work in an area, retail stores will close and manufacturers and offices will relocate. With less legal income flowing into the community, illicit markets grow, bringing more theft, drugs and violence.

Dr. Skogan’s focus was residential neighborhoods, but those lessons are directly relevant to downtown areas, too — especially right now. Hanna Love and Tracy Hadden Loh of the Brookings Institution wrote this spring on the situation facing downtowns in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Seattle. In all four cities, downtown districts haven’t fully recovered from the pandemic, when many office workers went remote. Office vacancy rates remain high and businesses that serve office workers are languishing or have shut down. Meanwhile, individuals struggling with homelessness, visible mental illness or addiction seem more numerous, and accounts of theft and violence abound.

In interviews the researchers conducted with business owners, commuters, downtown residents and public officials, concerns about crime were top of mind, cited as the main factor “stopping workers from coming back to the office.” Yet when Ms. Love and Dr. Loh examined crime statistics in these cities, they found a mismatch. Though citywide crime rates had gone up, most of the increase had occurred in disadvantaged residential areas. Downtowns were less affected than people believed.

What’s more, a disturbing pattern was emerging. Calls were mounting for cities to direct resources, including law enforcement and social services, toward business districts as a way to revive them. But those resources alone wouldn’t do it — and diverting them from the parts of the city where they were needed most would make a difficult situation in those areas worse.

Finally, when people are scared of crime, politicians pressure the police to crack down. Contrary to what some progressives think, increasing the police presence in an area does tend to lower the crime rate. But indiscriminate, heavy-handed crackdowns — reliance on blanket stop-and-frisk tactics, for example — erode community trust, hampering police officers’ ability to conduct investigations. Crimes go unsolved and criminals remain free to strike again.