Author: Francesc Guillén Lasierra, Head of Projects and Organisation in Departament d’Interior (INT)
CCI is already a very comprehensive project. There are universities, LEAs, Prevention Forums and organisations. The project promotes and sustain an integral concept of security, taking into account not only crime, but also disorder, urban design and security perceptions. Despite of the size of the project it has an open vocation to look for any interesting experience for the project aims, no matter whether it comes from outside of the project.
As concluded by the research carried out so far in the project’s framework one of the relevant problems in the area of security perception and its measurement is how to detect particular public feeling of security at a very low territorial scale. Research has evidenced that feelings of insecurity may vary from even closer spaces, since sometimes it is quite a concrete factor that favours or worsen it. In consequence to be able to draft policies and strategies to improve feelings of insecurity information about very small territorial areas is needed (Buil-Gil et al. 2019). Otherwise with generic policies particular problems may be overlooked and the target missed.
Surveys with detailed information about small areas need a sufficient sample that may be extremely expensive in the large ones (it is unlike to think of, for instance, carrying out a Crime Victimisation Survey though a whole country (such as England and Wales or France) with very numerous samples at all small territorial levels. Consequently additional instruments are needed in order to be able to have territorially speaking detailed information within a reasonable cost. One of the tried lines of investigation has been the search for indicators (social, economic, urban...) that may be linked to a problematic feeling of insecurity (where people are likely to feel unsafe). Some authors (Buil-Gil et al., 2019) are already working in this direction, identifying indicators that, though contrasted algorithms, may provide with consistent information about the feeling of insecurity in small areas.
In this context, the Barcelona City Council and the Institute of Regional and Metropolitan Studies of Barcelona (IERMB from its name in Catalan ) have been carrying out a yearly Crime Victimisation Survey since the early eighties. It means the security survey with the longest series in Southern Europe. The survey includes the city of Barcelona and the other 35 municipalities of its metropolitan area. In the case of Barcelona, however, the sample only allows getting reliable results for the 10 districts in which the city is divided. That turns out to be too wide in order to tackle feelings of insecurity at the neighbourhood level (Barcelona is divided in 73 neighbourhoods in total). In this context, city managers have detected a need of additional information in order to design and implement especial policies that can effectively improve the feeling of insecurity in Barcelona neighbourhoods. To fill this gap they have asked the IERMB to carry out a research that could provide with new instruments to: i) ascertain the foreseeable level of perceived insecurity at Barcelona neighbourhoods and ii) identify the factors associated to this feeling.
To estimate the perception of insecurity in Barcelona neighbourhoods the IREMB has applied the SAE package (Small Area Estimation), concretely the method of the best nonlinear empirical prediction (EBLUP). In order to identify the factors that are associated to the feelings of insecurity they have used multilevel modelling techniques, which consider the consecutive and simultaneous influence of individual and neighbourhood level factors. All these analysis has been carried with data from the Victimization Survey combined with other sources such as administrative data and other sources that provide social, demographic, economic and urban indicators. The project is not finished yet, but it implies an important step forward to cope with the detection of the feeling of insecurity in small areas and to identify factors associated to this feelings.
CCI partners are convinced that to make science go ahead sharing research outputs is absolute necessary. It is bound to have a multiplier effect and that would be missed if we, all, kept closed within our own projects and targets. Consequently, a cooperation protocol between CCI and IERMB is being drafted in order to take mutual advantage of our knowledge and experiments. The next project meeting in Barcelona in January 2020 will be the departing stage of what we expect to be a long, stable and fruitful cooperation.
1 Vid. https://iermb.uab.cat/en/
