Research results show that crime rates are low in areas with many dog-owning residents
Dogs are loved all over the world as human pets and are important to their owners for healing and vitality. A new study shows that dogs not only have a positive effect on their owners, but also have a beneficial link: 'Areas with many dog owners have lower crime rates.'
Paws on the Street: Neighborhood-Level Concentration of Households with Dogs and Urban Crime | Social Forces | Oxford Academic
More dogs in the neighborhood often means less crime
https://news.osu.edu/more-dogs-in-the-neighborhood-often-means-less-crime/
Dogs Could Be Lowering Crime Levels in Your Neighborhood. Seriously
https://www.sciencealert.com/dogs-may-lower-crime-levels-seriously
Jane Jacobs , an American non-fiction writer and city planning theorist, wrote in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities that passers-by and residents continue to be a condition for keeping public places safe. He mentioned that there is traffic and that their line of sight is always present and watching the surroundings.
This theory, called ' Natural surveillance ,' has influenced sociology and urban planning for many years, but few attempts have been made to quantify the impact of this hypothesis on reducing crime rates in the neighborhood. That. The reason is that it is difficult to think of a valid measure of how much the inhabitants are monitoring nearby streets.
Therefore, Nicolo Pinchuck, who is enrolled in the doctoral course at the Faculty of Sociology at Ohio State University, conducted a study to investigate the nature monitoring hypothesis using 'dog walking' as a scale. 'One of the reasons I started this study was that I thought that walking a dog would capture the level of surveillance of the inhabitants well.' 'When I went for a walk, I had a conversation with another owner I met. Or we stroke each other's dogs. Sometimes we know the dog's name but not the owner's name, 'Pinchuck said.
The research team asked the residents of Columbus 'whether they have dogs' with 2014-2016 criminal statistics in the 595
As a result of the analysis, it was found that areas with high reliability to neighboring residents have a lower incidence of murder, robbery, and weighted assault than areas with low reliability. We also found that among areas with high mutual trust, areas with many 'households with dogs' had a lower crime rate than areas with few dog owners.
Specifically, in areas with high mutual trust and many dog owners, the incidence of robbery is about two-thirds and the incidence of homicide compared to areas with high mutual trust but few dog owners. Is said to have decreased to about half. Although this does not prove a causal relationship that 'the more dog owners have, the lower the crime rate,' it supports Jacobs' natural surveillance hypothesis that the eyes of neighbors' surveillance lower the crime rate. increase.
We also found that the greater the number of dogs kept in the neighborhood, the less property crimes such as robbery are, regardless of the trustworthiness of the inhabitants. It is believed that this is because the dog's gaze and bark keep the criminal away from the building. Mutual trust and the protective effect of dogs could be confirmed even when considering a wide range of crime-related factors such as the gender, age, and socio-economic status of the residents living in the neighborhood.
'Trust doesn't really help the safety of your neighborhood unless you know what's going on on the street. It's the dog walk that fills it,' said Pinchuck. Are essentially patrols of the neighborhood. They witness when something goes wrong or where there are suspicious outsiders, which can be a deterrent to crime. '.
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