Sweden: Crime vs Fear

Sweden has an organization dedicated to monitoring crime reports across the country, Brottsförebyggande rådet.

Beyond crime monitoring, though, this organization also assembles the results of crime surveys, police interaction surveys, and lots of other amazing public data. They have a collection of historical data and surveys here.

Two data points that particularly interested me were Brott mot enskilda personer i olika befolkningsgrupper (Crime against individuals in different demographics), and Otrygghet och oro för brott i olika befolkningsgrupper (un-safety and un-calm for crime in different demographic groups). Ok, so I don't really know how to directly translate otrygghet or oro, but I loosely translated them as 'fear'.^[1]

I thought it would be cool to put these two things side-by-side; that is, the chance of someone being the victim of a crime next to how afraid they are that they might be the victim of a crime.

Of course, we know people are more afraid of being victims than are actually victims. That's not the amazing find here. The question is how much more are people afraid, and are people afraid in proportion to how much they're affected by crime? That is, are old people more afraid of being mugged, even though young people are the ones actually being mugged?

Click around and (hopefully) find out!

The most interesting thing I found is how much more single parents are impacted by crime than other groups... I genuinely had no idea.

This is also on github.