Perceptions of Chicago’s Safety Beyond the Rumors

The Writing on the Wall at Lincoln Park

Author: Tangxiaoxue Zhang

Program of Study: Masters in Computational Social Science (MACSS), Social Sciences Division

When I first set out to explore Chicago, I wandered around Lincoln Park, especially the part near DePaul University. To be honest, there was not much writing on the walls that struck me—no murals or dramatic slogans, only a small billboard with an informational map introducing the university. Yet even this absence told me something. The calm, orderly campus surroundings suggested safety. To my eyes, this neighborhood was quiet, well-kept, and stable. It was a striking contrast with the reputation of Chicago that I had grown up hearing about in China.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Originally, I had planned to interview university students for a study on students’ attitudes toward Chicago safety. However, I quickly realized that students were often too busy, and not always willing to stop for long conversations. (This phenomenon itself could be a topic for further research: how time pressure shapes students’ willingness to participate in community life.) Instead, I turned my attention to local residents—the people walking their dogs, shopping, or simply passing through. What I learned from them became the foundation of my project.

Why I Wanted to Study Safety in Chicago

In China, the University of Chicago is well known not only for its academic excellence but also for its reputation for crime (Quora, n.d.). Parents are always unwilling to let their children study here. Some students even reject offers or decline exchange opportunities owing to safety fears. In my own family, one heated debate happened as well: should I risk attending UChicago, or should I choose a “safer,” though academically less prestigious, university?

I therefore arrived in Chicago carrying these fears. At first, they seemed confirmed by conversations with others: everyone warned me about “the South Side” of the city. But I soon realized that much of what I had heard were generalized statements, not grounded in everyday student life. Hyde Park, where the university is located, has risks, but it is not nearly as dangerous as the rumors suggested. Still, when people are asked to rate Chicago’s safety on a scale, their intuitive responses tend to be negative. I noticed I did this too—assigning the city a higher danger rating than my actual lived experience would justify.

The Problem of One-Shot Ratings

This realization led me to question how perceptions of safety are usually measured. Social media polls and news reports often present Chicago’s safety as a single number—a quick rating towards one basic question such as “Do you feel safe in your neighborhood?” (Chicago Department of Public Health, 2024). But such “one-shot answers” may have significant shortcomings.

One of these is availability bias (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973), which refers to the tendency to recall vivid, dramatic events more easily than mundane, everyday ones (Dube‐Rioux & Russo, 1988). In other words, the sensational stories emphasized in the media disproportionately shape public perceptions, overshadowing the thousands of uneventful, safe days (Bassett & Lumsdaine, 2001). 

F2 Availability Bias(Heuristic)

Hence, I wanted to test whether people’s perceptions of safety in Chicago would change if they paused, reflected on their own experiences (or those of close friends), and then re-evaluated their answers. In this study, what truly mattered was not the exact numbers participants gave, but whether their ratings shifted before and after reflection.

Conversations with Locals in Lincoln Park

My interviews began with a simple question: “Do you live in Chicago?” Interestingly, even those who said “no” often offered to help me anyway. This friendliness was surprising. Dog walkers in particular proved the most willing to stop and talk, haha. These conversations gave me both data and a warm sense of connection to the city.

The interview followed a structured sequence. I first asked participants how many years they had lived in Chicago. Then, I asked two initial rating questions: (1) “On a scale from 1 to 10, how dangerous do you think Chicago is overall?” and (2) “On the same scale, how dangerous do you think your own neighborhood is?” Next, I asked about information sources: “How do you usually hear about crime or safety issues in Chicago?” and “How frequently do you encounter such information?” After these baseline questions, participants entered a reflection phase, during which they recalled a personal experience of danger—or one that had happened to a close friend. Finally, I asked them to rate again the danger of Chicago and their neighborhood on the same 1–10 scale, this time after reflection.

Question	Response
Q1 Chicago safety (1–10)	☐
Q2 Neighborhood safety (1–10)	☐
Q3 Info source	☐ News ☐ Social media ☐ Friends/family ☐ Personal exp. ☐ Other: ____
Q4 Frequency unsafe	☐ Never ☐ Rarely ☐ Sometimes ☐ Often ☐ Very often
Reflection Most dangerous personal / friend event	______________________________
Q5 Chicago safety after reflection (1–10)	☐
Q6 Neighborhood safety after reflection (1–10)	☐
Notes	______________________________

T1  Questionnaire used for interview

During the reflection phase, I heard some frightening stories:

• Jewish students having their necklaces rubbed by strangers.
• Someone attacked by a group of people with knives.
• A woman threatened by a man on the train with a lighter held close to her hair.
• Accounts of robberies, fights, and even gunshots heard in neighborhoods.
• A foreign student described being extorted by a man with a firearm.

Hearing these experiences reminded me that Chicago, like any large city, does have real risks. But the central question remained: how did recalling these events affect people’s overall ratings of safety?

What the Data Showed

I interviewed 7 local residents in Lincoln Park and 7 foreign students from AEPP. Their reported sources of crime information are summarized in F3. Locals most often cited news, local media, or apps like Citizen, while foreign students were more likely to mention friends, the UChicago Safety App, or UCPD reports.

F3 Source of Crime Information

In addition, over half of the locals reported feeling unsafe more than sometimes, while the majority of foreign students reported feeling unsafe less than sometimes.

Safety Level	Locals (%)	Foreign Students (%)
Felt unsafe more than sometimes	~57% (4 of 7)	~29% (2 of 7)
Felt unsafe less than sometimes (including sometimes)	~43% (3 of 7)	~71% (5 of 7)

T2  Perceived unsafety frequency

This difference may be partly explained by time spent in the city: locals had lived in Chicago an average of 25 years, while the foreign students had lived here less than 1 year on average. Apart from that, students’ active region is relatively limited compared to the locals.

Interestingly, from these conversations, two key findings emerged:

(1) Neighborhood ratings were stable, while city ratings shifted.

For all participants, a majority of them (57%) kept their neighborhood ratings the same before and after reflection. In contrast, only 36% kept city ratings steady – most revised their “Chicago overall” scores after reflecting. This supports Construal Level Theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010), which argues that people evaluate broad, abstract categories (like “Chicago”) differently from concrete, familiar ones (like “neighborhood”). Familiarity anchors judgments, while abstraction leaves more room for change in rating.

(2) Locals and foreigners had different patterns.

6 of 7 local residents increased their ratings of danger after reflection, while 5 of 7 foreign residents decreased theirs. This divergence may be explained by different cognitive processes:

• Locals tend to habituate risks in daily life, but recalling specific events reactivates negative memories, increasing the salience of danger (Lee & Kim, 2022).
• Foreigners often start with inflated danger perceptions due to availability bias as stated before: their initial impressions are shaped by dramatic stories from news and social media. Reflection on their own, relatively safe experiences led them to lower their danger ratings.

All in all, 12 out of 14 people changed their scores after the reflection, suggesting that relying solely on “one-shot” questions may fail to capture objective or stable perceptions of safety for both local people and foreign students.

What This Means for Perceptions of Safety

Of course, this project has limitations. With only 14 participants, the findings can only suggest tendencies rather than firm conclusions. Moreover, demographic differences between locals and international students were not controlled, and individual personality traits may have influenced responses. For instance, the particular international students I interviewed may have been more cautious, while the local residents I spoke with may have been more outgoing or experienced. These factors mean the results should be viewed as exploratory rather than definitive.

Even with these limitations, the findings highlight how perceptions of safety are socially constructed and shaped by cognitive biases and information channels. A single survey number cannot capture the complexity of people’s lived experiences. Psychological theories such as the availability heuristic explain why news-driven impressions inflate fear, while habituation helps explain why long-term residents may downplay risks until prompted to recall specific incidents.

Apart from these ideas, there are two more perspectives worth mentioning here to further explain why outsiders are more likely to overstate how dangerous Chicago is. On the one hand, some people unconsciously resist changing their views. One local participant, reflecting on 13 years in Chicago, emphasized that the city has improved significantly over time—yet many international students still hold onto outdated, negative impressions. This persistence can be explained by belief perseverance, the tendency to maintain one’s initial beliefs even in the face of contradictory evidence (Anderson et al., 1980). Closely related is confirmation bias, in which people selectively attend to or remember information that supports their preexisting views while disregarding contrary evidence (Nickerson, 1998). Together, these biases make it difficult for outsiders to update their views of Chicago objectively. If someone is already primed to think of Chicago as “dangerous,” positive experiences may be dismissed as exceptions, while negative news stories are treated as confirmation. This pattern illustrates why one-shot survey questions often capture entrenched biases more than reality.

On the other hand, international students often rely on second-hand information, which is especially vulnerable to distortion. Classic research on rumor transmission (Buckner, 1965) shows that as more people retell a story, its accuracy tends to decrease (interactive effect), but when listeners question details more carefully, accuracy increases (criticalness effect). These findings suggest that much of the information reaching newcomers is not only filtered but also reshaped by the way it is shared and received.

Related to this is the literature on false memory formation. Loftus (1975) demonstrated that the phrasing of questions can alter people’s recollections of events. For instance, participants being asked, “When did the people carrying guns enter the room?” were more likely to remember seeing guns than those asked, “When did the people enter the room?” Suggestive questions can therefore introduce new—but not necessarily correct—details into memory, leading to reconstruction or distortion. Once this happens, even witnesses themselves may struggle to distinguish between what they actually experienced and what was suggested to them.

Applied to the case of international students, these processes help explain why crime-related stories often become magnified as they circulate through social media and peer networks. By the time such stories reach that student, those real stories may already have been exaggerated or reconstructed, creating an inflated perception of danger. Only after reflecting on their own experiences—or those of close friends—do many students begin to revise their initial impressions downward.

Taken together, these findings suggest that perceptions of safety are not fixed facts but shifting judgments, shaped by biases, experiences, and the stories people tell. Reflection emerges as a powerful corrective, helping people balance rumor against lived reality.

Conclusion: Finding My Own Chicago

When I first came to Chicago, I carried my family’s fears and rumors prevalent in my country. But through this project—through walking in Lincoln Park and Hyde Park, talking with locals and students, listening to stories—I found a more nuanced truth. Chicago is neither perfectly safe nor hopelessly dangerous. It is a city of contradictions, like any big city. 

To “find Chicago” means to look beyond stereotypes, to listen carefully, and to let both data and human voices shape our understanding. This reflection is not only personal but also relevant to international students who arrive in Chicago carrying second-hand fears. My project suggests that taking time to reflect on real experiences, rather than relying on quick impressions or rumors, may lead to a more balanced and accurate sense of safety. Importantly, the same question—how much of our perception is shaped by rumor versus lived reality—might remain for other contexts as well.

For me, that journey has already begun. And it makes me more confident that I chose the right place to study.

 

 

Reference

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Buckner, H. T. (1965). A Theory of Rumor Transmission. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 29(1), 54–70. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2746856

Chicago Department of Public Health (2024). Healthy Chicago Survey. Retrieved from https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/cdph/supp_info/healthy-communities/hcs-data-and-documentation.html

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Loftus, E. F. (1975). Leading questions and the eyewitness report. Cognitive Psychology, 7(4), 560–572. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(75)90023-7

Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175

Quora (n.d.). What is the reputation/how well known is the University of Chicago in China? Would appreciate input from native Chinese from the mainland? Message posted to https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-reputation-how-well-known-is-the-University-of-Chicago-in-China-Would-appreciate-input-from-native-Chinese-from-the-mainland

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