What effect does inequality have on residents’ sense of safety? Exploring the mediating processes of social capital and civic engagement

A sense of safety and security is of the utmost importance for most residents because it contributes to personal and collective well-being. However, that sense of safety may rest upon community structural factors such as inequality and intracommunity factors such as social capital and civic engagement. In fact, these factors may mediate the relationship between inequality and residents’ sense of safety. As such, the purpose of this study is to investigate this process—the extent to which social capital and civic engagement partially mediate the relationship between economic inequality and sense of safety across 26 U.S. metro areas. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), we found that social capital fully mediates the relationship between inequality and sense of safety but that civic engagement does not. Specifically, residents in communities characterized by high levels of inequality also report reduced levels of social capital, which then results in a lower sense of safety. Additionally, residents who report lower civic engagement report that their communities are less safe.