50,000 Stuttgart residents aged 14 and over were randomly selected from all city districts. The personal letters for the municipal safety survey were sent out in November 2023. Participation was possible until the end of December 2023.
For the first time, the representative survey on the feeling of safety provides information down to every district of the state capital and includes the following topics, among others How safe do you feel in Stuttgart and in your district? Have you been the victim of a crime in the last twelve months? Have you reported a crime or not?
The scientific evaluation of the survey was carried out by the University of Heidelberg and the Baden-Württemberg Criminological Research Institute (KriFoBW). The aim is to further improve safety and quality of life.
Making prevention more effective
As long as a municipality does not know exactly how safe people actually feel, it can only implement municipal crime prevention on the basis of police crime statistics. And in every municipality there are crimes that are not reported - often out of shame, insecurity or fear.
The main aim of the current study was to identify this dark field of crime in Stuttgart. By analyzing unreported crimes, it was possible to gain a more accurate picture of how crime is actually distributed in the city, which types of crime go undetected and why they are not reported.
The results are important for making prevention measures more effective and deploying resources in a more targeted manner. In this way, crime can be reduced and victim protection strengthened.