Feeling safe enough to walk down the street or send your kid to school on a bus or train is at the core of what the local government promises its residents. Yet while we have detailed, regularly updated statistics on crime, traffic stops, arrests, and more, we’ve long lacked something just as critical: the ability to measure how people feel about safety and law enforcement in their own communities.
We’ve long been committed to overcoming this gap, and today we’re talking a big step ahead to support communities nationwide. In collaboration with our partners at the National Policing Institute, I’m proud to share the launch of The Public Safety Confidence Index, a first-of-its-kind collaboration between Zencity and NPI, to provide a free, detailed, nationwide measure of community trust based on over 20,000 survey responses per year.
To manage, you need to measure
For decades, crime rates and clearance stats have been the yardsticks for measuring safety. But over the past few years, it’s become increasingly clear that data on crime alone doesn’t capture the whole picture.
Residents’ willingness to call the police, share information, or even walk down the street at night depends not only on objective safety, but on perceived safety and trust in law enforcement. Until now, there’s been no consistent, scalable way to measure these dynamics, and you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
Over the past few years, Zencity has been helping hundreds of cities and counties, from LAPD, Chicago PD and AZDPS to small communities like Apex, NC start to measure and improve this “sense of safety” with our Blockwise survey. This survey, designed by law enforcement experts, allows for the measurement of sense of safety and perception of law enforcement in a detailed demographic and geographic breakdown. This data is routinely used to allocate resources and shape policy and messaging, all to increase the sense of safety.
The launch of this Index as a free, nationwide, resource is geared to help leaders, professionals and advocates achieve this important task across the country. The Index monitors two core indicators: Sentiment, meaning how positively do people view their local police, in terms of fairness, transparency, and approachability? And Safety, meaning how safe do people feel in public spaces, and how confident are they that their police will solve crimes and keep their communities secure?
These scores are built from multiple questions and normalized on a 0–100 scale, offering a nuanced, data-backed study of how public confidence is evolving across time and place.
At Zencity, our mission has always been to help governments make better decisions powered by community voices. That’s especially important when it comes to something as complex, and consequential, as cultivating a sense of safety. By creating a consistent, reliable measure of confidence, we’re giving agencies and communities a shared starting point for conversation, action, and accountability.
What the early trends indicate
Even as early insights, there are trends emerging that are worth paying attention to:
- While crime declined nationwide in 2024, perceptions of safety fell — showing the importance of measuring both; but early 2025 data shows a rebound, suggesting that ongoing reductions in crime and community engagement may be restoring public confidence.
- State-level sentiment doesn’t follow traditional political lines, showing that confidence in law enforcement is more local and more complex than red vs. blue narratives suggest.
- Among those that experience crime, higher sentiment is associated with more likelihood to report crimes to the police, suggesting that interaction can build trust when it’s handled well.
- Confidence varies across age, race, and income, with younger, lower-income, and minority residents expressing less trust and safety.
As we continue to grow the dataset and refine the research, we plan to release further studies and deeper analysis into trends, like urban vs. rural dynamics, or various regions and demographic breakdowns. We also plan to make the raw data available to the public, so that researchers and practitioners can run their own analyses.
Trust starts with listening
The Public Safety Confidence Index gives us a powerful tool to do just that — to listen at scale and equip public safety leaders with the insights they need to strengthen trust. But measuring national trends is just the beginning. To truly move the needle, agencies need to understand sentiment and safety in their own communities, and act on it. Ready to see how your community compares? Request a demo to explore your local insights.
