Fear Is More Expensive Than Crime
In Modena, the homicide rate is lower than Finland's. The fear rate is not.
Modena province recorded approximately 30,000 reported crimes in 2023, according to the Interior Ministry data published by Il Sole 24 Ore. The homicide rate: 0.6 per 100,000 — lower than Finland (1.6), Belgium (1.7), or France (1.3).
By any statistical measure, Modena is a safe city. By any perceptual measure, it does not feel like one.
This gap between perception and measurement has a cost, and the cost is not abstract. Consider a shop owner who has been robbed twice in three years — total losses approximately €2,000. She starts closing ninety minutes early because the street feels unsafe after dark. At €35–50 per hour in average revenue, over roughly 300 operating days per year, the early closure costs her €15,000–22,000 annually. The fear costs seven to eleven times more than the crime.
This is what happens when perception drives behaviour instead of data. The shop owner is not irrational. The street has poor lighting. There are fewer people walking after seven. The environmental signals — the empty pavement, the dark corners, the shuttered shops — manufacture a sense of danger that the crime statistics do not support. And each shop that closes early makes the street emptier, which makes it feel less safe, which makes the next shop close earlier. The fear compounds itself.
The pattern extends beyond commerce. Social isolation — driven partly by fear of public space — increases mortality risk by 26–32%, according to Holt-Lunstad's meta-analysis in Perspectives on Psychological Science. The US Surgeon General's 2023 advisory equated the health impact of chronic isolation to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
Meanwhile, the 2003 European heatwave killed approximately 20,000 people in Italy. A hip fracture from a fall — often connected to social isolation in elderly populations — costs the Italian health system approximately €28,000 per case, with a 25% one-year mortality rate. These are the invisible risks. They do not make the evening news. They do not trigger the alarm systems that evolution built for visible, immediate threats.
The fourth discipline of structured thinking: measure the actual risk, not the perceived one. Then design environments that close the gap.
