Dogs Could Be Lowering Crime Levels in Your Neighborhood. Seriously

The dogs are great. The wonderful animals are connected to us. Dog owners are our best friends.

Researchers have found a reason to love dogs, but it's not obvious. There is a correlation between the amount of dog ownership in a neighborhood and crime levels. Dogs help us fight crime. It's really serious.

Dogs can't take all the blame. According to researchers from Ohio State University, owning a dog means you need to walk it and get out and about.

Increased levels of civilian activity on the streets and interactions with your neighbors help to keep things safe by increasing the level of security in the neighborhood.

Nicolo Pinchak is the lead author of a new study.

They watch when things aren't right and when there are outsiders. It can be used to deter crime.

The researchers' hypothesis is based on the idea that people in public places help to maintain order and safety by giving them an opportunity to watch their surroundings.

A continuous stream of "eyes on the street" and communal interactions by people in public places help to create a web of public respect and trust within a neighborhood, which together can help deter crimes from occurring.

Pinchak and his team say there have been few attempts to quantify whether the hypothesis works to lower neighborhood-level crime rates.

To find out if the daily routines of dog-walkers fit with the theories of Jacobs, the researchers focused on dog ownership.

The researchers used data from multiple sources, including crime statistics for neighborhoods in Columbus, Ohio, as well as a marketing survey showing the concentration of dog-owning neighborhoods in the city.

The researchers found a correlation between the presence of dogs and reduced crime rates.

The team writes in their paper that they found that the concentration of dogs in a neighborhood was related to the rate of property crime.

Only one city has seen the results. Future studies are needed to explore the issue in more detail because the researchers can't rule out biases in the data.

The idea that dog ownership and dog walking contribute to lower crimes in the community is supported by new data, which suggests that residents with increased familiarity to identify suspect outsiders, or put would-be offenders off, may be more likely to intervene.

More research is needed to unpack this further, the researchers say, but for now, it certainly looks like dogs are having a beneficial effect on these neighborhoods.

If you don't have people on the streets watching what's happening, trust won't help neighborhoods as much. Pinchak said that dog walking does that.

People walk their dogs and they pet each other's dogs. They don't know the dog's owner. They can spot potential problems by learning what is happening.

The results are reported in social forces.