Crime and Erosion of Trust: Evidence for Latin America

Trust links citizens to the institutions intended to represent them and to one another. By reducing trust, crime has the potential to grind down social capital and become an obstacle to development. This paper analyzes the relationship between individual victimization and trust in Latin America using an empirical strategy that reduces both overt and hidden biases. Victimization significantly reduces vertical trust (in the local police) but has no robust effect on measures of horizontal trust. Governments need to reduce actual victimization but also rebuild trust in local public institutions to enhance the effectiveness of crime prevention efforts.