Victims of the approximately 1 million violent crimes committed in England and Wales every year may experience physical, emotional and financial harm, and feel more fearful and less trusting. But our new research shows the harmful effects of violent crime also reach beyond their victims, and can affect the wellbeing of whole neighbourhoods.

In a recent study, we looked at the impact of violent crime – every violent incident against a person that the police were aware of – on the mental wellbeing of those living nearby. Our study looked at incidents of violent crime in neighbourhoods served by Thames Valley Police, one of the UK’s largest forces, as well as self-reported mental wellbeing in those neighbourhoods.

Using nearly a decade of data from 2010 to 2017, we linked each reported incident of violent crime to self-reports of mental wellbeing from a smartphone app in the immediate neighbourhood, with data on over 90,000 self-reports in total during the study period.

Because multiple self-reports were available for each person, we could remove the influence of individual characteristics, such as some people living more or less stressful lives.

We also controlled for day-to-day factors that might affect both crime and stress levels, such as weather, daylight and day of the week. And we controlled for each........

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