This paper demonstrates the use of mixed methods discovery techniques to explore public perceptions of community safety and risk, using computational techniques that combine and integrate layers of information to reveal connections between community and place. Perceived vulnerability to crime is conceptualised using an etic/emic framework. The etic “outsider” viewpoint imposes its categorisation of vulnerability not only on areas (“crime hot spots” or “deprived neighbourhoods”) but also on socially constructed groupings of individuals (the “sick” or the “poor”) based on particular qualities considered relevant by the analyst. The range of qualities is often both narrow and shallow. The alternative, emic, “insider” perspective explores vulnerability based on the meanings held by the individuals informed by their lived experience. Using recorded crime data and Census-derived area classifications, we categorise an area in Southern England from an etic viewpoint. Mobile interviews with local residents and police community support officers and researcher-led environmental audits provide qualitative emic data. GIS software provides spatial context to analytically link both quantitative and qualitative data. We demonstrate how this approach reveals hidden sources of community resilience and produces findings that explicate low level social disorder and vandalism as turns in a “dialogue” of resistance against urbanisation and property development. 1. Introduction This paper demonstrates the use of computationally based mixed methods discovery techniques to enhance the power and analytical reach of fieldwork in the study of crime risk and public safety. The substantive focus of this paper is on community safety and the perception of risk from crime and social disorder at neighbourhood level. Our conceptual focus is on the application of an etic/emic framework for vulnerability to crime. Our methodological focus is on a mixed methods approach using software to help combine and integrate layers of information to reveal connections between community, crime, and place. This demonstrator study draws on primary empirical data from fieldwork at sites and in criminal justice settings in a contemporary English town. In countries like the US and the UK the policy register for research on safety and risk is “community policing.” Police forces and police researchers in such countries have developed the diagnostic activity of the “environmental scan” as a tool to gauge public risk perception in so far as it relates to the built environment. The present official system for
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