Gallup’s Global Law and Order Report, released Tuesday, shows that most people feel safe walking alone at night, including 72% of Americans.

People worldwide feel safer today than they did a decade ago, but progress has stalled in recent years, according to Gallup.

“Traditional statistics like crime reports, arrests, and victimization rates, they only tell us so much. I mean, they tell us some really important information. But they describe how safe communities are, which is vitally important. But they don’t tell us anything about how safe people feel. And so, the only way to do that is to ask them,” said Julie Ray, managing editor for global news at Gallup. “That’s what we’ve been doing for about 20, almost 20 years now.”

This year, Gallup looked at data from about 140 countries and territories.

“How safe people feel is important,” Ray said. “Because when they feel safe, they’re free to thrive and relationships flourish — it really helps communities feel more cohesive, and it makes them more resilient to adversity.”

Worldwide, 70% of people feel safe walking alone at night where they live.

The U.S. figure of 72% is about 24th out of the 38 other wealthy Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries that Gallup tracked this year, Ray said. And it’s similar to Canada, France and Germany.

Ecuador was found to be the least safe country in the world, where just 27% of people feel safe walking alone at night. Gallup noted that the South American country is an increasingly important node in global cocaine trafficking. Gang violence and homicides have spiked as a result, with Ecuador’s murder rate reaching nearly 50 per 100,000 residents in 2023.

Back at home, the FBI on Monday released 2023 national crime statistics.

Violent crime fell 3%, and murder fell more than 11%.

Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst and member of the Council on Criminal Justice, published an article in which he said murder fell at the fastest pace ever recorded last year.

Murders spiked in 2020 to a rate of 6.83 per 100,000 Americans — but the murder rate has dropped 16% since then. The murder rate is still close to 10% higher than it was in 2019, when it was 5.17 murders per 100,000 people. And the murder rate was under 5 per 100,000 people between 2010 and 2015.

But the current murder rate is still far below what it was in previous decades, such as 9.8 per 100,000 people in 1991 and 10.22 murders per 100,000 people in 1980.

The falling crime rates, of course, don’t apply to every city or every neighborhood in America — and they don’t stop Americans from growing more concerned about crime.

The Pew Research Center found earlier this year that nearly 60% of Americans want crime reduction to be a priority for the nation’s leaders.

Less than half of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center said the same just three years ago.

Gallup’s data consistently show that Americans think crime is getting worse. In the latest Gallup survey, taken last fall, 77% said there was more crime in the U.S. than there was a year ago.

Ray said the driving factors in making people feel safe are confidence in their local police and satisfaction with where they live.

“It looks like everything kind of happens at the local level,” she said.

Criminologist Alex Piquero similarly described how crime is a very local issue.

“So, if you can go to Washington, D.C., which is where I grew up, the homicide tends to concentrate in one part of the city,” he said. “Even in that part, there are different blocks that are safe relative to unsafe. And other parts of Washington, D.C., have almost no homicides.”

Are American cities “dangerous” or “on fire?” Piquero said.

“My answer to that would be no,” he said. “I travel regularly. I have no problem visiting any city in the United States, whether it’s Memphis, Washington, New Orleans or New York City. Doesn’t matter to me. I just pay attention to my surroundings.”

It’s true that some cities are experiencing more of some types of crimes than others, Piquero said.

“There are still people who are affected by gun violence in their communities,” he said. “So, we have to be very mindful that people are still experiencing horrific events in their communities, but we are on the way forward in a positive way.”

Piquero, a professor at the University of Miami and a former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, said “that mismatch always exists” between what crime statistics say and how Americans perceive crime in the nation and in their cities.

The gap between the statistics and perception grew larger when crime spiked along with mistrust in all types of official information during the early part of the pandemic, he said.