I agree it may “feel” safer, but a lot of that, in my experience, comes down to not knowing what you don’t know about a place. For example, I would say, “oh, yeah, such and such place seems alright, not bad, I walked around and felt fine.” Locals would say something like, what, that’s nuts, we don’t go there unless we’re looking to get knifed, stay away from that area, it’s trouble”. Now, I also know that locals are prone to exaggeration too, but just goes to show that as an outsider we may enjoy naive safety.