If you look at the 2013 paper from this same group you will find that this is exactly what they did (http://pulse.media.mit.edu/papers/).
Even further, they used geospatial statistics techniques to control for the effects of the income, area, and population in an area, and hence, developed a model that incorporated not only perception, but also demographics, when predicting the location of homicides.
>StreetScore is a machine learning algorithm that predicts how safe the image of a street looks to a human observer. We trained StreetScore to predict perceived safety using a 'training dataset' consisting of 3,000 street views from New York and Boston and their rankings for perceived safety obtained from Place Pulse — a crowdsourced survey.
Even further, they used geospatial statistics techniques to control for the effects of the income, area, and population in an area, and hence, developed a model that incorporated not only perception, but also demographics, when predicting the location of homicides.