Fear of Crime

That is a very large gap and it is the reason fear of crime is studied separately from crime. What the surveys catch is two different things at once: everyday moments of worry when a person feels personally threatened, and a more diffuse or ambient anxiety about risk. Some people are also more willing than others to admit worry and vulnerability, which the measures cannot separate.

The answer about crime is often about something else

The definition itself carries the warning: fear of crime is not necessarily reflective of the actual probability of being a victim.

The material goes further and proposes that much of it is about something else. For a great many people the answer about crime is carrying something else: a judgement that the neighbourhood is coming apart, that nobody is in charge of standards any more, and that ordinary civility has thinned out. Worry about crime can be a way of saying that society is moving too fast and in the wrong direction.

That is a claim worth testing against the finding that follows.

Why neighbours read the same street differently

Two individuals living next door to each other and sharing the same neighbourhood can view local disorder quite differently.

Research from the United Kingdom suggests why. How much ambiguity a person will tolerate in what they see around them appears to move with how worried they are about where society is heading. Somebody with firm views on law and order, or convinced that their community has been declining for years, is likelier to see disorder around them once the actual state of the place has been accounted for. They are also more likely to link the physical cues they see to problems of social cohesion and declining informal social control.

Net of the actual conditions is the phrase that matters. The same street produces different readings depending on what the reader already believes is happening to society.

None of the everyday complaints is a crime

The material lists the things that generate the sense of unease, and none of them is a crime:

• young people hanging around
• poor community spirit
• low levels of trust and cohesion

The first of those has a fear of its own attached to it, and the article treats fear of youth, fear of street culture and fear of crime as long-standing features of Western culture that arrive together.

Incivilities of that kind are described as signalling a lack of conventional courtesies and low-level social order in public places, and they produce information about risk. Crime and the risk of it have become bound up with whether a place is judged stable, whether people are thought to agree about right and wrong, and whether the unofficial ways a neighbourhood keeps order are working.

How the crime multiplier works

Hearing about events and knowing people who have been victimised raises perceptions of risk, a process described as a crime multiplier: mechanisms in the residential environment that spread the impact of criminal events beyond the people they happened to.

Skogan's caution is the necessary one. Many residents of a neighbourhood know of crime only indirectly, through channels that may inflate, deflate or garble the picture.

Whether the media cause crime fear or follow it

Public perceptions are shaped in part by mass media coverage, and people take up circulating images of the criminal event: perpetrators, victims, motive, and representations of consequential, uncontrollable and sensational crimes.

The mechanism proposed is stimulus similarity. If a newspaper reader identifies with the victim described, or feels their own neighbourhood resembles the one described, the image of risk is personalised and becomes a concern about their own safety.

The causal direction is not settled and the source says so plainly: do people fear crime because a great deal of it is shown on television, or does television show crime because people fear it and want to see what is happening. Several studies find that media coverage of crime is selective and distorts the perception of the everyday world of crime, and the actual frequency of victimisation is described as tiny by comparison.

Some scholars press the point harder, arguing the fear does more damage than the offences do.

Why reassurance about crime rates rarely reaches the fear

Warr's argument in 1987 was that people do not carry one level of risk sensitivity around with them. It changes sharply between offences, tracking how bad each offence is taken to be.

People who feel especially vulnerable are more likely than others to report four things:

1. feeling less able to defend themselves
2. low self-efficacy
3. a belief that the consequences would be worse for them
4. a belief that they are a likelier target

Those four are separable, and only the last is a claim about probability. The other three are claims about what would follow, which is why reassurance about crime rates so rarely reaches the fear.

Where the worry hardens into avoiding particular streets it starts to look like Agoraphobia from the outside, and the two come from opposite places: one fears its own symptoms with no escape available, the other fears other people's intentions in particular places.

What turned fear of crime into a research field

The study of fear of crime has grown considerably since the late 1960s. David Garland notes, alongside rises in crime rates and experience, the weight of high-visibility events in the United States in the 1960s and in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, and the drug-related crimes of the 1980s committed by people often portrayed as desperate, driven and capable of mindless violence.