Methodology Institute

This article assesses the association between national welfare state regimes and public insecurities about crime across Europe. A multilevel analysis of respondents in 23 countries sampled in the 2004/05 European Social Survey finds a strong relationship between insecurities about crime and national levels of social expenditure and decommodification of social welfare policy. Some social protection measures are more strongly associated with national levels of fear of crime than others, especially public non-monetary support for children and families that strengthens the individual’s capacity to cope with problems on their own. We conclude with the idea that state-level social protections may buffer the development of widespread fear of crime by increasing self-efficacy and thereby mitigating various social and economic fears.

Fear of crime is widely seen as an unqualified social ill, yet might some level of emotional response comprise a natural defence against crime? This paper differentiates between a dysfunctional worry that erodes quality of life and a functional worry that motivates vigilance and routine precaution. A London-based survey shows that one-quarter of those individuals who said they were worried about crime also viewed their worry as something akin to a problem-solving activity: they took precautions; these precautions that made them feel safer; and neither the precautions nor the worries reduced the quality of their lives. Fear of crime can be helpful as well as harmful: some people are both able and willing to convert their concerns into constructive action.

Public confidence in policing is receiving increasing attention from UK social scientists and policy-makers. The criminal justice system relies on legitimacy and consent to an extent unlike other public services: public support is vital if the police and other criminal justice agencies are to function both effectively and in accordance with democratic norms. Yet we know little about the forms of social perception that stand prior to public confidence and police legitimacy. Drawing on data from the 2003/2004 British Crime Survey and the 2006/2007 London Metropolitan Police Safer Neighbourhoods Survey, this paper suggests that people think about their local police in ways less to do with the risk of victimization (instrumental concerns about personal safety) and more to do with judgments of social cohesion and moral consensus (expressive concerns about neighbourhood stability, cohesion and loss of collective authority). Across England and Wales the police may not primarily be seen as providers of a narrow sense of personal security, held responsible for crime and safety. Instead the police may stand as symbolic ‘moral guardians’ of social stability and order, held responsible for community values and informal social controls. We also present evidence that public confidence in the London Metropolitan Police Service expresses broader social anxieties about long-term social change. We finish our paper with some thoughts on a sociological analysis of the cultural place of policing: confidence (and perhaps ultimately the legitimacy of the police) might just be wrapped up in broader public concerns about social order and moral consensus.

Public insecurities about crime are widely assumed to erode individual well-being and community cohesion. Yet robust evidence on the link between worry about crime and health is surprisingly scarce. This paper draws on data from a prospective cohort study (the Whitehall II study) to show a strong statistical effect of mental health and physical functioning on worry about crime. Combining with existing evidence, we suggest a feedback model where worry about crime harms health, which in turn heightens worry about crime. We conclude with the idea that while fear of crime may express a whole set of social and political anxieties, there is a core to worry about crime that is implicated in real cycles of decreased health and perceived vulnerability to victimization. The challenge for future study is to integrate core aspects of the everyday experience of fear of crime into the more layered and expressive features of this complex social phenomenon.

This paper examines vulnerability and risk perception in the fear of crime. Past studies have often treated gender and age as proxies for vulnerability, and on the few occasions that vulnerability has been operationalised, there has been little agreement on the mechanisms that underpin perceived susceptibility. To develop a more theoretically-driven approach, the current study examines whether markers of vulnerability are associated with higher levels of fear through mediating assessments of likelihood, control and consequence. Females are found to worry more frequently than males partly because (a) they feel less able to physically defend themselves, (b) they have lower perceived self-efficacy, (c) they have higher perceived negative impact, and (d) they see the likelihood of victimisation as higher for themselves and for their social group. Younger people are also found to worry more frequently than older people, but differential vulnerability does not explain this association. Finally structural equation modelling shows that the effects on worry of physical defence capabilities, self-efficacy and perceived consequence are mostly mediated through judgements of absolute and relative risk. Conclusions focus on the implications of this finding for debates about the rationality of the fear of crime.

A large body of empirical research exploring emotional responses to crime in Europe, North America and elsewhere suggests that substantial proportions of the public worry about victimisation. The British Crime Survey (BCS) has asked questions exploring worry about crime of English and Welsh respondents since 1982, and in the 2003/2004 sweep of the BCS new questions were inserted into a subsection to explore the frequency and intensity of such fearful events. As well as illustrating the rationale of the new measurement strategy, this research note reports the results of the new questions in direct relation to the ‘old’ methods. The findings show that few people experience specific events of worry on a frequent basis, and that ‘old’ style questions magnify the everyday experience of fear. We propose that ‘worry about crime’ is often best seen as a diffuse anxiety about risk, rather than any pattern of everyday concerns over personal safety.

Public confidence in policing has received much attention in recent years, but few studies outside of the US have examined the sociological and social-psychological processes that underpin trust and support. This study, conducted in a rural English location, finds that trust and confidence in the police is shaped not by sentiments about risk and crime, but by evaluations of the values and morals that underpin community life. Furthermore, to garner public confidence the police must be seen first to typify group morals and values and second to treat the public with dignity and fairness. All these findings are consistent with the perspective that people are Durkheimian in their attitudes towards crime, policing and punishment – a perspective developed here in this paper.

This paper introduces the fear of crime to risk research, noting a number of areas for future interdisciplinary study. First, the paper analyses the career of the concept of fear of crime and the politics of fear. Second, it considers research and theory on the psychology of risk, and particularly a risk as image perspective and interplay between emotion and cognition. Third, it speculates how people learn about risk and suggests how to customise a Social Amplification of Risk Framework to fear of crime. Finally, the paper argues that fear of crime may be an individual response to community social order and a generalised attitude toward the moral trajectory of society. Each of these areas of discussion has implications for future theoretical developments within risk research; each highlights how risk research can contribute to the social scientific understanding of an important issue of the day.

This study assesses the scaling properties of some new measures of the fear of crime. The new conceptualization—a range of distinct but related constructs that constitute the fear of crime—comprises the interplay between emotion, risk perception and environmental perception. Data from a small-scale survey are analysed using confirmatory factor analysis showing good scaling properties of the multiple indicators. Two implications of the new conceptualization for the rationality of the fear of crime are discussed. First, perceptions of the risk of crime seem to be a product of how individuals make sense of their social and physical environment. Second, the fear of crime may constitute such evaluations of community cohesion and moral consensus as well as specific experiences of ‘fear’ of ‘crime’—a way of seeing as well as a way of feeling. The conclusions consider ramifications for the rationality of the fear of crime, particularly in the context of reassurance policing in England and Wales.

Concerns over the impact of debt on participation in higher education (HE) have dominated much of the debate surrounding the most recent reforms of financial support for full-time students in England, including the introduction of variable tuition fees. Yet few studies have attempted to explore this issue in a statistically robust manner. This article attempts to fill that gap. It examines the relationship between prospective HE students' attitudes to debt, and their decisions about whether or not to enter HE. Using data derived from a survey of just under 2,000 prospective students, it shows how those from low social classes are more debt averse than those from other social classes, and are far more likely to be deterred from going to university because of their fear of debt, even after controlling for a wide range of other factors. The article concludes that these findings pose a serious policy dilemma for the Westminster government. Their student funding policies are predicated on the accumulation of debt and thus are in danger of deterring the very students at the heart of their widening participation policies.

This paper argues that to ignore the social meaning that constitutes public perceptions of crime is to offer a shallow picture of the fear of crime – and survey research need not do either. Examining the symbolic links between community cohesion, disorder and crime, this study suggests that perceptions of risk are explicably situated in individuals’ understandings of the social and physical make-up of their neighbourhood, as well as vulnerability and broader social attitudes and values. Furthermore, an explanation is offered for recent research that suggests the prevalence of fear of crime has been exaggerated. Namely, survey responses may articulate both ‘experienced’ fear—summations of the frequency of emotion—and ‘expressive’ fear, or attitudes regarding the cultural meaning of crime, social change and relations, and conditions conducive to crime.

Abstract: This chapter provides a critical overview of research on public insecurities about crime. Spanning several decades and continents, this body of work tends to focus on negative emotional responses (fear, worry or anxiety) to the threat of common crime categories (burglary, theft, assault). First, the chapter charts the emergence of the fear of crime from the policy-relevant victimisations surveys of the 1960s in America, to its transformation into a staple feature of government statistics and object of academic significance. Despite the topic‘s high status however, it has remained a slippery research subject - with real methodological complexities at its core. We outline some important breakthroughs from feminist and ‗left realist‘ scholars, and highlight advances using experience-based questions and the ‗expressive‘ dimensions of public insecurities about crime. Recognising the value of interdisciplinary research, we review what criminologists studying the fear of crime might learn from the ‗psychology of survey response‘, studies in ‗everyday emotions‘, and the better use of quantitative techniques and longitudinal data to capture the multi-dimensional and dynamic nature of fear.

In this chapter I argue that a comprehensive account of the fear of crime needs to bridge these two levels of analysis. I present a tentative and briefly sketched out theoretical treatise that tries to do just that. In order to integrate and develop disparate insights I draw upon an area of interdisciplinary research that has so far gone untapped within criminology: risk perception. Working within what Thompson & Dean (1996) call a contextualistic formulation of risk, the framework considers the psychology of risk; how risk is constructed and information circulated; the institutional processes and interests at play in amplification and attenuation; and the social meaning of crime that infuses and inflects public perceptions of risk.

This paper considers the psychology of risk perception in worry about crime. A survey-based study replicates a long-standing finding that perceptions of the likelihood of criminal victimization predict levels of fear of crime. But perceived control and perceived consequence also play two roles: (a) each predicts perceived likelihood; and (b) each moderates the relationship between perceived likelihood and worry about crime. Public perceptions of control and consequence thus drive what Mark Warr defines as ‘sensitivity to risk.’ When individuals perceive crime to be especially serious in its personal impact, and when individuals perceive that they have little personal control over the victimization event occurring, a lower level of perceived likelihood is needed to stimulate worry about crime.

This paper summarizes ‘procedural justice’ approaches to policing, contrasting these to the more politically dominant discourse about policing as crime control. It argues that public trust in policing is needed partly because this may result in public cooperation with justice, but more importantly because public trust in justice builds institutional legitimacy and thus public compliance with the law and commitment to the rule of law. Some recent survey findings are presented in support of this perspective.

One of the first actions of the new Home Secretary was to scrap public confidence as the single performance indicator of policing in England and Wales. But public trust and confidence will remain important to policing policy and practice. Trust and confidence can (a) encourage active citizen participation in priority setting and the running of local services, (b) make public bodies more locally accountable and responsive, and (c) secure public cooperation with the police and compliance with the law. Analysing survey data from London we find that overall 'public confidence' condenses a range of complex and inter-related judgements concerning the trustworthiness of the police. We argue that confidence summarises a motive-based trust that is rooted in a social alignment between the police and the community. This social alignment is founded upon public assessments of the ability of the police to be a 'civic guardian' who secures public respect and embodies community values (Loader & Mulcahy, 2003). By demonstrating their trustworthiness to the public, the police can strengthen their social connection with citizens, and thus encourage more active civic engagement in domains of security and policing.