Fear of Crime as a Social Fact

Fear of crime has emerged as a significant issue. Much research has investigated the extent and distribution of fear across such social statuses as age, sex, class, and race. Our research takes a different direction: it treats fear as a social fact which varies across sites and situations—fear between cities and the structural characteristics of cities which influence it, such as crime rates, the proportion of crime which is interracial, racial composition (percent nonwhite and segregation), and population size. Using data from the National Crime Survey (NCS) and various other sources, we regress fear of crime on these structural characteristics for 26 cities. For whites the analysis suggests that fear is affected by property crime rates and the proportion of crime which is interracial, and that racial composition indirectly affects fear by strongly influencing the proportion of crime which is interracial. For nonwhites the analysis suggests that fear is also affected by racial composition, but not by crime rates or the proportion of crime which is interracial. The paper explores the meaning of these findings for a structural theory of the fear of crime.