Fear of Crime

Definitional ambiguity regarding fear of crime is pervasive; however, most researchers relate it to being afraid of becoming a victim of crime when frequenting public areas. Fear of crime gained national recognition in the 1960s as a viable topic of social research when it was identified as a pervasive social problem whose impact was detrimental to the structure of civilized society. Long acknowledged as a public malady, it is believed to result in communities characterized by loss of solidarity and communal spirit. Communities overcome by fear of crime are places where individuals isolate themselves from one another and no longer live as the social animals they are. Left unchecked, fear of crime can result in people becoming suspicious of one another such that they willingly give up freedom and support for democracy. Understanding fear of crime is important to the study of race and crime because many crime victims and residents of communities plagued with violent crimes and drugs experience higher levels of fear; thus fear of crime has greater impact on their lives.

The public's perception of crime and their fear of crime differ significantly from the reality of crime. This disjuncture between fear of crime and the reality of crime is understandable when one recognizes that the fear of crime has become politicized in much the same way as has crime. Fear of crime has been used to convince the public that crime is rampant and that a society free of crime and its fear must submit to social control policies designed to alleviate the problem. Although fear of crime can be resolved with social control measures, excessive social control can result in an unjustifiable surrender of freedom. Living in a democracy that strives for maximum individual liberty and freedom dictates that society surrender only the amount of freedom or liberty that is necessary for society to function in a stable and orderly fashion. The difficult task is to prescribe only the amount of social control needed to resolve the specific problem without unnecessary loss of freedom and liberty. Development of public policies that enhance rather than reduce quality of life is an issue that is basic to the scientific understanding of the fear of crime.

An examination of the relationship between Americans' fear of crime and politics indicates that the 1960s witnessed the beginning of the politicizing of the fear of crime with a government report titled The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, which reportedly became the basis for the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1967. Since that time, political strategists have exploited the public's suggestibility about crime and its capacity to incite human emotion. Evidence of its politicization is perhaps best exemplified through its past use in national presidential campaigns. For example, political strategists for Richard Nixon co-opted public fears stemming from the civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam in the [Page 285]1968 War on Crime campaign. Several years later, Reagan's strategists used the public's fear of crime in the War on Drugs campaign. In George H. W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign, political strategists co-opted the public's ignorance of the criminal justice system and the emotional nature of one criminal incident to create a fear of crime that the public associated with the Willie Horton case. In George W. Bush's 2004 campaign for the presidency, the public's fear of criminal victimization by terrorists was used not only as a political platform but also to justify a war, that is, the War on Terror.

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