Spatial dimensions of fear in a high-crime community: fear of crime or fear of disorder?

• Author: Kohm, Steven A.
• Position: Canada

Introduction

For evaluation purposes, community-based crime-prevention strategies often focus on possible reductions to fear of crime (Crawford 1998) as well as on various types of disorder or so-called quality-of-life concerns (Wilson and Kelling 1982; Skogan 1990; Matthews 1992). The measurement of crime, disorder, and levels of fear in communities has, therefore, become integral to assessing the efficacy of community crime prevention. In this article, I present the findings of a study of fear of crime in a high-crime, inner-city neighbourhood in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I propose a method of conceptualizing the relationship among disorder, crime, and fear that merges perceptual mapping with traditional measures of fear of crime and disorder. This analysis serves to help us understand how crime and fear of crime work to restrict individual activity and adds to a limited literature on the consequences of fear of crime. The results presented here provide support for the general link between fear of crime and disorder, while uncovering distinct spatial patterns of fear associated with crime and disorder.

I begin by outlining the salient research on fear of crime and the relationship among disorder, crime, and fear. Next, I provide details on the community context in which the research was carried out. Following this, I discuss levels of fear of crime, victimization, and disorder in the study area by contrasting the survey results with figures from the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS). This provides a jumping-off point for a consideration of the spatial dimensions of fear of crime revealed in a perceptual-mapping exercise carried out in conjunction with the local survey. I conclude by reflecting upon the significance of these spatial patterns of fear to the debate on the relationship among disorder, crime, and fear. The policy implications of these spatial patterns of fear are also discussed at this time.

Issues for measuring fear of crime

An increase in public fear of crime is thought likely to impair quality of life by restricting individual movement, decreasing general sociability, reducing mutual trust, and impeding informal social controls, all of which may ultimately lead to public streets becoming even more dangerous (Conklin 1975; Hale 1996; McIntyre 1967). This is of particular concern in lower-income, inner-city neighbourhoods, which tend to experience higher rates of crime than suburban neighbourhoods (Fitzgerald, Wisener, and Savoie 2004).

Since the 1960s, criminologists have grappled with methodological and conceptual issues stemming from treating fear of crime as an object of analysis. Fear of crime can be thought of as both an emotional and a physiological response to some imminent danger (Ferraro 1995: 24). As Mark Warr (2000) suggests, fear of crime is "an emotion, a feeling of alarm or dread caused by an awareness or expectation of danger" (453). Measuring dread and anxiety, however, is a complex task and difficult to tap through surveys, save perhaps in the case of a general assessment of worry. In one of the few studies to assess the intensity and frequency of worry, Farrall and Gadd (2004) found only a small percentage of respondents (15%) who worried about being victimized with any regularity. In fact, most surveys purporting to assess fear of crime use questions that ask people to conduct a risk assessment (How worried are you about ...?) or explore behavioural outcomes (Do you feel safe walking alone in your neighbourhood at night?).

Garofalo (1981) suggested that fear ought to be differentiated from worry in that fear is generally regarded as an emotional response to an imminent threat of violence, while worry is more cerebral and calculated and may better apply to concern about potential property loss or destruction. Similarly, Ferraro (1995) contends that much conceptual confusion stems from a failure to differentiate properly between fear of crime and perceived risk of crime. What many take to be measures of fear of crime are, in Ferraro's view, actually measures of a person's subjective assessment of personal risk. Qualitative inquiry and the ability to probe may better serve to assess the impact of fear.

More recently, Vincent Sacco (2005) has argued that investigators should distinguish three dimensions of fear of crime: the cognitive, emotional, and behavioural dimensions (125). Cognitive dimensions of fear of crime focus on individuals' subjective estimates of their likelihood of victimization, as in Ferraro's (1995) concept of risk of crime. Individuals' subjective assessment of risk can be regarded, to some extent, as right or wrong in that it can be compared to some known measure of risk, such as the reported rate of crime (Sacco 2005: 125). On the other hand, emotional dimensions relate to the affective dimensions of fear: How do people feel about crime? Unlike the cognitive dimensions, the emotional dimensions of fear cannot be judged wrong or right because they merely reflect individual feelings: We cannot say that a person feels more afraid than they ought to (Sacco 2005: 127).

Lastly (and most importantly for the present purposes), behavioural dimensions of fear of crime reflect what people actually do in response to crime or their subjective assessment of risk. For example, individuals may take defensive measures in response to crime, like installing burglar alarms, or precautionary actions, such as avoiding certain places or staying home at night. Behavioural responses are felt by some researchers to reflect the true consequences of fear. The connection between victimization, fear of crime, and defensive reactions is not as consistent as one might expect although some precautionary reactions have been identified in studies (Ferraro 1995; Bazargan 1994). Sacco (2005: 128) further cautions that, for a variety of reasons--faulty memory, a desire to please the interviewer, and so on--the behaviours that people report may not provide a complete or accurate measure of reality. For researchers, then, while survey questionnaires can elicit responses about an individual's personal risk assessment, a higher or lower personal risk assessment cannot provide information about how crime or fear of victimization actually affects or restricts day-today life. Qualitative inquiry is more suited to that task in that it allows the interviewer to probe an individual's behavioural responses to her/his perceived risk of victimization. In the case of a high-crime neighbourhood, responses may take the form of staying inside, going out only at certain times, or avoiding certain places. All of these responses may impinge on life satisfaction.

Rather than becoming mired in the debate about measures of the cognitive and affective dimensions of fear, the present study acknowledges the limitations of these sorts of questions and uses them only to add context to a more nuanced, qualitative understanding of the spatial-behavioural dimensions of fear. A strength of the present approach is that it combines traditional questions about fear and perceived risk with a qualitative, open-ended process that gets at the concrete impacts of fear of crime on life in one inner-city community.

Disorder, crime, and fear

The links among disorder, crime, and fear were most famously advanced by Wilson and Kelling (1982) in their metaphorical treatise on "broken windows." The now familiar sequence of events suggests the following: disorder (in both social and physical manifestations) takes root in a community, which sends the message to would-be offenders that informal community controls are weak in the area. Offenders are emboldened by the assumption that nobody cares, and the result is a rise in criminal offending. When crime and disorder become commonplace, residents withdraw from community life and not only does the problem get worse, but the community also begins to spiral downward from disorder to crime and finally into urban decline. As Wilson and Kelling (1982) put it,

[D]isorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the test of the windows will soon be broken. (31; original emphasis) Wilson and Kelling (1982) argue that this developmental sequence of disorder, crime, and decline can destroy any neighbourhood: "A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other's children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle" (31). In short, the argument is that disorder ought to be taken just as seriously as crime because disorder itself lies at the root of crime and inner-city decline.

The policy implications of broken windows are clear and prescriptive: Police are urged to emphasize their order-maintenance role by focusing on neighbourhood disorder rather than on crime control. As a result, the broken-windows metaphor has become perhaps the most "policy-influencing work in the crime and place literature" (O'Shea 2006: 174) and has very quickly become one of criminology's "folk wisdoms" (Matthews 1992: 20). While subsequent empirical work by Wesley Skogan (1990) found that there was "quite a strong tendency for crime and disorder to 'go together'" (74), other scholars have disputed the so-called inextricable link between crime and disorder (Matthews 1992; Sampson and Raudenbush 1999; Harcourt 2001; Harcourt and Ludwig 2006). For example, after re-analysing Skogan's data, Harcourt (1998) concluded that

there are no statistically significant relationships between disorder and purse-snatching, physical assault, burglary, or rape when other explanatory variables are held constant, and that the relationship between robbery and disorder also disappears when the five Newark neighbourhoods are set aside. In the end, the data do not support...