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Urban Fear and Its Roots in Place

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The Urban Fabric of Crime and Fear

Abstract

Where one lives seems to shape one’s worry about crime. Structural characteristics of neighbourhoods, visual signs of disorder and recorded crime have all been shown to have a direct and independent effect on individual levels of fear of crime. But when individuals evaluate their personal risk of crime, do they draw on the wider social and physical environment that extends beyond their own neighbourhood’s boundaries? In short, does the wider urban fabric matter? In this chapter, we link individual survey data (from a national probability sample of individuals resident in urban areas of England and Wales) to independent measures of neighbourhood demographic characteristics, visual signs of disorder and reported crime. Testing the so-called spatial autocorrelation, our findings indicate geographical spillover effects. Living near an area with high crime rate and visible signs of low-level disorder is associated with a higher probability of worry about crime, even holding constant one’s immediate neighbourhood context. People’s conceptions of their neighbourhood may be more complex than standard administrative boundaries, with people’s routine activities often taking them further than their own immediate locality. Equally, individuals may also assume that the crime and disorder that occurs next door can intrude on their own doorstep.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Community studies also focus on the importance of the relations between places in determining how neighbourhoods are defined by residents. Therefore, how people define their local neighbourhood can be thought of as partially a reflection of comparisons with the areas that surround them and their beliefs about how the neighbourhood is perceived by others (Chaskin 1998).

  2. 2.

    Based on a measure of the overall levels of fear in surrounding neighbourhoods.

  3. 3.

    All models were estimated in Mlwin using MCMC.

  4. 4.

    Because these measures are derived from sources independent of survey respondents, any observed associations with fear of crime will reflect actual neighbourhood effects rather than correlated measurement errors.

  5. 5.

    The original analysis of Brunton-Smith and Sturgis also included a measure of urbanicity. Given that we restrict our analysis to urban and inner-city locations, we omit this measure from the current analysis.

  6. 6.

    Police-recorded crime statistics have long been criticised for providing a biased picture of crime across police forces, with figures reliant on the activities of the police operating within each area (Skogan 1996; Brunton-Smith and Allen 2010). Following the introduction of the National Crime Recording Standard in 2002, which provided new guidelines to ensure that comparable recording practices were adopted across all police forces, there is now a strong justification for expecting that this measure will successfully identify variations across neighbourhoods.

  7. 7.

    Brunton-Smith and Sturgis (2011) link diversity directly to individual ethnicity, demonstrating that white residents were particularly influenced by the degree of ethnic diversity (in contrast, Black residents were identified as less fearful in more diverse neighbourhoods). This further supports social disorganisation theory, with Black residents in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods more likely to be living with other minority residents.

  8. 8.

    A large proportion of individuals who said they were ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ worried also reported not having worried once over the past 12 months. Answers given to intensity questions diverged strikingly from answers given to frequency questions. Of the 10% of the sample who said that they were ‘very worried’ about being robbed or mugged in the street, only 37% could recall having worried once or more during the past year (indeed only 7% said they worried at least once a week). Of the 12% of the sample who said that they were ‘very worried’ about being burgled, 61% could recall having worried once or more during the past year, but only 14% said they worried at least once a week.

  9. 9.

    These measures were included in the survey as part of an ESRC-funded project and therefore were not fielded to the full BCS sample.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK

    Ian Brunton-Smith

  2. Methodology Institute and the Mannheim Centre for Criminology, London School of Economics and Political Science, Columbia House, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK

    Jonathan Jackson

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  1. , Department of Urban Planning and Environ, Royal Institute of Technology, Drottning Kristinas väg 30, Stockholm, 10044, Sweden

    Vania Ceccato

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Brunton-Smith, I., Jackson, J. (2011). Urban Fear and Its Roots in Place. In: Ceccato, V. (eds) The Urban Fabric of Crime and Fear. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4210-9_3

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