Urban Policing and the Fear of Crime
The interplay between policing strategies and the fear of crime in urban areas has only recently garnered the attention it warrants. There are two main reasons for this. The  rst revolves around the relatively ambiguous or undeveloped exploration of the linkage between crime and the fear of crime. The second reason hinges on the  rst: amorphous knowledge of the crime–fear of crime nexus has compelled police agencies, until fairly recently, to target speci c crimes and only generally to address fear of crime. This paper focuses on the relationships between various policing strategies and fear of crime in urban areas. How does fear of crime affect policing and do policing strategies deliberately and/or unwittingly impact on residents’ fear of crime?
Perceptions of the local danger posed by crime: Race, disorder, informal control, and the police.
How do individuals make judgments about the safety of their neighborhood from crime? Using survey, census, police, and systematic social observation data from Seattle, this work suggests that residents draw on their perceptions of potential lurking dangers-especially in the form of physical or social disorder-and on their evaluations of the efficacy of local formal and informal social control efforts. In fact, residents draw on their evaluations of local social control efforts to determine how concerned they should be by perceptions of local disorder. The results question the importance of actual disorder relative to perceptions of disorder and suggest a new and indirect explanation for the link between the racial composition and perceptions of the danger posed by crime-in particular that race colors the way people view local disorder, the police, and the capacity for informal social control.
FEAR OF CRIME AND VICTIMIZATION AMONG THE ELDERLY IN DIFFERENT TYPES OF COMMUNITIES
The central issue examined here is the effect that community setting, relative to other factors, has on victimization and fear of crime among the elderly. Findings are from 1,410 in-home interviews in two retirement communities (age homogeneous) and two age-heterogeneous communities. Victimization of elderly is low in all communities, and although nearly half of the respondents have some fear of crime, the percentage reporting great fear of crime is low. Victimization and fear of crime are only weakly related to one another, and the regression model for each does not account for much variance. But both are significantly related to the type of community, and fear of crime is also related to other variables. The greater the age density of the community (greater concentration of elderly), the less crime and less fear of crime. Living arrangements, sociodemographic variables, and health status of the elderly as indicators of personal vulnerability to crime are not related to victimization, but are related to fear of crime, and effects of community setting on fear of crime are reduced when these other variables are taken into account. Suggestions for other, unmeasured, sources of variations and implications for future research are presented.