Fear of Crime and Neighborhood Change

• NCJ Number: 103321
• Date Published: 1986
• Author(s): W Skogan
• Length: 27 pages
• Grant Number(s): 84-IJ-CX-0011
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Issue Overview

Annotation

This essay on the sources and consequences of fear of crime argues that certain critical events and conditions can shift neighborhoods from relative stability into a state of demographic and economic change. Once areas slip into the cycle of decline, feedback processes take control of conditions and increase levels of fear.

Abstract

Developments that have an indirect effect on increasing crime rates and fear of crime include neighborhood disinvestment, demolition and construction activities, demagoguery, and deindustrialization. Fear of crime in declining neighborhoods does not always accurately reflect actual crime levels, but is derived from primary and secondary knowledge of neighborhood crime rates, observable evidence of physical and social disorder, and prejudices arising from changes in neighborhood ethnic composition. Regardless of its source, fear of crime may cause individuals to withdraw physically and psychologically from community life and consequently weakens informal social controls and a neighborhood's mobilization capacity. Fear may also contribute to deterioration of business conditions, influence the importation and local production of delinquency and deviance, and stimulate changes in the composition of the resident population. Fear of crime, however, does not inevitably encourage or result in urban decline, as gentrification demonstrates. Approximately 80 references. (Author abstract modified)