NCJ Number
189266
Journal
International Journal of Police Science and Management Volume: 3 Issue: 1 Dated: Autumn 2000 Pages: 9-18
Date Published
2000
Length
10 pages
Annotation
Repeated monitoring at local levels of the fear of crime is becoming more common, as the demonstration of the effectiveness of local crime prevention -– and fear-of-crime prevention –- becomes more important.
Abstract
The ways of measuring the fear of crime were developed for deployment at the national level, and were not designed to assess the efficacy of preventive measures oriented to reducing it. Slight changes in the way that questions are asked, and more analytic interaction between the resulting datasets would allow the efficacy of local crime prevention measures to be judged more fairly. This project design was initially an open-ended investigation of people’s general feelings about crime; then compressed into survey questions capable of administration in a standard crime survey. All the research was conducted in Scotland. Survey attempts to assess levels of the fear of crime have been based historically on a small number of questions. It has not always been clear what these questions have been measuring. Data relating to levels of fear have typically been compressed into binary nominal variables. In the future, however, the analysis of locally collected police-force-wide crime survey data may generate enhanced benefits if some questions are repeated, and some new ones asked. This might enable different levels of worry/fear/unsafety/whatever to be pinpointed. In turn this might enable the monitoring and evaluation of fear-of-crime prevention initiatives to evaluate sensitively degrees of success, which have probably been achieved but are unrecognized using current measures. 5 tables, 14 notes, and 16 references.