Community policing and fear of crime have been inextricably linked since 1981, when the evaluation of a field experiment in Newark, New Jersey, found that the presence of a foot patrol made neighborhood residents feel safer. Soon after, a foot patrol study in Flint, Michigan, found the same thing. Since then, it has become widely accepted that fear reduction is a legitimate police objective and that community policing is perhaps the best fear reduction strategy in the police arsenal.
Except for a few studies in the early to middle 1980s, however, research attention has not stayed focused on the connection between policing and fear of crime. Similarly, police program and strategy development targeted at fear reduction seems to have waned. Police departments today have only a few dated studies and little in the way of practical information to rely upon if they want to implement fear reduction initiatives.
Background
Fear of crime is a significant issue for Americans. A 2002 Gallup Poll determined that 62% of adults believed there was more crime than in the previous year, and a 2000 ABC Poll found that 80% of adults rated the crime problem in the United States as bad or very bad (though only 23% gave the same rating to crime problems in their own community). A 2000 Pew Survey reported that fewer than half of adults nationwide felt very safe when walking in their neighborhoods after dark, at school, or when at a shopping mall at night. Only two-thirds felt very safe in their homes at night.
Fear of crime has a range of deleterious effects on citizens and communities. Fear can cause individual citizens to restrict their work and leisure activities. It is especially likely to constrain the lives of those who feel most vulnerable, including the elderly, children, and women. Fear can cause neighborhoods to lose businesses or residents, contributing to a downward cycle of deterioration, and it can generally interfere with the vibrancy and vitality of any community. Public life is damaged when fear of crime causes citizens to stay at home or to frequent only highly protected enclaves.
In contrast to the few studies about how police or others might reduce fear of crime, a tremendous amount of research attention has been focused on the social and psychological phenomenon of fear of crime. It is recognized that fear of crime is multidimensional, including (1) feelings of fear, concern, and/or worry for self versus others, such as children and spouses; (2) feelings of fear, concern, and/or worry in one’s home, in one’s neighborhood, and elsewhere; (3) perceived likelihood of becoming a crime victim; and (4) reported behavioral effects such as going out at night, going out during the daytime, going downtown, etc.
It has also been documented that fear often increases during periods when crime is decreasing, that the most fearful individuals are often not those at most risk of crime victimization, and that the most fearful communities are not always the ones with the highest levels of crime. Generally, elderly citizens and women report higher levels of fear than middle-aged people and men. When included in surveys, teenagers often report surprisingly high levels of fear. The most consistent finding, though, has been the inconsistent correlation between actual crime and fear of crime.
Broken Windows
Fear of crime played a crucial role in the development of the influential “broken-windows” theory. When James Q. Wilson and George Kelling sought to explain why a foot patrol reduced fear of crime even though it did not reduce actual crime, they noted that when neighborhood residents complain about crime, they typically cite graffiti, abandoned cars, panhandlers, loud kids, and other types of minor crime and incivility, rather than robberies and assaults. They then posited that foot patrol officers are more likely than motorized patrols to address these kinds of low-level crime and disorder that seem to be uppermost in people’s minds. This explanation achieved face validity precisely because it built on the observed inconsistent correlation between levels of serious crime and fear of crime.
The broken-windows theory goes on to claim a second stage of effects—that when police address minor crime and disorder, residents are reassured and communities are strengthened, thus leading to reductions in serious crime as well. These second stage effects on the levels of serious crime are disputed by many researchers and social theorists. The underlying dynamic, though, that policing of minor crime and disorder can reduce fear of crime in a community, has become widely accepted.
COP and POP
For twenty years now, conventional wisdom has been that community policing and broken windows are the best approaches to reducing fear of crime. Because these conclusions were reached so quickly, however, few studies of specific techniques have been undertaken. Consequently, the evidence that specific community policing techniques, such as storefront offices, newsletters, door-to-door visits, citizen patrols, crime prevention programs, or bicycle patrol, are effective in reducing fear is largely missing. Similarly, how best to reduce fear of crime in settings where a foot patrol is not feasible, or in communities where the broken-windows approach is not applicable (such as upper-income neighborhoods without much disorder), has not received much concentrated attention.
A promising problem-oriented approach to fear reduction was implemented in Baltimore County, Maryland, in the early 1980s. That approach emphasized the necessity of analyzing the causes of elevated fear of crime in a neighborhood before designing and implementing responses. The Baltimore County experience revealed that a community’s fear of crime might be caused by one or a few neighborhood kids, by rumors (true or not) about a series of crimes, by disputes between ethnic groups, by one hate crime, by aggressive panhandlers, or by a variety of other specific factors. The range of causes was broad enough to demonstrate that any one-size-fits-all solution to fear of crime, including foot patrol or broken-windows policing, would not always apply. This realization led Baltimore County to adopt a problem-oriented approach to reducing fear of crime, relying first on careful identification and analysis of neighborhood-level problems, followed by tailored responses.
Reassurance Policing
The British police have recently implemented a strategy that they call “reassurance policing.” They noticed in the late 1990s that crime had declined for several years but the public’s fear and concern about crime had not followed suit. They termed this situation the ”reassurance gap” and set out to develop techniques for addressing the situation. In contrast to U.S. terminology, they elected not to emphasize fear of crime but rather risks, signals, neighborhood security, and community safety. The methodology is for locally assigned police officers to work jointly with local partners and the public to identify and target the specific problems that are of greatest concern to local people, using techniques such as environmental visual audits, tasking and coordinating groups, intelligence-oriented neighborhood security interviews, and key individual networks.
Reassurance policing seems to combine the best of broken-windows and problem-oriented policing. In particular, it relies on signal crimes theory, which holds that people’s fears and concerns are determined more by specific events and conditions than by the mass of all crime and disorder. It naturally follows that if police and communities address the specific events and conditions that people are concerned about, their levels of fear will decrease and their feelings of security will improve.
Fear of Terrorism
The next frontier for police may be fear of terrorism. Three observations come to mind. (1) There would seem to be a qualitative difference between the generalized feelings of fear and helplessness experienced by Americans after the attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the more routine fear of crime caused by disorder and incivility in the local neighborhood. (2) If this is true, then the techniques developed by police during the past twenty years to deal with fear of crime may not be applicable to fear of terrorism. Nevertheless, (3) fear is the very objective of terrorism (the aim of terror), and therefore limiting the impact of terrorism would seem to require limiting the fear that it creates. Whether this will develop as an important role for local and state police, as opposed to national investigation agencies, intelligence services, the military, and/or politicians, remains to be seen.
