APPENDIX 13
Supplementary memorandum submitted by
Barrie Irving, Police Foundation
FEAR OF
CRIME: THEORY,
MEASUREMENT AND
APPLICATION
INTRODUCTION
The Police Foundation was recently asked by
the ACPO to convene a seminar of experts on the "Fear of
Crime" concept to:
— Examine the state of knowledge in
this field
— Provide guidance about "what
works"
— Comment on the mention of "Fear
of Crime" in the recent White Paper "Policing a New
Century: a blueprint for reform" in the light of the recent
statement of Ministerial priorities sent to the ACPO.
At short notice and mindful of the timetable
of the Home Affairs Committee for consideration of the White Paper,
the Foundation took soundings from a number of academics and ultimately
brought together Geoffrey Pearson (Goldsmiths); Chris Hale (Kent);
Martin Innes (on behalf of Nigel Fielding—Surrey) and Tim
Hope (Keele). Extensive advice and written material was also made
available by Jason Ditton (Sheffield and Glasgow).
The conclusion of the seminar was that the Police
Foundation should, as far as practicable in the time available,
synthesise the relevant arguments for the Home Affairs Committee
and act as a conduit for appropriate published supporting material.
THE WHITE
PAPER
The committee will be aware of the way in which
"Fear of Crime" features in the "Blueprint for
Reform". The summary point which provides the sense of urgency
for this evidence is that Police Forces are being asked to reduce
"Fear of Crime" across all sectors of society (see attached
quotation from Ministerial Priorities communication to ACPO).
Indeed, it is in part to enhance their ability to do so that structural
working practice, supervisory and sanction reforms are being mooted.
The logical implication of this new and clearly
stated responsibility is that "Fear of Crime", its incidence
and prevalence in the population, indeed its epidemiology, can
be charted with sufficient rigour to allow police performance
in this respect to be assessed along with other more traditional
police tasks like reducing and detecting crime.
It is the considered view of those that the
Foundation has consulted that neither the concept of "Fear
of Crime" nor the theory behind it, nor its operationalisation
within the British Crime Survey and similar surveys, are sufficiently
intellectually or practically reputable for Her Majesty's Government
to rely on any or all of them in the ways implied by the White
Paper and the statement of Ministerial Priorities when taken together.
The advice given to the ACPO was therefore to
argue strongly against any attempt to use British Crime Survey
or other similar measures of "Fear of Crime" as a means
of evaluating police performance.
The seminar recognised, however, that there
is a political imperative to respond to current levels of public
anxiety about crime, and that the police and interested academics
have a responsibility not only to expose misguided thinking in
this area but also to propose intellectually sound and practicable
ways of understanding the causes of that anxiety sufficiently
to enable the police and other agencies to control it.
CHALLENGING THE
CONCEPT
It takes only a moment of reflection to realise
that fear is a complex emotion that is treated in a universally
cavalier fashion in common parlance. Fear is a component of excitement
in sport and leisure; it serves to alert us to incipient threat
(actual or perceived) and is therefore a guardian emotion and
both neurophysiologically and experientially it is closely allied
to anger and rage.
While many psychologists have worked with the
concept of fear using survey methodology, reputable approaches
have usually been cumbersome and could not readily be incorporated
into population screening instruments like the British Crime Survey.
Sociological and criminological investigations
of "Fear" are also in danger of straying across disciplinary
borders: there are a number of psychiatric conditions that predispose
sufferers to express inordinate levels of anxiety in all areas
of their lives. It is currently estimated that around 4-6 per
cent of the US population suffer from a psychiatric disorder known
as "General Anxiety Syndrome."
The public's experience of the world is heavily
affected by exposure to multi-channel media activity that can
have, via fiction, fact and "faction" a devastating
perceptual impact especially if national media sources set agenda
that are then reinforced by local level broadcasting and print.
These channels of mass communication, largely
commercially owned and operated, are driven by audience/readership
figures. Stories and presentations that appeal to instinctive
emotional drives (sex and self-preservation) tend to win audiences
and readers.
When a member of the public is asked by a pollster
about "Fear" and "Fear of Crime", there is
a complex mass of experience and processing of that experience
brought to play in answering what appears to be a simple question.
The questioner, the survey analyst and the user of the results
are in danger of remaining blithely unaware of what lies behind
the answers.
To its credit the British Crime Survey has attempted
to tie down what can be inferred from the public's responses to
questions about "Fear" but as we shall see these efforts
have not been successful.
Jason Ditton and a number of well-known academic
colleagues have been reflecting on these issues. The consensus
would appear to be that the puzzling characteristics of "Fear
of Crime" research results owe more to the poor quality of
the concept and its operationalisation in surveys than to any
underlying reality.
These puzzling characteristics include:
— Reported prevalence does not reflect
differing local circumstances in any logical way
— Coherent attempts to change levels
of "Fear" have either no effect or a paradoxical effect
("fear" goes up)
— "Fear" is negatively related
to risk
The Police Foundation seminar and Dr Ditton
agreed that the most parsimonious way of explaining these odd
results is to look at what a respondent being surveyed is being
asked to do. First, respondents are asked to guess the likelihood
that something will happen to them and, having done that, they
are asked to imagine the damage they would sustain if the threat
became a reality. On the basis of that complex process, respondents
then have to infer what effect this hypothetical experience would
have on their ambient emotional state.
Valid and reliable information is unlikely to
emerge from this decisional maze. People are poor estimators of
probability especially where crime is concerned and imagining
damage is a hugely idiosyncratic process. Finally, ambient emotional
states (anxious, euphoric, happy, sad etc) are mostly physiologically
determined—reactions to individual events feed the overall
state but in highly complex ways. Psychiatrists do not know why
some people succumb to post traumatic stress disorder while others
who suffered the same trauma do not.
Professor Anthony Giddens has hypothesised that
science and modern technology have removed old certainties and
produced an anxious generation. This anxiety can be counter-productive
but it can also be nothing more than a fashion—post modern
angst. Whatever it is, it probably feeds the tendency to say yes
to fear of crime researchers.
Geoffrey Pearson reminded the group of the way
in which "respectable fears" have been generated in
every generation. But in the last twenty years there appears to
have been an increasing tendency for something now called "Fear
of Crime" to establish itself as a persistent and ubiquitous
component of UK and Western angst.
A few possible explanations of this phenomenon
need to be considered:
— Fear of crime is politically popular:
it appears to provide governments with a new moral target and
a well-established arsenal to attack it.
— Fear of crime can be found almost
anywhere at any time—it is a research-friendly concept.
(A review in 1995 found 200 published articles: Ditton's more
recent review quotes 600.)
— The quirky nature of the research
findings allows an enormous range of popular interpretations.
— The findings can easily be used to
support police lobbying for additional investment.
"Fear of Crime" as a distinct field
of criminological research can be traced back to Lyndon Johnson's
1967 Crime Surveys. Originally the level of public concern about
crime was interpreted as an indicator of the importance politician's
should attach to crime rate. High levels of concern were taken
to imply the need to reduce crime levels. They were not read as
a diagnosis of a public malaise to be treated in its own right.
Since then there has been an extraordinary and
largely unnoticed reinterpretation both here and in the U.S. The
public are now treated as if they suffer from a condition that
is, in some important respects, independent of crime and detection
rates. It is out of this transmogrification that the police `reassurance'
strategy and the recent statement of Ministerial Priorities has
been born.
SOME KEY
RESEARCH OUTPUTS
Regardless of local variations and changing
rates of crime a decade of "Fear of Crime" research
results can be summarised thus:
Table 1
| 1. | The number of respondents who claim that they are a bit worried or very worried about burglary is 60±5 per cent.
|
| 2. | The number of respondents who claim that they feel a bit or very unsafe when walking alone in their area at night is 35 per cent±6 per cent.
|
| 3. | The number of respondents who claim that they feel a bit or very unsafe when at home alone at night is 10 per cent±1 per cent.
|
Source—Ditton J, 2002
Table 1 is derived from BCS reports, 1994 and 1996, and Scottish
Crime Survey reports for 1984, 1992 and 1996. DITTON, Jason, FARRALL,
Stephen, BANNISTER, Jon and GILCHRIST, Elizabeth, "Crime
surveys and the measurement problem: Fear of crime". Ch.
8, pp. 142-156 in V. Jupp, P Davies and P. Francis (eds) Doing
criminological Research, 2000, Safe, London.
The impact of investment on reducing fear of crime is paradoxical.
Table 2
| | 1 Low investment
| 2 Medium investment
| 3 High investment |
4 No investment |
| Before-After per cent change ActualBurglary
| -10 | -22
| -43 | +3
|
| Before-After per cent change Worry aboutBurglary
| +3 | +2
| +7 | -4
|
| Before-After per cent change in Burglaryworry by those Aware of anti-Burglary action
| +10 | -6
| -9 |
|
Table 2 is taken from Ekblom, P., Law, H, and Sutton, M (1996)
Safe Cities and Domestic burglary, HO Research Study No
164, London, HO RSD; derived from pages xiv, 13 and 70.
While target hardening investment against burglary works—it
tends to be associated with increasing worry about burglary. The
only logical result is obtained from those who are aware of the
investment and then only if investment is medium or high. To the
cynical eye this looks like a reaction to a campaign not the underlying
reality.
What is not in this table, but exemplifies the state of the
"Fear of Crime" research industry, is the worry reported
by those who live in areas where anti-burglary investment has
been high but who are unaware of it—they actually became
more worried. If this had been a proper double-blind experiment
only those unaware of what was being done to them would feature
in the results!
Ditton has also exposed the danger of assuming that the public
know what makes them feel less anxious (safer?). He reports the
result of an extensive investigation of street-lighting introduction
using a before and after test of estimates of effectiveness and
experience of reality.
Table 3
| | Will (before)
| Did (after) |
| Will/did people's fear of crime decline? |
69 per cent | 25 per cent
|
| Will/did the amount of crime decline? | 59 per cent
| 17 per cent |
Table 3 is taken from DITTON, Jason, FARRALL, Stephen, BANNISTER,
Jon and GILCHRIST, Elizabeth, "Crime surveys and the measurement
problem: Fear of crime". Ch. 8, pp. 142-156 in V. Jupp, P
Davies and P. Francis (eds) Doing criminological Research, 2000,
Safe, London.
Experts in the field agree that hypothetical questioning
is a dangerous activity, especially when questions come armed
with official sanction. The British Crime Survey tends to favour
using "going out at night or not" as a test situation.
Yet methodologists have not really grappled with the problem that
most people do not, in fact, go out in the streets at night and
therefore cannot easily report on this experience.
Again the drive to extract data is indicated by the device
of asking those who don't go out what they think they would feel
like if they did. The way the questions are being asked is tending
to drive the results.
There are, however, sound investigations of what worries
people. Top worries by age group have been reliably charted as
follows:
Table 4
| | 12-17 years
| 18-25 years | 26-40 years
| 41-65 years | 65+ years
|
| 1st | Exams 60 per cent
| Money 69 per cent | Money 64 per cent
| People 63 per cent | Health 64 per cent
|
| 2nd | Money 31 per cent
| Exams 41 per cent | People 49 per cent
| Health 47 per cent | People 37 per cent
|
| 3rd | People 20 per cent
| Job 25 per cent | Job 38 per cent
| Money 38 per cent | Ageing 37 per cent
|
| 4th | Future 19 per cent
| People 22 per cent | Health 28 per cent
| Job 17 per cent | Lonely 23 per cent
|
| 5th | R/ships 18 per cent
| Future 19 per cent | R/ships 13 per cent
| World 13 per cent | Money 22 per cent
|
Table 4 is taken from Aind de Roiste (1996) "Sources
of Worry and Happiness in Ireland", Irish Journal of Psychology,
17 (3), pp. 193-212.
In a straight race, crime in the UK does not feature and
this is also true for middle class Americans. However, it is interesting
to note that if researchers throw away their disreputable questioning
techniques and ask people to talk about their reactions to crime—the
overriding emotion associated with Burglary, Car crime, Assault
and Vandalism is anger, with being made "Afraid" coming
a poor second.
The drive to extract "Fear of Crime" value from
survey data has also infected some reporting behaviour. In particular,
"don't knows" and "no answers" are increasingly
excluded from analysis and categories of partial agreement/disagreement
are combined in self-serving ways. Examples have been catalogued
by Ditton and others but this practice was noted by all participants
in the Police Foundation seminar.
The context of asking about "Fear of Crime" also
affects results and in an incisive critique Ditton and colleagues
used this phenomenon to check consistency of results, when typical
"Fear of Crime" questions were asked of the same people
at different times.
Table 5
| First Question | Second Question
|
| | Not at all+ not much
| Quite a bit+ a lot |
|
| Not at all + hardly ever | 46
| 13 | 59 |
| Some of the time + all of the time | 18
| 23 | 41 |
| | 64 | 36
| 100 |
Table 5 is discussed in FARRALL, Stephen and DITTON, Jason
(1999) "Improving the measurement of attitudinal response:
An example from a crime survey", International Journal of
Social Research Methodology, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 55-68.
The researchers then expanded this technique and awarded
worry scores to subjects depending on consistency over a number
of questions and answers. This produced a more or less normal
distribution of worry with very few being worried all the time
or never. Using the technique to gauge the proportion of the population
who worry consistently about three major crime types, less than
1 per cent fell into the extreme category. Expanding their critique
to the issue of "staying in" and "going out",
Ditton and colleagues carefully disaggregated the usual BCS questions
to discover the real shape of the underlying distribution—while
this research still suffers from the methodological problems detailed
above, it starts to put the "Fear of Crime" into perspective.
Table 6
| Row |
| n | per cent
|
| 1 | Feel safe in, stay in, feel safe out
| 627 | 57
|
| 2 | Feel safe in, go out, feel safe out
| 206 | 19
|
| 3 | Feel unsafe in, go out, feel safe out
| 8 | 1
|
| 4 | Feel safe in, stay in, feel unsafe out
| 152 | 14
|
| 5 | Feel safe in, go out, feel unsafe out
| 26 | 2
|
| 6 | Feel unsafe in, stay in, feel safe out
| 14 | 1
|
| 7 | Feel unsafe in, stay in, feel unsafe out
| 45 | 4
|
| 8 | Feel unsafe in, go out, feel unsafe out
| 14 | 1
|
Table 5 is discussed in FARRALL, Stephen and DITTON, Jason
(1999) "Improving the measurement of attitudinal response:
An example from a crime survey", International Journal of
Social Research Methodology, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 55-68.
The conclusion is that around 8 per cent of the subjects
have an 'unsafety' problem—not really the stuff of moral
panics.
Clearly rows 5 and 6 are either responding to special circumstances
(domestic violence, neighbour problems) that would be difficult
to attack with rational policy. Row 7 and 8 do have a major problem
but they fall within the prevalence range for General Anxiety
Syndrome and therefore may not be an appropriate case for Criminal
Justice System treatment. Membership of these groups is unrelated
to age, gender or previous experience—as we would expect
if these people are in fact suffering from generalised anxiety
syndrome.
THE RESEARCH
CONSENSUS
The consensus of the Police Foundation seminar was that the
concept of "Fear of Crime" has become by slow steps
not only intellectually disreputable but practically absurd. That
this is now so is just as much the fault of researchers as politicians,
civil servants and police, all of whom have some vested interest
in keeping the poor idea alive.
Up until the publication of the White Paper on Police Reform
and the associated statement of Ministerial Priorities, there
was no particular harm in the concept and its surrounding academic
political and Criminal Justice System flummery. However, it was
felt that when an honourable profession is placed in danger of
being seriously assessed on its ability to reduce fear of crime
across all sectors of society, then it is time to call a halt.
The seminar recognised that it might be difficult at this
late stage and in view of the Police Service's determined pursuit
of a "reasonable agenda" based on the "Fear of
Crime" concept, to jettison this Ministerial priority entirely.
It was also thoroughly appreciated that behind "Fear
of Crime" lay a real and complex concern to which the Criminal
Justice System and the Government ought to respond.
It was agreed, therefore, that the ACPO and seminar participants
through the Police Foundation ought, as a matter of urgency, to
prepare an alternative strategy based on firmer philosophical
and methodological foundations. The support of the Home Affairs
Committee for this endeavour is sought.
A POST-SCRIPT
ON THE
WAY FORWARD
There is one encouraging strand of research in this general
field that focuses on using local informants from a variety of
backgrounds to identify physical sources of risk and threat in
time/space. Geographers have known for some time that establishing
settled connection with an area involves learning not only about
local amenities (opportunities for benefit) but also about risks
and threats that need to be avoided or protected against.
The seminar agreed that the relatively new partnership arrangements
and the availability of local crime management infrastructure
presented an unparalleled opportunity to map commonly identified
sources of threat and risk at ward level.
Mapping threat/risk in this way would help to define the
relative burden of responsibility falling on various agencies:
(Housing, Social Services, Police, National Health and Education).
While some of this threat mapping would echo crime/incident mapping—several
new dimensions would probably be added.
The Foundation's own experience as consultants on data sharing
in a London Borough suggests that Housing, Education and Social
Services might have very considerable roles to play in diagnosing
and treating threat hot-spots that now tend to be seen solely
in terms of police responsibility.
Mapping at ward level would nevertheless feed directly into
the police reassurance enterprise. However, hard data on threat
would do much to specify, prioritise and energise local police
efforts.
The Police Foundation, for its part, will continue to work
with the ACPO, the members of the seminar and geographers at University
College London to try and develop an appropriate methodology for
this enterprise.
Barrie Irving, Police Foundation
February 2002
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