Criminology: Crime Prevention, Disorder and Community Safety - Essay Example

?As the percentage of terrorism is increasing in the world so as the fear of victimization among people; Williams (2000) d: “Thus there is no consensus on a "best" measure for fear of crime, or even on exactly what may be measured by a particular approach. The most common approach to fear of crime measurement uses some variation of the National Crime Survey's "walking in the neighborhood" questions, which offer a very general approach to crime fear. Few researchers have been concerned with the exact type of fear they are tapping and those few have generally attempted to make the distinction in an ex-post-facto fashion. In reality, the term "fear of crime" is an artifact of a broad interest in what is presumed to be the psychological effect of crime. As a result, there is no clear rationale behind its use.” Researches indicate that people especially women fear crime more than men but they do not report it quite often so it can be concluded that the actual statistics of women victimization is higher than reported. Stanko (1992) observed that according to the surveys, males are more capable of being victimized than women despite of the fact that women show more insecure behavior. It is perceived that the fear is irrational and unrealistic. However it should be noted that crimes happened with women are not reported all the time as women are more sensitive to their social image than man thus less willing to report that they are being victimized. Young (1988: 174) wrote that: "Domestic crisis and sexual crimes are less likely to enter the statistics than property crimes, which leads to the systematic underestimation of crimes against women". It should also be considered that researches and surveys only consist of crimes happened in front of witnesses or road-crimes. Women are often victimized within the walls of their own homes and do not report to any one. Warr (1984, 1985) investigates that as women are scared more of sexual assault than men so the general fear gets mix with the fear of sexual assault and heighten their insecurity. He also suggested that women's fear of victimization should be differently analyzed than men as men rarely fears sexual assault. Keane (1995) suggested that women’s fear of crime consists of two fears basically i.e. concrete fear and formless fear. Concrete fears are the fears of some specific crimes while formless fear is general fear or fear that can not be associated with some specific crimes. This theory of Keane has an underlying assumption that some crimes are more fear inducing than others. For women sexual assault is more fear inducing than any type of theft or property damages. As per Keane, women reported both types of fears whether concrete or formless but younger females reported more of a concrete fear than elderly ladies. It can be deduced that elder age feels more formless fear than younger. Elders are more sensitive and insecure in perceiving crimes and have less tolerance for it. According to the researches of Warr (1985) and Ferraro (1996), women perceive rape as much serious crime as a murder. After an extensive research work by Ferraro (1996), he concluded that elder women and younger women both report the highest level of fear however the basis of fear can be different entirely. The elder women are more sensitive about the risk of financial damage, risk of being injured or loss of life while younger women are more scared of sexual assault. The fear of younger women is mostly comprises of rape or harassment and is more dominant in them than any other fear. The main difference in the reasons of fear is the fear of sexual assault. If this fear will be excluded from the fear of crime in women, the difference between male and female fears of being victimized will be reduced. Warr (1985) also reported that women who are below the age of 35 fear more of sexual assault. As per him, as the girls become older, their fear increases and as they become women and start to age the fear diminishes. However as per Kennedy and Silverman (1984), as they become more elder, the fear started to rise again because of the knowing of physical weakness and vulnerabilities. It is studied that elder people fear more about physical injuries and loss of their precious possessions. Some elder people are almost neurotic about the savings of their entire life and do not want to loss it at any cost. According to the Warr (1987), there is more sensitiveness to fear of victimization if we classify the victims as per the type of crime and the characteristics of the individual. A bad experience of victimization of theft or robbery may heighten the fear of victimization. Keane (1995) reports that “Experiencing specific offences may be a better predictor of fear than others. In particular, along with more serious personal offences such as sexual assault, crimes that posed even the threat of sexual assault; such as being followed, getting obscene phone calls, or indecent exposure also elicited high fear responses.” As per the research of Macmillan, Nierobisz, and Welsh (2000), harassment from people you do not know is more common and also more extensive than harassment from non-stranger, and it results in inducing high fear of being victimized. Since a very long time, survey researches have been made to understand the nature of victimization and the level of fear among people. However, the survey research questions depend on the objective of researches (see Ferraro 1995; Ferraro and LaGrange 1987; DuBow, McCabe, and Kaplan 1979). Some survey questions emphasis on the time of the day in which people feel more fear like fear during the day time or fear during night time. Some surveys put their attention on the surroundings like area in which you feel fear and area in which you feel safe. Some focus on surroundings like the level of fear when alone or when with other people. These questions are generic and do not highlight the nature of fear. A man has different reasons to answer such questions while a woman has entirely different reasons for answering the same questions. However one question has become a standard for measuring fear of crime: “Is there anywhere near where you live-that is, within a mile-where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?” This question has become conventional not because it was chosen by social scientists, but because it has been used by the Gallup Organization and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) to measure fear since the 1960s. During the past three decades, approximately 40 to 50 percent of Americans surveyed each year have responded affirmatively to this question (for a review, see Warr 1995a). The Gallup/NORC item has been criticized by Ferraro (1995) on the grounds of being hypothetical and limitedness to the time factor. Neither it mentions crime nor the viewer type but it only crudely measures the level of fear. In fairness, the measured prevalence of fear obtained with this item is not radically different from that measured in other national surveys (see Warr 1995a), and the routine use of the item permits longitudinal comparisons of fear, if only in relative terms. Much deeper issues are raised by questions of this kind, however. Almost two decades ago, Warr and Stafford (1983) asked residents of Seattle to report their everyday fear, not of “crime” in general, but of a variety of specific offenses ranging from violent crimes like homicide, rape, and robbery to various property and public order offenses. To generate strong fear, an offense must be perceived as both serious and likely to occur. Residential burglary is the most feared crime in the United States because it is viewed as both relatively serious and rather likely. Murder, on the other hand, is perceived to be very serious but unlikely to occur. Even today, the rank order of offenses that emerged from their analysis remains startling to many. Murder, for example, was low on the list of fears, while residential burglary outranked all other offenses on fear. Warr and Stafford demonstrated that these findings were not anomalous or even counterintuitive. The discussion thus far leads to a tentative conclusion that the public exaggerates the risk of serious criminal victimization. It is worthwhile to reiterate that this situation, if true, is the most desirable problem to remediate; fear can legitimately be reduced without any attendant increase in the risk of victimization. Let us turn now to the second question posed earlier. Assuming that fear ought to be regulated, can it be regulated, and, if so, how? There are two general approaches to this problem. Contrary to common assumption, they showed, fear is not determined simply by the perceived seriousness of an offense. Instead, the degree of fear attached to particular crimes is a multiplicative function of the perceived seriousness and perceived risk of the offenses. One might be called self corrective, meaning that it focuses on means to alter the way that crime is presently depicted in the mass media. The other approach could be described as counteractive, meaning that it attempts to discount or replace messages promulgated through the mass media. Let us begin with the former approach, bearing in mind that media news coverage is the public’s primary source of information about crime. Assuming that such coverage substantially affects public perceptions of crime, how might news coverage of crime is changed for the better? Consider the characteristics of everyday news coverage. Crime is ordinarily reported in the form of isolated, discrete incidents (“three young adults were injured today in a standoff with police”) or occasionally as counts (“thus far this year, 13 robberies have been reported to the police”). (See, for example, Graber 1980.) These reported events are not a complete or exhaustive list of all crimes. Instead, they are selected from a much larger pool of crime events available for reporting. What is more, the selection process is not random or representative, but quite the opposite. Not only are violent crimes disproportionately emphasized (particularly homicides), but crimes may be selected merely because they are odd or unusual, involve prominent persons or public figures, or fit a reestablished journalistic theme like “crimes against the elderly” or “careless tourists” (Skogan and Maxfield 1981; Gordon and Heath 1981; Sherizen 1978; Ericson, Baranek, and Chan 1987; Fishman 1978, 1981). To imagine the consequences of such reporting practices, consider this question: Could an individual reliably estimate the magnitude and causes of population growth in a city through isolated, incomplete, and no representative interviews with those who have left or have moved in? Aside from (or in addition to) changing media crime-reporting practices, information on crime can be promulgated through alternative channels. Messages about crime can be disseminated through a variety of means, including pamphlets; billboards, transit ads, and other signage; magazine and newspaper ads; Web sites; and oral presentations at public gatherings. Such a strategy might seem inconsequential compared with the awesome power of television and newspapers, but messages of this type have figured heavily in public campaigns about smoking, heart disease, and other health risks (see generally, National Research Council 1989). When it comes to crime, at least two public agencies are a natural choice for conveying such messages. One is the municipal police department. Most modern police departments have a public information office to dispense information on crime to persons (often journalists) on request. There is no major logical or logistical jump in moving from a reactive function of this type to a more proactive version of public information. The logical connection between crime and the police makes the police a perfect agent for crime communications, and, notwithstanding occasional scandals, the police enjoy enormous public support in the United States (e.g., Warr 1995a). I witnessed this function of the police when they embarked on a door-to-door campaign to inform residents of one Austin neighborhood that several rapes had recently occurred there. Where the costs of distribution pose a problem to police departments, there is no lack of civic organizations and volunteers willing to place pamphlets or booklets in mailboxes or on front porches. Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein (1982, 484) have also argued that a proper setting for communicating risks is the school: Informing people, whether by warning labels, package inserts, or extensive media programs, is but part of the larger problem of helping people cope with the risks and uncertainties of modern life. We believe that some of the responsibility lies with our schools. Public school curricula should include material designed to teach people that the world in which they live is probabilistic, not deterministic, and to help them learn judgment and decision strategies for dealing with that world. These strategies are as necessary for navigating in a world of uncertain information as geometry and trigonometry are to navigating among physical objects. Although modern schools are swamped with demands for their time and suggestions about their curriculums, a case can be made that the risks of crime are of sufficient size and gravity that at least some time ought to be devoted to them, if only to alleviate unnecessary fear throughout life. In occasional lectures to schools and churches, I have been struck by the almost desperate hunger of many people for objective information on crime and its risks. No matter who the messenger is, what is the content that messages about crime should convey? In recent years, an entirely new field of research in science has emerged known as risk communication (cf. National Research Council 1989). Concerned with the methods, problems, and efficacy of communicating risk to the general public, the field has concentrated largely on new technological risks (nuclear power, pesticides, toxic waste disposal), medical/health risks (recombinant DNA, smoking, seat belt use, high cholesterol, alcohol abuse, cancer) and both natural and manmade disasters (hurricanes, floods, aircraft crashes, lightening, tornadoes, earthquakes). No one, to my knowledge, has grappled with risk communication about crime, but the lessons of this field are nonetheless useful and enlightening. One lesson brings to mind the primary obligation of the physician: First does no harm. The effect of a communication can only be ascertained empirically. Untested messages can have unintended consequences, and therein lies the danger: Poor risk communications may cause more damage than the risks they are intended to control. They can lead to wrong decisions by omitting key information or failing to contradict misconceptions. They can create confusion by prompting inappropriate assumptions or emphasizing irrelevant information and produce conflict by eroding the audience’s faith in the communicator. They can cause recipients to be unduly alarmed or complacent or to undertake ineffective actions. Because communicators’ intuitions about recipients’ perceptions cannot be trusted, there is no substitute for empirical validation. (Bostrom et al. 1994, 796) Fischhoff, Bostrom, and Quadrel (1997, 993) similarly observed: “Effective risk communication requires careful empirical research. Poor risk communication can often cause more public health (and economic) damage than the risk it attempts to describe. One should no more release an untested communication than an untested medical device.” In short, risk communications must be pretested before they are disseminated. Fischhoff (1989) argues that an essential prerequisite for designing risk communication is the need to know what the public does not know, a matter that ordinarily requires empirical research and cannot simply be presumed. In that connection, Fischhoff, Bostrom, and Quadrel (1997) offer an ingenious idea for altering public perceptions of risk. In keeping with evidence that people are often highly overconfident about the information or beliefs they hold, these investigators suggest that one function of communications is to give people “the appropriate degree of confidence in their beliefs,” especially in cases “where people confidently hold incorrect beliefs that could lead to inappropriate actions” (1997, 997). As an example of misplaced confidence, they cite an investigation showing that a majority of teenagers are not aware that a single beer affects driving ability as much as a shot of vodka and those mistaken teenagers are usually very confident about their incorrect information. Studies of this kind are particularly useful for identifying misconceptions that need to be targeted in messages. How should communications about risk be constructed? What elements should they contain? Information about risk is often highly technical, but technical terms and examples should be avoided (Covello, von Winterfeldt, and Slovic 1987; Fischhoff 1989). Risks can be presented in everyday terms using alternative examples. For example, the proportion of Americans who are murdered each year in the United States (fewer than 1 in 10,000 per year) is roughly the same as 1 day in 27 years, or 1 inch in 833 feet, or 1 gallon in a home swimming pool. By contrast, the crude probability that a household will be burgled in the United States is about 1 in 10-20 per year, or roughly the chance of drawing two consecutive cards of the same suit from a fresh poker deck. Crosshazard comparisons (where the risk of, say, murder is compared with the risk of an auto accident, disease, or lightning strike) can be useful for illustrating risk as well, but they can be difficult to interpret or understand if not properly constructed (Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein 1982). Information in communications must also be relevant to the audience: Poorly chosen information can be seen as wasting their time (indicating insensitivity to their situation) can take up the place (in the media or school) that could be filled with pertinent information (imposing an opportunity cost), and can lead them to misunderstand the extent of their knowledge. (Fischhoff, Bostrom, and Quadrel 1997, 997) Communicators must also ensure that events or risks discussed in the communication have the same meaning to recipients as to themselves (e.g., Do respondents know what a burglary is? Do they confuse it with robbery?), and they need to be honest and straightforward about the limitations of their own information (Fischhoff 1994; Fischhoff, Bostrom, and Quadrel 1997). The public is often skeptical of experts and government officials, and honesty about the accuracy of their estimates can help to offset mistrust. It is impossible to fully survey the literature on risk communication here, but it is useful to offer two summaries of effective communications by prominent investigators in the field. These are not merely seat-of-the pants recommendations but careful statements based on extensive research and experience. First, in an appendix to a National Academy of Sciences conference on risk assessment, Covello, von Winterfeldt, and Slovic (1987, 117-118) offer the following advice on risk communication: Use simple, graphic, and concrete material, avoiding technical or specialized language wherever possible. Compare risks within a carefully defined context that is relevant to the target audience. Avoid comparisons of risk that may appear to the audience to be non comparable because of different qualitative characteristics-for example, the risk of smoking compared to that of living near a nuclear power plant. Understand and recognize qualitative concerns, such as concerns about catastrophic potential, dread, equity, and controllability. Identify and explain strengths and limitations of different risk measures, and present (whenever possible) alternative indexes of risk-for example, measured or expected fatalities or incidences of diseases for the entire population and for the most- and least-exposed individuals. Identify, acknowledge, and explain uncertainties in risk estimates. Provide opportunities for people to learn how to interpret risk information. Relate on a personal level-that is, when people ask personal questions such as “Can I drink the water?” respond in a personal way without minimizing risks and uncertainties. Recognize the power of subtle changes in the way that information is presented and use such knowledge responsibly. Understand and recognize that health and environmental debates often involve much broader considerations, including political values and ideologies. In addition, Fischhoff, Bostrom, and Quadrel (1997, 998) offer this advice: Once information has been selected, it must be presented in a comprehensible way. That means taking into account the terms that recipients use for understanding individual concepts and the mental models that they use for integrating those concepts. It also means building on the results of research on text comprehension. That research shows, for example, that comprehension improves when text has a clear structure and, in particular, when the structure conforms to recipients’ intuitive representation of a topic; that critical information is more likely to be remembered when it appears at the highest level of a clear hierarchy; and that readers benefit from ‘adjunct aids,’ such as highlighting, advanced organizers (showing what to expect), and summaries. Such aids might even be better than full text for understanding, retaining, and being able to look up information. Conclusion: Fear is a natural and commonplace emotion. Under many circumstances, it is a beneficial, even life-saving emotion. Under the wrong circumstances, it is an emotion that can unnecessarily constrain behavior, restrict freedom and personal opportunity, and threaten the foundation of communities. What differentiates fear of crime from some other hazards of life is that it often rests on highly uncertain information about risk. According to Warr, “Most citizens have little scientific foundation for their beliefs about crime. In daily life, they are constantly confronted with information about crime from sources that may not appreciate nor care about the accuracy of that information and that may use crime to entertain, sell, advertise, exploit, or win votes. In the end, most citizens are left to reason as best they can about the risks of crime. Because the consequences of victimization can be catastrophic for themselves and those they love, many are likely to err on the side of caution, worrying about and guarding against crime more than is necessary or defensible.” Given the ubiquity of messages about crime in our society and the costs of inaccurate information, it is incumbent on criminal justice officials to provide the public with reliable information about crime, including information about the risk of victimization for different criminal offenses, the sources and likelihood of error in those estimates, the nature of victimization events (including the risk of injury associated with those events), and, where known, the personal, social, and temporal/spatial characteristics that increase or reduce risk. Without information of this kind, citizens will remain uniformed about the risks of crime. In that condition they will indeed become victims, if only to those for whom crime and fear of crime are merely tools to entertain, titillate, or sell. Crime, after all, is not like some virulent new disease whose risks and epidemiology are poorly understood. The risks associated with many criminal offenses are understood with a degree of certitude that would startle many casual observers, and such information was developed largely at public expense. The problem today is not the absence of knowledge itself, but rather the failure of criminologists and public officials to demystify crime for the general public and to present a reasoned and understandable version of the facts of crime. The gap that remains between the state of knowledge and public awareness is not merely unfortunate, it is dangerous. Word Count: 3830 References: 1987. Fear of victimization and sensitivity to risk. Journal of Quantitative Criminology 3:29–46. Covello, Vincent T., Detlof von Winterfeldt, and Paul Slovic. 1987. Communicating scientific information about health and environmental risks: Problems and opportunities Davies, Vincent T. Covello, and Frederick W. Allen. Washington, D.C.: Conservative Ferraro, Kennith. F. 1995. Fear of Crime: Interpreting Victimization Risk. Albany, N. Y.: State of New York University Press. Fischhoff, Baruch, Ann Bostrom, and Marilyn Jacobs Quadrel. 1997. Risk perception and communication. In The methods of public health, edited by Roger Detels,Walter W. Holland, James McEwen, and Gilbert S. Omenn. 3d ed. Vol. 2 of the Oxford textbook of public health. New York: Oxford University Press Foundation from a social and behavioral perspective. In Risk communication, edited by Clarence J. Keane, Carl. 1995. “Victimization and Fear: Assessing the Role of the Offender and the Offence.” Canadian Journal of Criminology 37: 431-455. Stanko, Elizabeth. A. 1992. “The Case of Fearful Women: Gender, Personal Safety and Fear of Crime.” Women and Criminal Justice 4: 117-135. Warr, Mark. 1984. “Fear of Victimization: Why are Women and the Elderly more Afraid?” Social Science Quarterly 65: 681-702. Williams, Frank P., Marilyn D. McShane, and Ronald L. Akers. 2000. "Worry About Victimization: An Alternative and Reliable Measure for Fear of Crime." Western Criminology Review 2(2). [Online]. Available: HYPERLINK "http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v2n2/williams.html" ?http://wcr.sonoma.edu/v2n2/williams.html?. Read More