Examining the Relationship between Citizen Contact with the Community Prosecutor and Fear of Crime

ABSTRACT

Fear of crime has been studied extensively in the extant criminological literature, although the majority of these studies focused on fear of crime through the lens of policing. Put differently, the fear of crime literature that has examined the impact of the criminal justice system has focused primarily on policing. This study thus adds to the literature by being one of the first to examine citizen fear of crime through the lens of contact with the community prosecutor. Using a sample of 325 citizens from a large city in the United States, we found that respondents who interacted with the community prosecutor’s office were more fearful of crime. Also, respondents who got their news mostly from television and perceived that there was physical disorder in the community were more fearful of crime. Conversely, respondents who knew victims of violent/property crime and who believed they were at higher risk of victimization were less fearful of crime. The implications of our findings for community safety and security are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Fear of crime in the United States
• fear of crime in the community
• community prosecution
• risk of victimization
• physical disorder
• social disorder
• property crime
• violent crime

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the journal’s editors and the reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Furthermore, we have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Notes

1.  This lack of delineation is addressed further in the literature review section, under “Community Prosecution and Fear of Crime.”

2.  The codebook noted that Wave 3 of the data set was about community prosecution. While the term “community” was not inserted in some of the questions, such as the pivotal question “How much interaction have you had with the prosecutor’s office in the last 12 months?”, most of the questions in the survey pointed to work that community prosecutors do. For example, there were questions such as “The … prosecutor’s office does a good job addressing neighborhood problems” and “Community prosecution programs … give citizens a vital role in the community.” These questions point to the work of community prosecutors, not traditional prosecutors.

3.  Because age was measured at the ordinal level (respondents selected a category from an ordinal scale, rather than report their actual ages), we do not have a specific maximum age.

4.  Although the R Square values are low for Models 1 and 2 in Table 3, these numbers are not unusual in fear-of-crime research (see, for example, Jackson, 2009).