Race and Ethnic Differences in Fear of Property, Personal, and Gang Victimization among People Involved in Crime: Testing the Effects of Perceived Neighborhood Characteristics

ABSTRACT

Fear of victimization among the general population has received much scholarly attention, yet fear among people involved in crime remains largely overlooked. Among 2,200 criminally active respondents, we examine the differential effects across race/ethnicity of perceived neighborhood characteristics on fear of victimization. Hispanics were significantly more afraid than African Americans and Whites. For Hispanics, perceptions of social disorder and higher levels of collective efficacy significantly predicted fear of property, personal, and gang crime. Physical disorder and subcultural diversity were more salient for African Americans and Whites. We discuss the fear-neighborhood disorganization link among racial subgroups.

KEYWORDS:

• Fear of crime
• fear of victimization
• race
• ethnicity
• offenders
• gangs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. To ensure an identical interpretation between the English and Spanish surveys, the research team commissioned third parties to translate the survey from English to Spanish, and then from Spanish back to English (e.g., “back translation”). Many Spanish-speaking participants preferred to take the survey in English whereas 212 participants (9%) completed the Spanish version. Only 110 participants (5%) chose to follow along as the survey was read aloud.

2. The National Gang Center lists carjacking as gang-related crime (https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/Legislation/Carjacking), and prior research includes carjacking as a form of gang crime (e.g., Lane & Fox, 2013).

3. Importantly, our measure overwhelmingly captures street gang membership, not institutional/jail gang membership. The survey also asked those who said they were current and former gang members if their gang had a presence inside the jail only, outside the jail only, or both inside and outside the jail. Only seven respondents indicated that their gang was inside the jail only, of which three were current gang members and four were ex-gang members. We retained these individuals in the analyses presented here, because when we removed these seven cases the findings remained unchanged (e.g., none of the inferences changed).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.