Fear of Crime and the Attitude Towards Safety in the City

Abstract

Utilising a representative survey from 2019 on safety in the city of Pforzheim (Germany), this paper studies cognitive, affective and conative indicators of fear of crime (FoC), together with various other security-related variables, to generate a joint psychological map of these variables. We also study how personal values make it possible to predict people’s attitudes towards security problems. The data exhibit nonnegative inter-correlations among all items on FoC, perceived safety problems, social capital and quality of life. This suggests a common attitude object. The FoC indicators are located in the centre of a psychological map that includes all variables. Those who emphasise conservation values score relatively high on FoC and are more concerned about safety.