Anger versus Fear about Crime: How Common Is It, Where Does It Come From, and Why Does It Matter?

Abstract

While a long history of scholarship has explored fear as an affective reaction to the prospect of crime, a much smaller number of studies have suggested that anger may be both more common and more predictive of punitive policy views (e.g. Ditton et al. International Review of Victimology 6:83-99, 1999a; Johnson Punishment & Society 11:51-66, 2009; Hartnagel & Templeton Punishment & Society 14:452-74, 2012). This difference matters in that fear and anger imply different stories: fear can be personal while anger necessarily draws our attention to social meanings and connects to broader issues like race relations and racism. We use a nationally representative survey conducted by the ANES to verify what we already know and then ask new questions about the potential sources and other potential consequences of anger about crime. While personal victimizations are associated with fear, victimizations of acquaintances are associated with anger. Anger appears rooted in both racial resentment and the racial context. In turn, while the fearful are supportive of a wide range of approaches to addressing social problems, the angry are only more supportive of crime spending and in fact oppose social assistance spending. Implications for research on affective reactions to crime and for crime-relevant policies are discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.