Predicting Frequent and Feared Crime Typologies: Individual and Social/Environmental Variables, and Incivilities

The lack of organisation in urban spaces plays a decisive role in the level of integration, communication and social bonds of the residents, impacting the citizens’ feelings of trust and security. Different personal variables and contextual characteristics have been associated with the fear of crime (FOC). The main objective of this study is to analyse how individual and social/environmental variables, and incivilities, predict crime against people and property, crime that has either happened or is feared to happen. Five hundred and fifty‐four residents (M = 43.82; SD = 18.38) in the Historic Centre of Porto (HCP), Portugal, answered 61 items of the Diagnosis of Local Security (DLS) Questionnaire. The results of this study show that in the most frequent crime category, 72% of occurrences represent crime against property. In the feared crime category, there is a preponderance of crime against people (61%). Age of the respondents predicted the most frequent and feared crime, while sex predicted the most feared crime only. Social/environmental variables, as well as incivilities, also predict the frequent and feared crime in two typologies, i.e., crime against people and crime against property. Practical implications to reduce FOC and areas for further investigation are discussed.
This research was funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), grant number “PTDC/DIR‐DCP/28120/2017” (Project LookCrim—Looking at crime: Communities and physical spaces)
This work was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the scope of the strategic funding of UID/BIO/04469/2019 unit and BioTecNorte operation (NORTE-01- 0145-FEDER-000004) funded by the European Regional Development Fund under the scope of Norte2020 –Programa Operacional Re- gional do Norte. This work was also supported by an FCT PhD grant [FRH/BD/111645/2015]. The authors also acknowledge the project fund- ing by the “02/SAICT/2017 –Projetos de Investigação Científica e Desen- volvimento Tecnológico (IC&DT) –POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028893”. This work was also supported by FCT and the Competitiveness and Internationalization Operational Program under Grant Agreement No. 030881 (PTDC/EMD-EMD/30881/2017 (POCI-01-0145-FEDER- 030881) and by FCT project UIDB/50026/2020 and UIDP/50026/2020. Additionally, this work has been funded by ICVS Scientific Microscopy Platform, member of the national infrastructure PPBI - Portuguese Plat- form of Bioimaging (PPBI-POCI-01-0145-FEDER-022122; by National funds, through the FCT project UIDB/50026/2020 and UIDP/50026/2020 and by the project NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000039, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), un- der the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).