{"id":7473,"date":"2018-05-03T11:58:09","date_gmt":"2018-05-03T15:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/?p=7473"},"modified":"2019-03-25T12:40:34","modified_gmt":"2019-03-25T16:40:34","slug":"gallup-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/03\/gallup-fear\/","title":{"rendered":"Actual violent crime has nothing to do with our fear of violent crime"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I updated a graph from our 2003 book <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/prisonindex\/toc.html\"><i>The Prison Index<\/i><\/a> to answer the question: How closely does Americans&#8217; fear of violent crime reflect the actual violent crime rate?<\/p>\n<p>The answer: Hardly at all.<\/p>\n<p>Beginning in 1965, <a href=\"http:\/\/news.gallup.com\/poll\/221183\/americans-fear-walking-alone-ties-year-low.aspx\">Gallup began asking Americans<\/a> if there was &#8220;any area near where you live&#8230;where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?&#8221; Over time, these poll results show a tenuous relationship, at best, between the violent crime rate and the number of people who report being afraid:<\/p>\n<p class=\"featureimage caption\">\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.prisonpolicy.org\/images\/fear_of_crime_1965_2017.png\" alt=\"Graph comparing violent crime rates to Americans expressing fear of victimization, from 1965 to 2017.\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" class=\"\"  \/>The violent crime rate (yellow) peaked in 1991.  The fear of crime (orange) peaked nine years earlier and was already declining when the violent crime rate was approaching its peak.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, this data isn&#8217;t sensitive to regional and economic variations in crime across the country. And people who aren&#8217;t afraid of being attacked might be afraid to walk around at night for other reasons.<\/p>\n<p>But it&#8217;s interesting to explore the discrepancy between perception and reality. From the early 1980s to the early 1990s, as violent crime reached historic heights, Americans&#8217; fear of victimization fell. <\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t to say that Americans are grossly out of touch. But it should remind elected officials and media that the last place to look for evidence of a crime wave is in public opinion polls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Comparing violent crime rates to public opinion data shows that there&#8217;s a long-standing disconnect between perception and reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[33],"class_list":["post-7473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-briefings","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7473"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7480,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7473\/revisions\/7480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7473"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prisonpolicy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}