Abstract
This study examines the adoption of household safety protection (HSP) measures in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. Drawing upon assumptions from environmental criminology and situational crime prevention, the study explores the impact of crime and fear of crime on HSP. Geographical Information System (GIS) combines in a single dataset data on HSP adoption: a cross-sectional resident safety survey, socio-demographic statistics of the areas and newspaper vignettes. A pre-analysis of the data is used to check whether HSP adoption varied by tenancy type. Then, hypothesis testing is performed using binary logistic regression models to identify significant predictors of HSP, including individuals’ previous victimization, perception of high crime rates in the neighborhood, declared altruistic fear, and exposure to crime in the local media, while controlling for individual and areal covariates. Protection strategies are found to differ significantly according to tenancy type, and among those who rent, HSP varies by type of housing company. The likelihood of having several types of HSP was found to increase with perception of crime and altruistic fear but to only a small extent, previous victimization.
Highlights
The adoption of household safety protection (HSP) may be a behavioral response to crime, residential burglary (Greenberg 1987)
Whereas burglary is a relatively rare crime in Sweden, experienced by only 1 % of Sweden’s residents in any given year, fear of having their home burgled is reported by 16 % (The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) 2008) and many Swedes report using some sort of HSP to protect their home
HSP and type of tenancy Type of tenancy was hypothesized to be a determinant of HSP adoption in Stockholm, and the results of this study show strong support for this idea
Summary
The adoption of household safety protection (HSP) may be a behavioral response to crime, residential burglary (Greenberg 1987). Whereas burglary is a relatively rare crime in Sweden, experienced by only 1 % of Sweden’s residents in any given year, fear of having their home burgled is reported by 16 % (The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) 2008) and many Swedes report using some sort of HSP to protect their home (Roth and Sandahl 2008). For this reason the process of adoption of HSP remains an important area of study. Burglaries range from a low rate of around 3 per 1000 residents in the inner city to a high of over 7 per 1000 residents in the outlying areas
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