Abstract
The fear of crime is an established research topic, not only in sociology, environmental psychology and criminology, but also in GIScience. Using spatial analysis to analyse patterns, explore hotspots and determine the significance of respective surveys is one reason for the increase in popularity of such research topics for geographers, cartographers and spatial data scientists. This paper presents the results of an intensive online map-based questionnaire with 1551 respondents from the city of Ostrava, Czech Republic. The respondents marked 3792 points associated with the fear of crime over a ten week period. The perception data were compared with recorded crime data acquired from police department records for the years 2015–2018. This paper explores the spatial autocorrelation from perceived hotspots and from recorded crime hotspots. Our findings fit into the literature confirming results about the locations that most frequently attract fear, but there is still room for more investigations regarding the links between recorded crime and the fear of crime.
Highlights
Understanding people’s responses to the fear of crime [1] is important for understanding behaviours which reflect this concern
The authors understand the fear of crime as an emotional response towards places in a city where respondents do not feel safe, in accordance with the main question in the questionnaire: “Mark the places where you feel unsafe”
The research presented in this paper is based on an intensive, online map-based questionnaire with 1551 respondents from Ostrava, the Czech Republic
Summary
Understanding people’s responses to the fear of crime [1] is important for understanding behaviours which reflect this concern. Recent studies [5,6] link the fear of crime to a person’s emotional response. It is important for policymakers and municipalities, who are able to act upon these concerns. Many studies have suggested a link between the fear of crime, social disorder and serious crime (e.g., [25]), “broken windows” theory was criticised to focus only on the physical and forgetting about social factors influencing the fear of crime [26]. The fear of crime can be perceived differently by different social groups
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