Comparing fear of crime and crime statistics on a university campus

Abstract

Campus crime at colleges and universities has resulted in a call for more safety and preventive measures from policymakers, students, to citizens. While research highlights students’ fear on campus crime, few studies have examined this topic from a spatial and cognitive perspective. In this chapter the authors report on a novel methodology to compare campus crime data with participants’ selfreported cognitive fear of crime maps. In this study, 313 undergraduate students provided fear of crime maps at a middle-sized university in the southwestern United States. The students’ perceptions were aggregated and compared to university crime statistics to produce five bivariate maps. These maps represent perceived fear of crime in relation to four broadly observed crime categories namely burglary, theft, harassment, and sexual assault. In this research effort, students’ fear of crime is aligned with data for actual burglary and theft occurrences but their fear is exaggerated for harassment and sexual assault. The implications of this study are multifold, extending from potential safety improvements and better decision-making (e.g., aid law enforcement to target specific areas for crime monitoring) to developing educational workshops to dispel myths and present facts on campus safety. The introduced bivariate mapping technique provides another step towards safer university and college campuses.