Violent crime has been dropping for decades, but you wouldn’t know it to judge from what some call ‘the culture of fear’ that surrounds us. Virginia's crime rate has shown the same decline and remains lower than the national average. So why is fear on the rise?
Even though statistics show you’re far more likely to be the victim of an accident than a crime, especially a violent crime, perception of the pervasiveness of crime is on the rise.
"Often times the media pick up on what is different and unusual, so what you get from the media is often skewed or imperfect understanding of what’s going on in the world," says Don Shoemaker, professor of sociology at Virginia Tech.
"I don’t mean to be blaming the media but I think that especially for those in areas where crime is relatively unlikely to occur they can be influenced by what they see and hear. So it’s understandable that people might be alarmed by what they see and especially if they see that there’s a series of similar events occurring within a two or three of four year period of time."
And it’s not just news media, law enforcement who often communicate after a violent act as a way to ask for help in cracking the case or alerting people to be careful themselves – can also add to the fear factor.
"So the fear of crime can be rational or irrational in that it’s subjective, it’s not based on experience its based on perceptions and stereotypes sometimes."
Shoemaker points to statistics that show younger people are more likely be violent crime victims than older people, men more likely than women. But the opposite is true when it comes to perception of crime. Shoemaker is working with other researchers to digitize the data on certain violent events such as school shooting.
"We’ve been collecting data on reported school shootings. They go back to the turn of the 20th century. Over a hundred years ago. People just weren’t aware of it. And not only school shooting but especially a hundred years ago, attacks with knives and things of that nature. These have been going on for quite some time they just haven’t been as clustered as they have recently and haven’t been as widely covered as they are being now covered. Certainly with the age of social media you hear about a school shooting almost before anybody around knows about it."
Horrific events often lead to intense news coverage, but Shoemaker says the connection between fictional violence in movies and television is less clear-cut. If you watch prime time television, it looks like there’s a murder every minute.
"If these shows didn’t attract advertisers, they wouldn't’ be on very long and the only reason they’re attracting advertisers is because they have viewers. You know, that’s the correlation and why are there viewers, because they like it. They want to see this kind of stuff. The public drives what the media present, in that sense. The public doesn’t drive – I’m not saying -- what’s reported in the newspapers, but what’s on television, what’s in the movies, what people willingly choose to pay for."
