CCTP 505-06 – Georgetown E-mail Alerts and the Fear of Crime.

Ian Smalley, Jonathan Winters, Lauren Burgoon,

Jacob Landis, Francesca Tripodi, Lewis Levenberg.

Discipline: Social Psychology

This discipline investigates: how communities form; what influences perception; how groups construct identity and emotional sensitivity; how groups react to threats or danger.

Questions this discipline asks about the problem we are investigating: what the relation between culture and fear is; how groups describe and regulate safety of their members’ bodies and property; what the influence of media is on groups and their perceptions of fear.

References:

– Altheide, David L.  “The News Media, the Problem Frame, and the Production of Fear.” The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Autumn 1997), pp. 647-668.

– Altheide, David. Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis.

– Bourke, Joanna. Fear: A Cultural History. Reno: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006.

– Chiricos, Ted, Eschholz, Sarah and Gertz, Marc. “Crime, News and Fear of Crime: Toward Identification of Audience Effects.” Social Problems, Vol. 44, Issue 3, (August 1997), pp. 342-357.

– Fabiansson, Charlotte. “Young People’s Perceptions of Being Safe – Globally and Locally”. Social Indicators Research. Dec. 30, 2005

– Ferraro, Kenneth F.  Fear of Crime: Interpreting Victimization Risk.  New York: State University of New York Press, 1995.

– Freud, Sigmund. “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” 1915. Trans. E. C. Mayne, 1925. Ed. James Strachey. Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, pp. 273-300. London: Hogarth, 1975.

– Gardner, Daniel. The Science of Fear: Why we Fear the Things We Shouldn’t and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger. New York: Dutton, 2008.

– Glassner, Barry. The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are afraid of the Wrong Things. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

– Hollway and Jefferson. “The risk society in an age of anxiety: situating fear of crime.” The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 48, (1997), pp 255-266.

– Hope, Tim and Sparks, Richard (Eds.).  Crime, Risk, and Insecurity.  New York: Routledge, 2000.

– Skogan, W.G. and Maxfield, M.G. Coping with Crime- Individual and Neighborhood Reactions. National Criminal Justice Reference Service. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1981

– Smith, Stacy L. and Wilson, Barbara J. “Children’s Comprehension of and Fear Reactions to Television News”. Media Psychology, Vol. 4, Issue 1 (February 2002), pp. 1 – 26

Discipline: Criminology

This discipline investigates: statistics of crime; geographic and demographic distributions of those statistics (trends and targets); methods of reporting those statistics and trends.

Questions it asks about the problem we are investigating: to what degree do statistics of crime in Georgetown (on campus and in the neighborhood) agree with or deviate from the notion that Georgetown is a “hot spot” of criminal activity? How do law enforcement agencies’ methods of reporting crime statistics and trends differ from those of media groups?

References:

– Adams, Gary B. and Rogers, Percy G. Campus Policing: the State of the Art. Los Angeles: School of Public Administration, University of Southern California, 1971.

– Barak, Gregg (Ed.). Media, Process and the Social Construction of Crime: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology. New York: Garland, 1994.

– Crime Maps of Washington, DC. ONLINE: http://www.crimeindc.org/. 2008.

– District of Columbia Crime Rates 1960 – 2007. ONLINE: http://disastercenter.com/crime/dccrime.htm. 2008.

– Metropolitan Police Department: Crime and Activity Statistics. ONLINE: http://mpdc.dc.gov/mpdc/cwp/view,a,1239,Q,543308,mpdcNav_GID,1523,mpdcNav,|,.asp. 2008

– U.S. Department of Justice. Mapping Crime: Understanding Hot Spots. ONLINE: http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/209393.pdf, 2005

– Wiles, Paul, Simmons, Jon and Pease, Ken.  “Crime Victimization: Its Extent and Communication.”  Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A: Statistics in Society, Vol. 166, No. 2 (2003), pp. 247-252.

Crossover references:

• Ferraro, Kenneth F. and Grange, Randy L. “The Measurement of Fear of Crime”. Sociological Inquiry, Vol. 57, Issue 1, (Jan. 2007), pp. 70-97.
• Lee, Murray.  Inventing Fear of Crime: Criminology and the Politics of Anxiety.  Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2007.