The Role of Communities in the Fear of Crime

Fear of crime refers to the subjective assessment of the risk of being a victim of a crime and the magnitude of its consequences. Fear of crime is highly dependent on variable and complex psychological, cultural and social factors. Recently, a mathematical model for the diffusion of information related to the fear of crime among subjects was proposed. This model captures the effect of communication among people by considering random interactions between persons. Nevertheless, recent evidence suggests that fear to crime can be strongly influenced by the underlying communication network that mediates the interactions among subjects. In particular, the topology of this network may change the opinions of the community members. In this work, we studied how the fear of crime changes when the interaction between persons is supported on a complex network that exhibits a community structure. We hypothesized that even if these supporting structures allow efficient communication, in the case of fear propagation this particular structure may promote an isolation effect of the fear of crime for the different communities, when compared with a model of random interactions. Our results support this assumption, and also suggests that this separation effect is higher for communities with low susceptibility to crime, i.e., groups with low susceptibility to crime have higher feelings of security than groups with high susceptibility to crime when considering interactions in communities. This result is important because in many cases security planners belong to the group with low susceptibility to crime, resulting in an undervaluation of the most vulnerable populations.