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Policing Advance Access published online on June 10, 2008
Policing, doi:10.1093/police/pan022
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© The Authors 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of CSF Associates. Publius, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Evolutionary Psychology and Fear of Crime

Aiden Sidebottom* and Nick Tilley

* Aiden Sidebottom, Research Assistant and Professor Nick Tilley, Graduate School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University, UK

Correspondence: Aiden Sidebottom, UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, University College London, 2nd Floor Brook House, 2-16 Torrington Place, London WC1E 7HN, UK. E-mail: a.sidebottom{at}ucl.ac.uk

Presently, public levels of fear of crime are generally considered to be excessive and undesirable. Their reduction is a recurrent policy target. It is recurrent because of the long-standing difficulties experienced in lowering levels of fear to match falling crime rates. The purpose of this brief paper is to describe how and why evolutionary theory may contribute to our understanding of the fear of crime, and help explain why it has been found so difficult to reduce it. The mismatch between fear and real risk, shown for instance in young men's consistent underestimation of risk, is examined. Implications of this for a policy aiming at ‘realism’ in relation to fear and risk are also discussed. In this vein, evolutionary theory, we believe, has the potential to explain both disproportionately high and disproportionately low levels of fear of crime. Moreover, it indicates why some methods of attempting to achieve fear-reduction policy aims have few prospects of success.


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