Fear of Crime in American Cities (1979)

Crime soared during the 1960s and 1970s. According to estimates from the Congressional Research Service, violent crime rates tripled and homicide rates doubled between 1960 and 1980. Property crime rates also more than tripled in the same time frame. This crime increase surely had many causes (and the precise nature of those causes remains debated by scholars), but one important ingredient was surely the urban decay of the era. Sociologist William Julius Wilson famously argued that the “jobless ghetto” provided an environment that encouraged criminal behavior. With high rates of unemployment and underemployment, many poor urban dwellers turned to robbery and drug dealing to make a living, and used guns to settle disputes. For a younger generation growing up in these communities, criminal activity was normalized as a feature of their lives, while relatively few adults they knew had stable remunerative jobs in the formal economy.

The steep rise in crime in cities across the country was joined by a rise in the fear of crime. This clip, from a 1981 The MacNeil/Lehrer Report episode entitled “Living with Crime in America,” illustrates how crime fears shaped the behavior of residents of Tucson, Arizona. Some scholars argue that the public fixation on crime was a natural byproduct of crime rates that were undoubtedly on the rise. However, some scholars (like Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow), argue that concerns about crimes were manufactured by politicians using fear to attract voters and media outlets sensationalizing crime to attract consumers. Regardless of the “legitimacy” of these fears, they undoubtedly accelerated the movement of largely white, middle- and upper-class residents to presumably safer suburbs. They also encouraged a “tough on crime” political agenda that positioned increased policing and incarceration as an urgently needed solution to growing crime.

The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Living With Crime in America | NewsHour Productions | March 23, 1981 This video clip and associated transcript appear from 7:20 - 11:36 in the full record.