Abstract
The organizational and structural character of local neighbourhoods has been increasingly linked to variations in crime and disorder, as well as public concerns about crime. A growing number of academic studies have emphasized the role of the local environmental context in which crime is committed and experienced. This in turn has begun to inform a range of policy developments, including the safer neighbourhoods initiative, and the emphasis on community policing (see for example, Innes, 2004). But largely absent from these empirical assessments is a detailed conception of the complex ways in which individuals variously experience ‘neighbourhoods.’ Studies have assumed that individuals are only influenced by their immediate surroundings; empirical work has drawn upon administrative geographies that have relatively little coherence with the theoretical conceptions of neighbourhood offered by community studies. Focusing specifically on fear of crime, we provide a more detailed assessment of the influence of neighbourhoods by incorporating the influence of surrounding areas alongside the immediate neighbourhood in which people live. Testing so-called ‘spatial autocorrelation’, our findings indicate geographical spill-over effects. More specifically, living near an area with high crime rate and visible signs of low level disorder is associated with a higher probability of worrying about crime, even holding constant one’s immediate neighbourhood context. We also explore the effect of the size and distance of surrounding localities, as well as examine cross-level interactions between individual experience of victimisation and area-level crime rates.