Fear of victimisation in relation to the key community policing components

Abstract

The fear of victimization (FOV) has been explored in relation to quality of police contacts, citizens’ perception of crime and disorder and social cohesionas three key community policing constructsin the Croatian local communities. The related data have been collected in a convenience sample of 2,749 Croatian citizens using the Community Policing Evaluation Survey scale (McKee, 2001), and analysed carrying out linear regression. Citizens’ perception of crime has been the best, and quality of police contacts the worst predictor of the FOV. There have been different age trends of the respective predictors’ relevance in males and females.