Hyper‐Local Fear of Crime: Identifying Linguistic Cues of Fear in Crime Talk on Reddit

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe fear of crime is an emotional response individuals have toward crime or the anticipation related to being the victim of crime. The increasing exposure to crime information presents considerable risks to people's psychological health and well‐being. Nevertheless, the fear of crime in online discourses is under‐researched despite abundant conversations about crime. This work presents a mixed‐methods study to comprehend how people disclose the fear of crime and what linguistic content or cues are associated with the fear. We gathered conversations about crime in the Baltimore subreddit. The content analysis revealed a necessity to differentiate between “experienced” and “expressive” fear of crime. The regression modeling identified strong factors related to the fear of crime, such as negative sentiment, objective expression, and first‐person pronouns. This work extends the conceptualization of the fear of crime in online discourses and suggests potential ways to detect the fear automatically.