Crime and Disorder: Perceptions of Business People in Cornwall, England

Abstract

While there has, recently, been a spate of research on the victimisation of businesses, rather less research has focused on the perceptions of the business community, and -in contrast to studies of the general public -little emphasis has been placed on explaining variations in concern over crime and disorder. This article uses data from the 2001 Cornwall Business Crime Survey to explore the extent to which business people in a rural county of England perceive crime and disorder to be a problem locally and are concerned at its impact on their businesses.The findings suggest that crime and disorder were not considered the most serious problems facing local businesses, but nevertheless evoked some concern, particularly among a significant minority of respondents. The article then focuses on explaining variations in perceptions and concludes that these can be understood in terms of the nature of the businesses, their location, and the extent to which businesses had experienced crime. These findings largely parallel Hough's (1995) earlier work explaining anxiety among the general public.

Crime and Safety in the Rural

“…Rural-to-urban migrating residents have been declared feeling less safe when moving to urban areas than urban-to-urban migrants (Kennedy & Krahn, 1984). The safety perceptions of rural college and university students have also been observed in different contexts Pritchard et al, 2015), and this included also the analysis of rural business perceptions of quietness and order (Mawby, 2004).…”

Safety Perceptions in Rural Areas

“…Rural-to-urban migrating residents have been declared feeling less safe when moving to urban areas than urban-to-urban migrants (Kennedy & Krahn, 1984). The safety perceptions of rural college and university students have also been observed in different contexts (De Angelis et al, 2017;Pritchard et al, 2015), and this included also the analysis of rural business perceptions of quietness and order (Mawby, 2004).…”

An Empirical Study of the Perception of Criminality through Analysis of Newspapers Online

“…Between 2002 and 2005, product of the Cornwall Crime Surveys (CCS) in a rural county of England, Mawby (2004) development an exploratory model of the occurrence of crimes and places where they were carried out. Abdul Jalil, Mohd and Mohamad Noor (2017), on the other hand, present a comparative study on correlation and information gain algorithms to evaluate and produce subsets of criminal characteristics, identifying a subset of attributes and classify the crimes into different categories, predicting the category of crime and directly support decision-making in crime prevention systems.…”