Typology of fear of crime and attitudes of acceptance of police violence among the inhabitants of São Paulo, Brazil
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/Boletin-criminologico.2020.v27i.11280Keywords:
punitiveness, fear of crime, public opinion, victimizationAbstract
Research suggests that the fear of crime affects people’s attitudes toward public security policies, favoring a preference for repressive or punitive actions towards what is considered a danger or a threat. Studies have pointed to a variety of possible individual and contextual factors that are antecedents of punitive attitudes. Fear of crime and punitive attitudes are the subject of public discourses that shape the criminal policies of many Western countries. Since emotions play a crucial role in criminal justice, criminologists seek to understand how these two concepts are related. In that sense, this study carried out an analysis of latent classes in a sample of inhabitants of the city of Sao Paulo (N=1806) to identify groups that describe the typologies of the association between the fear of crime and the favorable attitudes towards the violence of the police. The best model fit was of five latent classes. Among these groups, we find a profile in which there is a strong association between fear of crime and punitive attitude and another formed by those who report low fear of crime but have high levels of punitiveness. Furthermore, most of the people expressed not supporting police violence, despite showing fear of crime, so other factors could better explain the support for punitiveness that some groups present. We speculate few alternative explanations for these results in the discussion.
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