Strangers, Neighbors, and Race

• Date: 01 October 2012
• DOI: 10.1177/2153368712459769
• Author: Kevin M. Drakulich
• Published date: 01 October 2012
• Subject Matter: Articles

Race and Justice
2(4) 322-355
Strangers, Neighbors, and
ª The Author(s) 2012
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Race: A Contact Model of
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DOI: 10.1177/2153368712459769
Stereotypes and Racial
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Anxieties About Crime
Kevin M. Drakulich1
Abstract
How are perceptions of the danger posed by crime colored by race? This work draws
on the contact hypothesis to explore the link between a neighborhood’s racial
composition, interracial interactions, racial crime stereotypes, and perceptions of
criminal danger. Using a recent survey of Seattle residents, I find that interracial
interactions are associated with decreased crime stereotypes about racial and ethnic
minorities—though not crime stereotypes about Whites. Moreover, crime
stereotypes about racial and ethnic minorities are associated with reduced percep-
tions of neighborhood safety and increased anxieties about victimization, at least
among White respondents and especially in neighborhoods with greater numbers of
the targets of these stereotypes. I discuss interesting interracial differences in these
processes as well as the complicated relationship between racial proximity,
stereotypes, and perceptions of the danger posed by crime.
Keywords
stereotypes, criminological theories, contact hypothesis, perceptions of safety, fear of
crime, residential segregation
I can no more disown [Reverend Jeremiah Wright] than I can my white grandmother . . . a
woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who
on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
—Barack Obama’s ‘‘A More Perfect Union’’ speech1
1 School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Kevin M. Drakulich, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, Boston, MA
02115, USA
Email: k.drakulich@neu.edu

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323
Serious violent crime rates have dropped or remained steady in the United States since
the early 1990s, property crime rates have largely dropped since the 1970s, and the
likelihood of the average American becoming a victim of crime is quite low. Nev-
ertheless, fear of crime is quite common.2 The mismatch between fear and risk is not
limited to magnitude; a spatial mismatch also occurs in which people appear to
misjudge the safety of some neighborhoods relative to others. This is not necessarily
surprising: Few individuals have detailed knowledge of the exact risk of crime in one
neighborhood versus another, so individuals likely make guesses based on more
visible characteristics of neighborhoods which they assume to be indicative of crime.
However, there are consequences when residents of a neighborhood systematically
judge that neighborhood to be unsafe. Fear may scare those with resources away and
inspire others not to invest or participate in their neighborhood. Fear may also inspire
citizen complaints which can result in police crackdowns and harsh tactics. To the
extent that some neighborhoods, including many neighborhoods with larger numbers
of African Americans or other racial and ethnic minorities, have more crime, residents
of those neighborhoods will disproportionately suffer the consequences of fear of
crime. However, if people overestimate the risk of crime in neighborhoods with
greater numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, these neighborhoods will be more
likely to suffer the consequences of fear of crime than White neighborhoods with
identical crime rates.3
Recent work has suggested just this: that individuals tend to overestimate the
danger posed by crime (Quillian & Pager, 2001) and their risk of victimization
(Quillian & Pager, 2010) in communities with larger numbers of racial and ethnic
minorities, and in particular African Americans. Less is known, however, about the
specific processes by which this occurs. The present work proposes and explores one
such process: that perceptions of the danger posed by crime will be higher among
those who express racial crime stereotypes, but that these stereotypes will be less
common among those who regularly interact informally with neighbors of other races
or ethnicities. While criminologists have long suspected that racial crime stereotypes
may play a role in perceptions of the danger posed by crime, direct research on this
question—as discussed in subsequent sections—has been both relatively rare and
restricted in its implications by methodological limitations. Further, a number of key
questions about these stereotypes remain relatively unexplored in prior criminological
work, including the degree to which they are influenced by interracial interactions
among neighbors, the degree to which they vary among respondents of different races
and ethnicities, and the degree to which their potency in predicting perceptions of the
danger posed by crime is tied to the local presence of the targets of such stereotypes. A
better understanding of the relationship between racial composition and perceptions of
the danger posed by crime may inform not just our understanding of perceptions of
risk and fear of crime but also racial residential segregation and racial differences in
social capital.
To this end, the present work explores several interrelated questions about the ways
perceptions of the danger posed by crime are colored by race. First, are racial crime
stereotypes less common when individuals have positive interactions with neighbors

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Race and Justice 2(4)
of other races? Second, do these stereotypes of racial and ethnic minorities as
criminals inform judgments about the safety of a neighborhood? Finally, does the
relationship between stereotypes and perceptions of criminal danger vary across
members of minority versus majority race–ethnic groups, or across neighborhoods
with larger versus smaller numbers of the targets of such stereotypes?
Stereotypes, Interracial Contact, and Racial Anxieties
To begin, I explicate the logic behind the two central research questions of this article:
the role of interracial interactions in racial crime stereotypes and the role of these
stereotypes in perceptions of danger. Stereotypes are imperfect cognitive tools that
can result in incorrect judgments, including estimates of the association between race
and crime. Information is the mechanism for both the formation and revision of these
stereotypes, and the contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954)—concerned with interracial
interactions—provides expectations about how individuals are exposed to information
they could use to revise stereotypes.
Social Cognition: Stereotypes and Information Processing
In a complex social world, we must often assess situations and make decisions with
limited information. Stereotyping is a cognitive process that aids information
processing by organizing people into categories and associating universal traits with
these categories (Hilton & von Hippel, 1996). Stereotypes are activated when we
encounter someone who appears to fit in a category, and we use the trait information to
build expectations that can guide the processing of subsequently encountered
information (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000).
In this sense, stereotypes are functional, providing a cognitive economy for
processing social information and making decisions (Snyder & Meine, 1994). In the
absence of any other information about crime, then, stereotypes may be useful tools in
helping to estimate the crime risk, especially when residents correctly draw on a
known association between race and crime. This process is analogous to the concept
of statistical discrimination in the labor market—the idea that employers use group-
average information about race or gender to make hiring decisions when other infor-
mation is hard to come by (Phelps, 1972; Quillian & Pager, 2010). While statistical
discrimination is troubling—in that an association exists between racial composition
and crime at all and that this association is more prominent in people’s minds than
other neighborhood characteristics that might be associated with crime—it may still
improve estimates of risk.
However, stereotypes are not formed, revised, or activated with perfect information
or without bias. Tversky and Kahneman (1974) describe stereotypes as a ‘‘repre-
sentativeness heuristic,’’ a cognitive shortcut that helps individuals make judgments in
the face of uncertainty. However, using such a shortcut may result in specific kinds of
biases or mistakes in that judgment, an example of which is that individuals are often
not sensitive to the validity of the information upon which they make the predictions

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325
(Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Individuals, for instance, may fail to question the
accuracy of media accounts disproportionately focusing on crimes committed by
African Americans (Gilliam, Valentino, & Beckmann, 2002), political rhetoric
encouraging racialized anxieties about crime (Beckett, 1997; Harris 1969), or more
simply the accounts of racist (and misinformed) friends and relatives. As a result,
stereotypes may seem like useful tools to help estimate the risk of victimization in a
particular neighborhood, but they will lead to incorrect estimates of risk when based
on inaccurate or exaggerated information about the association of criminality with
race and ethnicity—a phenomenon Quillian and Pager (2010) refer to as stereotype
amplification. To the degree that the racial composition of a neighborhood is asso-
ciated with crime, employing even an overinflated notion of the relationship between
...