In this mixture of fear, anger, and disapproval, fear is perhaps the most important element. The poor are the major victims of street crime, but mugging, robbery, and pickpocketing are particularly threatening to everyone because they involve invasions of intimate personal space. Fear makes people less willing to distinguish between actual and imagined threats and more willing to listen to politicians who promise harsh reprisals. Local news media rarely miss the most dramatic incidents, especially in white neighborhoods. The media rarely explain why crimes have taken place, adding to the sense of randomness and senselessness.
Some findings suggest that the fear of crime is partly imagined.
The real fears that safety threats evoke easily spread to the non-criminal poor. Since beggars generally outnumber criminals, a possible threat from the latter thus turns into a more visible imagined threat from the former. Vagabonds and tramps evoked similar responses in the rural communities of past centuries. These are essentially cultural threats, not so much an attack on adults as youth culture's rather conventional attempt to keep adults at a distance. Fears of street crime must be understood as particular cases of more general class and race fears, which go far beyond issues of safety.