Fear of crime among Arab Americans in a culture of fear

As the minority group frequently at the centre of public fear in the post-9/11 era, Arab Americans’ own sentiment toward, and concerns with, crime, has eluded scholarly attention. This study investigated their fear of crime net of five empirically validated fear of crime theoretical models. Face-to-face interviews with a random sample of Arab and non-Arab households in Metro-Detroit, Michigan indicated that net of all controls, Arab Americans experienced significantly higher levels of fear concerning both general and bias crimes than non-Arab Americans. The greater fear among Arab Americans calls for policy and practice change, and moving from perceiving Arab Americans as a major “source” of fear, to “carriers” of fear who are in need of more attention, care, and assistance.