Cybercrime as the Most Feared Crime

Crime

Americans have always been worried about crime, and a recent poll cited crime as the single most pressing concern that Americans have, even above issues that likely affect their quality of life more, such as education and the state of the economy. Concern about crime is often generalized -- people do not necessarily express any one specific crime type that worries them more than others (Saad, 2014). One reason for this might be that different types of crime have different impacts on people's lives. A person might rightly fear murder above all other crimes because, while rates are usually low, the outcome is the most severe. However, crimes with high rates, such as burglary or vehicle theft, have high rates. They might have near zero impact on overall quality of life, but if people feel that they have a high likelihood of being a victim, then they might feel that this is a bigger concern.

Then there are overarching worries, things for which there are limited statistics and for which most people know little about -- terrorism or mass shootings or cybercrime. These are crimes that receive a large amount of publicity, and therefore might be in the public consciousness more than other types of crime, however low the likelihood might be of becoming a victim in the first two cases. Cybercrime is so little understood by most people that they may overstate their risk of becoming a victim, making something like that a major worry. Ultimately, people process their concerns about crime based on different features of it -- the severity of outcome, the publicity, the likelihood of being a victim or on how well they understand the risk. This is why people often respond to polls in a more general way, that they are worried about "crime." "

One Gallup poll showed that hacking is the crime that most people worry about (Riffkin, 2014). Hacking reflects on people's desire for privacy, and it has financial costs as well when there is identity theft involved. It is also a crime that most people know very little about. One can develop a sense of security about robberies by installing an alarm, for example, but very few people have any real sense of how to protect themselves from hacking -- it is assumed that the most common defenses are ineffective.

It is not without good reason that Americans are concerned about hacking -- cybercrime is a fairly important category, and there are multiple different components to it. First, we are becoming increasingly dependent on our electronic devices. Second, for many people all of our information is out there, and even the largest companies and government agencies can be hacked, in some cases quite easily. Hackers are often tied to organized crime, or even foreign governments, or the American government. The result is that hacking is a rather nebulous, but threatening form of crime. It usually does not have physical outcomes, however, so it is perhaps odd that something like murder is not at the top of the list. That said, almost every American can fear hacking, because anybody can become a victim and few people believe that they have a way to be truly protected.