The Crimes That Weigh on Americans' Minds

A new The study, based on a spring 2026 survey of 2,000 adults, digs into how individual attributes, neighborhood demographics, political ideology and other factors influence a person's fear of crime. People worried about their health or about a potential job loss, for example, tended to express more concern about becoming the victim of a crime, the study found. In contrast, a person's level of friendliness toward neighbors and their level of anti-immigrant sentiment showed little to no connection to their crime worries. The study also found that people's fear of being victimized doesn't always match up with how at-risk they think they are. For example, the share of people who express at least some concern about being murdered (43 percent) outstrips the share who say it is likely or very likely to happen to them (6 percent). The crimes Americans are most concerned about are financial ones. Identity theft tops the list, with 77 percent expressing some level of concern, followed by online theft (71 percent) and home burglary (71 percent). For the most part, people's levels of worry correlated only slightly with how politically conservative or liberal they were and were roughly consistent across political party affiliation. A person's attitudes toward immigrants, whether they interacted with or recognized their neighbors, and whether they had shared community values had little to no correlation with their fears of victimization. Fears also had little to do with people's level of 'racial resentment," as defined in the study. Sex and race mattered. Women were more worried than men about many kinds of victimization, but shared similar levels of fear about online theft. White adults were notably less worried about sexual assault and murder compared to other racial groups, while Black adults were especially worried about identity theft. Neighborhood disorder — like litter and visible drug use — had a strong impact on how much a person worried about falling victim to in-person crimes like home break-ins, sexual assault or murder. Job and health insecurity also made respondents more concerned about victimization. The study also takes a step back to look at Americans' broader array of fears. It found more people were worried about a personal health crisis (85 percent) or serious car accident (81 percent) than any of the crimes listed. The share of people who feared not being able to put food on the table was the same as those who feared being victim of a mass shooting (63 percent), and nearly the same percentage of people fear being murdered (43 percent) as fear being victimized by police brutality (44 percent).