Fear of violent crime is manufactured politically and rises independent of actual crime rates.

Evidence

Crime rates have been declining but, paradoxically, fear of criminal victimization is rising. A campaign to arm the populous requires high arousal of public fear. Carrying concealed guns in public places has been legalized by state and local legislatures. The fact that people are walking around with concealed weapons renders more of the public environment threatening. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1150

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to moral disengagement mechanisms elsewhere in the book about manufactured threat-feeding harmful policy; parallels the reader’s vault claims on Islamophobic policy fueled by manufactured fear.
• SEED: The manufactured-fear-of-crime mechanism could anchor an essay on how threat inflation drives punitive and rights-restricting policy across domains.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1150