Politicians, Media, and Society’s Perception of Crime

This chapter deals with three important issues for countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which are going through political transformation, associated with society’s perception of crime: fear of crime, politicization of crime, and the impact of the media on public perception of crime. The authors set out the main characteristics of these phenomena since 1989 in the countries of the region, with a view to performing a more detailed analysis of them in the context of Poland. Despite the numerous differences among the countries going through the transformation in the past 20 years, they are beginning to fall within the ambit of the same rules as the “mature” democracies of Western Europe. In evidence are the same processes associated with the behavior of politicians in relation to troubling social phenomena and their use of populism as a method of wielding power, similar media reactions to criminality, and the recorded drop in the fear of crime.