by Beth Shuster

About the author: Beth Shuster, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, frequently writes about urban life and contemporary culture.

They are on the news almost nightly: carjackers, sexual predators, workplace gunmen, follow-home, takeover and home invasion robbers, killers enraged on the road.

By the numbers, there are fewer and fewer of them. Yet fear of them has held steady. That fear has overwhelmed reality, causing many Americans to feel more threatened by crime even as the nation has become a safer place in which to live.

The reasons for that disparity are complex, and sometimes shockingly deliberate. Police stoke fear in part because they take crime seriously, but also to prime their budgets; politicians feel deeply about the issue, but also manipulate it to win votes...