A new study has found that fear of crime is very high among the immigrant population in Sydney but paradoxically most first and second generation immigrants living in the city's south-west feel safe in their local area.

The report Gangs, Crime and Community Safety: Perceptions and Experiences in Multicultural Sydney is the result of an extensive survey of 835 adults and young people, most from a non-English speaking background, conducted by researchers from the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of Western Sydney.

Chief investigator, Professor Jock Collins from UTS, said the survey had set out to tap the views of immigrant Sydneysiders at the centre of media storms about "ethnic crime" whose voices are mostly unheard in English-based opinion polls.

Professor Collins said the report highlighted a number of important but contradictory findings:

• Fear of crime is very high among the immigrant population in Sydney, but substantially among adults, and women in particular.
• However, most feel safe living in their local area. Hurstville rated as the safest local government area, followed by Canterbury, Rockdale, Liverpool and Auburn, where three quarters of those surveyed felt safe.
• People are most worried about their safety in public spaces, like railway stations.
• Most adults surveyed think that police are doing a good job on the crime front and applaud the way police are responding to criminal and youth gangs in Sydney. On the other hand, the majority of youth do not rate police highly.

"While the recent moral panic about ethnic crime in Sydney situates 'ethnics' as criminals, the research clearly reveals that 'ethnics' are also victims of crime," Professor Collins said.

"While immigrant youth do commit crimes - in a culturally diverse city such as Sydney criminals will also be culturally diverse - they are also victims of crime, a fact too readily overlooked in the current media and political discourse about crime.

"The politicisation of the ethnic crime issue by both major parties and the obsession with the issue in Sydney's media in the run up to the 2003 NSW state election intensifies the fear of crime, undermines feelings of community safety and threatens to undermine social cohesion in the city," Professor Collins said.