Many afraid to walk alone at night

The study was carried out for ITV1's Tonight programme following comments made by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith about feeling unsafe walking the streets of London at night.

On Thursday, Ms Smith tried to clarify her position by saying she felt "very safe" in parts of the capital she knew well but people should not walk in unfamiliar districts after midnight.

However the survey, which had 3,667 respondents from across Britain, showed many people felt afraid even in their own areas after dark. One third of women (30.4%) and men (34.4%) also said that either themselves or someone close to them had been victims of street crime. And one third (33.5%) of women and two fifths (40.4%) of men said either themselves or someone close to them had been victims of anti-social behaviour.

Three quarters of all respondents (75.3%) said they did not feel there was a high enough police presence in their area.

The programme features celebrity reporters Carol McGiffin (of TV's Loose Women), Shelagh Fogarty (BBC radio presenter) and Saira Khan (ex-Apprentice contestant) interviewing women and filming the streets on Friday and Saturday night in their home towns of London, Liverpool and Nottingham respectively.

On Saturday, Fogarty and her film crew were forced off the streets in Liverpool at about 9.45 pm after a man leaned out of a car in Croxteth and pointed a gun at them. The crew were looking for a spot to film a piece to camera and a police van was parked just a little way down the street. The night before, crews were caught up in a knifing incident in London, were on the scene of a double shooting in Nottingham and were pelted by stones and glass bottles by a large crowd of youths in Liverpool.

On Friday, McGiffin was caught up in a street melee while filming in Camden on Kentish Town Road in which more than a dozen police officers arrived after a man threatened another man with a knife. The incident took place after 11.30pm on a street full of pubs and bars.

In Liverpool, Fogarty and a crew were pelted with stones and glass bottles on The Strand, a 150 metre long stretch of road near Norris Green Estate, not far from where 11-year-old Rhys Jones was shot dead last August.

Saira Khan took to the streets of Nottingham on Friday and interviewed a number of women who said they would be scared to walk alone at night. However, she left the city feeling reassured after speaking to a police officer who said that crime was not that bad any more. Not long after, the Tonight film crew came across the scene of a shooting of two young men.