Municipal advisors for public order and safety are fast gaining more responsibilities in the Dutch local safety domain, making their previously behind-the-screens role more visible. It is unclear to what extent this new visibility also increases the risks they face of encountering citizen aggression and violence. Existing policy and research attention is mostly focused on violence against the police and against more political local public officials such as mayors. In this study, we examine aggression and violence against municipal public order and safety advisors through a survey of people working in this profession in every municipality in the Netherlands.
We find that nearly half of those surveyed indicate being victims of violence or aggression, with over 31% having been threatened. In most of these cases, perpetrators were thought to be frustrated and emotional, contradicting the dominant image of calculating, manipulative aggressors.
While municipal public order and safety advisors consider their risk of becoming victim of aggression to be lower than that of mayors or street-level safety officials and many of them feel quite safe in their work, they still consider their risk of future victimization to be high. Moreover, those who have encountered aggression before feel less safe, and in many cases feel less supported by their management. Those who feel safe in their work, say they do so because they are not very visible, because their organization does a good job supporting them, or they trust in their own capacities in de-escalating a situation.
The results show that as the responsibilities of this diverse professional group evolve, their increased visibility in the ‘mayor’s spotlight’ puts them at serious risk of aggression and violence. Municipalities should take these risks into account and put policies in place for protecting, supporting and training their public order and safety advisors.

At the Dutch municipal level, public order and safety are mainly associated with the mayor, who possesses most competences in that area. Nevertheless, in recent decades, the ‘safety alderman’ also seems on the rise. We define ‘safety alderman’ as an alderman that explicitly has safety, public order and/or enforcement in his or her portfolio. In this article, we examine how safety aldermen function, especially regarding cooperation with the mayor and other aldermen. We see that in practice an implicit or explicit dividing line exists between the work of a mayor and that of a safety alderman and that cooperation between the two is essential for the effective functioning of the safety alderman.

This explorative research is focused on the rate of residential fires in neighborhoods in a region that highly variates in urban and rural areas. Firstly, based on neighborhood characteristics from open data this research distinguish clusters of neighborhoods using a clustering technique. Secondly, the rate of residential fire is analyzed for the clusters of neighborhoods and shows differences between those clusters. Furthermore, a regression model is made for the rate of residential fire in each of the clusters of neighborhoods. In the clusters of neighborhoods with higher rates of residential fire, percentage of private rental residences, percentage of persons who have a migration background, percentage of lower income households, percentage of one person households and percentage of smokers are higher. These results give direction to further research. The findings on this level of neighborhoods are not causal relations, and are not applicable to the rate of residential fire in individual residents or households.