Since mid-January 2015, nearly 300 soldiers were mobilized by the Belgian government to ensure the safety of public places in Liège, Brussels, Antwerp and Verviers, providing assistance to local and federal police forces. This provoked intense political and public debate about the issue of the provision of security in a democratic society, raising questions such as: which are the goals of security policies and what kind of risks are they supposed to address? Which control instances should be responsible for the provision of security and how should they operate? The central issue, here, is whether either civilian or military actors and practices are the most appropriate for surveillance and policing tasks. As a matter of fact, this discussion goes back to the Belgian independence and has marked the entire history of the Belgian police system, since at the heart of it, there has long been a military police force, the gendarmerie. In this contribution, we examine how the militarization of security and policing tasks evolved across the twentieth century in Belgium, which socio-political conditions shaped these evolutions, and what kind of arguments pro or contra military approaches have been advanced in this process.

This contribution focuses on the manner in which between 1880 and 1940 private actors in the port of Antwerp, whether or not in cooperation with the public authorities, interpreted crime and crime control in terms of risk management, loss prevention and situational crime prevention through a strict economic approach, as opposed to the then dominant institutionalized and criminological discourse. Whereas crime control by the major criminal justice institutions put an emphasis on the biological, psychological and sociological characteristics of the offender, measures taken by maritime, industrial and commercial organizations were aimed exclusively at manipulating the temporal and spatial dimensions of the opportunity structures in which criminal activities, which posed a threat to the economic profitability, could develop.