The ‘fear of crime’ is a buzzword among citizens, media, politicians and professionals by now. But the phenomenon seems to be as intangible as it is important. The struggle of professionals with this concept is the result of a too wide and self-evident problem definition. This article contains an alternative approach. The focus is on disturbed fear of crime: a negatively changed and problematically experienced fear of crime on the level of the neighborhood.
Through a review of the literature and previous research, we work towards this concept and apply it to the neighborhood of Kerckebosch in the municipality of Zeist in the Netherlands. As during 2014 the local quantitative indicators for ‘the fear of crime’ rose from 7% of the local population indicating to ‘sometimes feel unsafe’ to 22%, while the rest of the municipality remained quite stable. Additionally, several local professionals received complaints of multiple local inhabitants claiming to ‘feel unsafe’ in the neighborhood. Our research question was: What explanations for their ‘disturbed fear of crime’ do local inhabitants of the neighborhood Kerckebosch give?
It was highly plausible that this local rise of the fear in Kerckebosch was connected to the social re-engineering of the neighborhood, but the exact nature of the quantitative rise was unclear. Therefore, we have interviewed 25 local inhabitants. Qualitative analyses showed the local rise of ‘the fear of crime’ to be the result of: (I) physical characteristics of the neighborhood; (II) events of burglary and intimidation from the past; (III) the presence of loitering youths and – primarily – (VI) a backlash of social integration as a side effect of the social re-engineering of the neighborhood. These qualitative explanations to the observed quantitative discontinuity led to several policy advises, which were based on international effect studies.

The fight against organized cannabis cultivation is an important topic within Dutch law enforcement. No longer the sole responsibility of the police, the current trend is for the police to work alongside local government, companies providing energy, housing associations and the Inland Revenue. Together they unite their strengths to deal more effectively and resolutely with the problem. Although different studies have been conducted concerning the (effectiveness of) the fight against cannabis cultivation, there is not much known regarding the way actors experience the fight from ‘within’, that is: the interactions, perceptions and transformations of agreements and premises which are enacted on the ‘molecular level’ of the cooperation. In two large Dutch cities, we have researched, on the basis of semi-structured interviews and observation, how parties implement their role within the integral fight against cannabis cultivation. The results reveal that the execution is more complex and uncontrollable than previously considered. The cooperation turns out not to be deductive, structured and ‘organized’; but rather flexible, dynamic and ‘self organizing’ in character.

In this article we want to show how different actors (amongst whom residents, professional safety-functionaries and street youth) view the safety situation in Rotterdam’s problematic neighbourhood ‘the Old West’ in very different ways and start from very different parameters. We conclude that the one-dimensional image of an unsafe neighbourhood that emerges from the city’s official, quantitative measurement instrument, the so-called ‘Safety Index’ (Veiligheidsindex), does not do justice to the diversity of opinions and visions of the different actors in the neighbourhood and is thus unsuited as the political ‘compass’ for local safety policy it was intended for. This diversity comes much better to the surface in the qualitative, ethnographic research on which this article is based. Such research enables us first to better understand safety as a local phenomenon and secondly offers more concrete points of departure for policy.

The Netherlands fire safety regulations require certain types of buildings to have a direct connection between the building fire alarm system and the dispatch centre of the fire brigade. These automatic fire alarm systems are mandatory for example in premises where inhabitants such as small children or elderly people have limited self-evacuation capabilites in case of fire. These automatic fire alarms aim at saving lives by a faster response of the fire brigade. However, the fast majority of these automatic alarms are false. As a result these calls constitute a considerable and undesirable drain on the fire brigade resources. These calls cause unwanted direct costs (salaries) and indirect costs (road accidents due to fire brigade mobilisation) apart from the regular maintenance costs. Up to now no data is available for the costs and benefits of the system of automatic fire alarms. This article describes the results of a study of the automatic fire alarm system in the region Twente. The yearly social costs are calculated at about € 3 million. In order to calculate the benefits all incident reports from automatic fire alarms during a period of 29 months have been investigated. In this period no call form an automatic fire alarm system has occured in which the fire brigade had to deploy its resources for a live saving or evacuation action.