This contribution reports about a research in a medium-sized municipality on the possibilities of giving municipalities an instrument to determine at the earliest possible stage which neighborhoods are at (increased) risk of exposure to organized crime and its consequences. We are searching for indicators to measure that exposure to give direction to preventive measures. Our focus is on the erosion of structures and foundations of society as a result of activities of organized crime, eventually resulting in the infringement of the rule of law. It is therefore not about the phenomenon of organized crime itself, but about its effects on society. This requires clarification and measurability of the concept. In this first exploration, we focus on the following five manifestations of the effect of organized crime: The emergence of a subculture: not recognizing government authority; the emergence of takeover of power in the neighborhood; the emergence of vulnerable groups of citizens; the creation of the image: crime pays off; and the emergence of unfair competition.

The promises of Big Data, predictive policing and artificial intelligence hold a key position in the public debate for quite some time now. Optimists tell that it is possible to predict where criminal events will occur before they take place. This would implicate a major shift towards a crime and insecurity preventive society, feeding on our cultural longing for a secure future. Therefore we give algorithms and deep learning access to more and more aspects of our lives. But how realistic and desirable is the application of Big Data techniques in the area of security?
In this article we put focus on the research question ‘In which way can Big Data and predictive policing support good governance of security?’, that has led our study. By exploring the central concepts, the processes behind them and their results in the domain of public security, we conclude that there are only rather disappointing results from the application of these techniques: crime and insecurity have not dropped when the police and other organizations turned to Big Data techniques. Instead, many negative side effects occurred. We search for explanations in six central academic critiques on the application of these techniques in the area of security.
We have found several ways to guaranty principles of good governance in the application of Big Data techniques, but these require a firm paradigm shift on Big Data in general. The heuristics of security professionals should not be overshadowed by technological promises: the professional should always be in the loop, must understand the way predictions come into existence and must be able to correct flaws and bugs of (semi-)automated decisions. We conclude that safeguarding public security must remain human work in which Big Data techniques can assist.

Both major disasters and smaller incidents at chemical companies impact the environment. Seveso regulations aim to limit the impact of the chemical industry on man and the environment. This leads to the expectation that violation of these rules is predictive of incidents. In the current study, incidents at chemical companies are predicted from the company’s history of rule violation, previously reported incidents and corporate characteristics. Analysis of three years of inspection data and of six years of reported incidents, shows that the company’s branch and previous reported incidents predict the occurrence of an incident. The company’s history of rule violation, however, does not. Future research is needed to examine the different possible explanations for these contra intuitive results.

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.

This contribution describes the legal basis for revoking or denying a residence status to asylum seekers and individuals in possession of a status who are considered war criminals, ‘common’ criminals or terrorists, in what way the Dutch government tries to identify these persons, and what the nature and size of this group is. The authors conclude that identifying alleged war criminals and jihadists is particularly complex and that there is a tension with respect to the use, necessity and desirability of making available concrete tools in the form of indicators to first line professionals for the purpose of identifying jihadists. The presence of unwanted but unremovable (criminal) asylum seekers is undesirable from the perspective of society. The suggestion is made to provide them, under certain conditions, with a temporary residence status.

This article addresses disaster recovery preparedness characteristics prescribed by literature and guidelines. An exploratory study was conducted in 25 Dutch safety regions to describe the status of disaster recovery preparedness with an emphasis on psychosocial support aspects. The study pointed at substantial cross-regional variation. Particular areas of improvement were identified in relation to involving citizens and partner organizations in safety regions’ recovery planning efforts, and the extent to which preparedness activities are guided by regional risk profiles. Optimization of preparedness takes place in an everyday context where relatively little priority is assigned to disaster recovery. Also, as major crises are fairly scarce there is little room for learning or routinization. Deliberate investments to enhance disaster recovery preparedness are needed, they would however benefit from more research into the association between relevant conditions, the disaster recovery preparedness level and the quality of service delivery when an event actually takes place.

Since winter 2014, Belgian is faced with a possible rolling out of power. Blackouts come without any warning whilst the duration and cause of it is mostly unclear. Rolling outs are usually planned by utility companies to put small service areas without electricity, to cope with a high energy demand that the utility companies can’t supply. This rolling out plan can prevent a larger blackout and should make people aware of the consequences of a possible black-out.
Given this situation, this paper presents the result of a study asking citizens about their self-efficacy and organizations of their own house hold to deal with possible blackouts. For this survey, 473 citizens have been interviewed in 2 Belgian cities. We asked about their own action to organize themselves and were looking at their expectations of the government.

In this article we examine which factors are correlated to the rehabilitation of prisoners. Central is the prisoners’ willingness during their imprisonment to work on a successful return in society. Assumptions derived from the theory were statistically tested with data from the Dutch Detainee Survey 2014; a large-scale study, in which prisoners held in all Dutch penitentiary institutions (N = 29) were surveyed (n = 2120). The results are in line with the theory and show that detainees are more positive about their (potential for) rehabilitation when they are more satisfied with a) the way they are treated by correctional officers (staff orientation); b) active deployment of the so-called Detention and Re-integration Plan; c) their daily program and activities, and; d) the experienced autonomy and personal decision-making. These outcomes offer fruitful perspectives on how the prison system can promote a successful return of prisoners in our society.

Is behavioural profiling a viable alternative to more traditional approaches to profiling, viewed from the perspectives of underlying theoretical assumptions and measures of effectiveness? In this article we describe behaviour profiling in relation to other types of profiling, we review relevant psychological mechanisms that underpin behaviour profiling, and discuss effectiveness of this type of profiling as well as methodological aspects of measuring effectiveness. Behaviour profiling is a method largely used to select potential offenders before the offence is committed by observing and giving meaning to behaviours preceding incidents. Deviant behaviours exhibited by suspects can be either part of a modus operandi related to the offence, the consequence of increased stress, or an atypical response to prodding actions by security officers. Relevant psychological mechanisms to explain ways behaviour profiling works include direct characteristics of deception as well as indirect indicators of deception, such as a criminal being more self-focused and more cognitively engaged. Effectiveness of behaviour profiling is increased by training, including learning more about modi operandi and related behaviours, awareness of biases in general, specific relevant biases, and techniques to correct for these biases.

This article aims to explore the driving factors behind the process of crimmigration, the merger of crime control and migration control. By analysing the legal and policy framework governing the so-called ‘Mobile Security Monitor’ – the discretionary immigration checks carried out by the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee in the borderlands with Belgium and Germany, the research explores the extent to which the framework might leave room for crimmigration-based decisions on the street level. As the article shows, the dual nature of the Mobile Security Monitor as both an instrument for immigration control and crime control combined with an important name-change and the ongoing securitization of migration in Europe seem to create a favourable environment for crimmigration.

To improve security in crowded environments, such as airports, shopping malls and railway stations, the number of surveillance cameras (CCTV) is rapidly increasing. However, the number of human operators remains limited and only a selection of the video streams can be observed. This makes it hard for an operator to be proactive. This paper gives an overview of novel developments that may lead to more efficient camera surveillance and a more proactive role for camera operators. It focuses on three main steps in this process of video content analysis: pedestrian tracking, action recognition and behavior analysis. Tracking and re-identification (i.e. recognizing a person in another camera) was initially only evaluated on off-line benchmark datasets, though recently it has gained in maturity with live demonstrations in realistic crowded environments and measured improved operator efficiency. For action recognition and automatic behavior recognition, we observe that the simple patterns, such as loitering detection, are emerging in many applications. Human action recognition obtains very high performance values in controlled environments and it is progressing towards more realistic environments. More advanced approaches, such as pickpocket recognition in a shopping mall and the detection of threats to trucks on a parking lot have been developed and the first systems have been presented in live demonstrations. Our main contribution is that we structure the recent advances and the emerging applications of video analysis for security applications, explain and interpret the results, and identify opportunities for the near future.

Community policing is a common strategy in the Dutch police organization: working in a geographically bounded area, in close proximity and engagement with the local population. The use of Twitter by local police-officers is an increasingly popular way of communicating in this context. Prior research has indicated that there is a positive relation between the use of Twitter by the local police officer and citizens’ confidence in the police. But what factors determine this confidence and how can it be strengthened by using Twitter? This article examines the nature of police tweets and shows how tweets can contribute to improving the degree of confidence between citizens and the police. To determine what factors influence confidence we made use of the model of trust and confidence by Jackson and Bradford. This model differentiates between ‘effectiveness’, ‘fairness’, and ‘engagement’. These three factors are used to explore the way tweets might influence confidence in policing. The empirical research included interviews with three police officers who twitter actively, as well as interviews with 30 ‘followers’ living in the neighbourhood where the police officer works. Also an analyses has been carried out of the tweets made by the police officers in one year, 3.506 tweets in total, by categorizing the tweets according to the model of Jackson and Bradford. We conclude that the model of Jackson and Bradford is useful to explore the possible relationship between the use of Twitter and citizens confidence in the police. Using Twitter by the local police officers seems to make a possible contribution to the degree of confidence in the police. Our categorization of Twittermessages allowed us to give practical recommendations to local police officers how to use Twitter in order to improve confidence among citizens. The data also suggest that followers appreciate the fact that local police officers show their knowledge of current affairs in the neighbourhood.

In 2011 we executed a quantitative and qualitative research on the extent of discrimination, polarisation and radicalisation in a region in the Netherlands. The results are representative for The Netherlands. The research shows that there is breeding ground for radicalization, in particular Muslim youths. The outcome also provides insights in relevant avenues for public policy. Over the past years, several inventories have been made of public policy that aims to counter radicalisation. Most of the interventions listed do not conjure with the interventions we propose on the basis of our research, such as awareness raising for practitioners, prevention of and education about discrimination, focus on neighbourhood grievances and nuisances caused by specific ethnic groups and the negative tone of the public debate regarding Islam and the multicultural society. If measures to counter radicalization are even evaluated, they tend to focus on the process and effectiveness of the intervention, but they do not answer the question if that is actually also the right intervention. We therefore propose not only to focus on doing things right, but also to ask the question if we are doing the right things. We suggest not only measuring effectiveness, but also measuring impact.

In this article a longitudinal effect study is described of resilience training Diamant. The training focuses in particular on adolescents with a dual identity who do not have work, are not enrolled in an education, feel unfairly treated (relatively deprived), have low self-esteem, and are at risk of social isolation. The training can be considered as a method to prevent development of criminal behaviour and possibly radicalisation. Certified trainers work with small groups of 10 to 15 adolescents to increase their resilience and help them finding their place in society. The present research focused on the following questions: (1) Does this training have a positive effect on self-esteem among the participants? (2) Does social isolation decrease as a consequence of the training? (3) Does the training reduce feelings of relative deprivation and help participants better deal with conflicts? Participants were interviewed before and halfway the training and directly after completing the training. A follow-up measurement three months after the end of the training examined effects on the longer term. In total 44 semi-structured interviews were held. Interviews were written out and coded using a two-step procedure: In the first step two researchers independently coded each interview. Second, when necessary, changes in the coding scheme were made. Then each interview was coded separately by the two researchers and disagreements were discussed until full agreement was reached. The results show that Diamant has a positive effect on self-esteem of participants. Also, participants overall showed an increase in connectedness to society. Third, Diamant reduced feelings of relative deprivation and participants indicated they could better deal with conflicts. Based on these results it is concluded that Diamant is effective in regard to its goals which were evaluated in this study. Limitations of the research and possibilities for future studies are discussed.

Human trafficking means exploitation; human smuggling is associated with illegal labour and a connection with exploitation is absent. Where a victim of human trafficking can appeal for legal protection, a smuggled migrant (illegally residing or with vulnerable legal status) overall has little rights because of the formal absence of the aspects of exploitation and coercion in human smuggling. In this article, the empirical analysis based on file analysis demonstrates that in several files of cases framed as human smuggling indications are found for exploitation of migrants, although this has not been recognised as such. Theoretically the authors tie this to the trend of crimmigration. Measures designed to combat human trafficking and smuggling are often concentrated on (criminal) law enforcement and criminal punishment, to the detriment of a human rights-based approach. The tension between immigration policy and the combat against human trafficking deserves more attention.

This paper deals with the question of how a partly privatized security sector could be regulated. A central aim of this regulation should be the control of security as a public good. Three models of regulation are analyzed. The current practice of this regulation in the Netherlands shows a serious lack of effectiveness. One of our main conclusions is that neither the state nor the private sector is able to enforce this regulation on their own. However, it is assumed that the state should have a central and integrated regulatory role in this field, with more attention paid to the practical implementation of it, with the power and will to sanction private agencies if necessary. In addition managers of private security companies should adopt a role as public managers with a public moral duty. Regulation of security is faced with a double problematic, not only the horizontal fragmentation of the field, but also the vertical fragmentation, often resulting in a serious gap between managers and those in the field, both in the public and the private sector. This implies that the regulation should not only rest on the state and on self-regulation by the sector at management level, but also on the promotion of a practical ethic for security workers to steer and regulate their daily work.

Consumer fraud seems to be widespread, yet little research is devoted to understanding why certain social groups are more vulnerable to this type of victimization than others. The present paper deals with internet consumer fraud victimization, and uses an explanatory model that combines insights from self control theory and routine activity theory. The results from large-scale victimization survey data among the Dutch general population (N=6,201) reveal that people with low self-control run substantially higher victimization risk, as well as people performing ‘risky’ routine activities, such as online shopping and participation in online forums. Though a minority share of the self-control-victimization link is indirect – because people with low self-control are more involved in risk-enhancing routine activities – a large direct effect on internet fraud victimization remains. This suggests that, within similar situations, people with poor impulse control respond differently to deceptive online commercial offers.

Municipalities play an increasingly important role in the fight against organized crime. Following Italian and New York examples, the Netherlands have developed several instruments for an administrative approach to organized crime. This article describes these instruments on a local and a national level and discusses its theoretical foundations. A critical assessment is made on the reach of this administrative approach considering the perception and nature of organized crime in the Netherlands. Further, methods for assessing the effectiveness of such an approach are discussed. Has organized crime successfully been targeted and how could this be established?