Surveillance measures in public places such as train stations, large events or business premises are aimed at increasing security at those specific locations. They enable people to move around securely at public (high) risk locations. However, people often experience these measures as an obstacle. Too much security often results in limitations of freedom of movement and violations of privacy. Could surveillance measures be designed in such a way that they are perceived more as a ‘service’? The authors studied the variables that influence whether people experience surveillance as a service or as a hindrance. At three surveillance locations (Schiphol Airport, Hoog Catharijne shopping area and Amersfoort railway station) more than thousand visitors were surveyed. They were asked how they experienced service and security on the site. The results show that there are differences in service perception in relation to security measures at the three locations studied. They show how the tension between service and safety can be reduced and provide clues for improving security measures. The results can be used by owners of public locations, surveillance stakeholders or private companies for the optimalisation and re-design of a location, as their goal is to attract loyal visitors, who are not frustrated and are willing to use the location frequently, and who preferably speak positively about the location to others. Also the security measures themselves can be improved, both technical security measures as well as human security measures.

This article describes a qualitative inquiry into Dutch people going to Syria for participating in Jihad. The inquiry compares theoretical findings with empirical facts, based on a content analysis and a document analysis, completed with ten depth-interviews. The results show that a combination of scientific findings on radicalisation and foreign fighters explains the jihad movement to Syria partly. The results also show that some factors, which have not recently be examined scientificly, are crucial for the character and extent of the movement towards Jihad.

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.

This article discusses the complex relations between the organizational fields of safety (i.e. disaster and crisis response) and security (i.e. crime prevention and public order), and the ways in which disciplinary and organizational boundaries make it difficult to come to a better integration or coordination in the safety and security domain. Based on results of a research project on cooperation and information-sharing between organizations in the fields of safety and security, the authors argue that it is not realistic to refer to safety and security as relatively independent fields. Instead, it would be more useful to approach it as a connected domain, encompassing both safety and security disciplines. Yet, the separation of the two fields is strongly embedded in the culture and responsibilities of organizations in these fields, which reinforces the disciplinary boundaries in the domain. Nevertheless, in the last few years it seems that there is an increasing recognition of the need for multidisciplinary collaboration in the safety and security domain. This paper explores possible directions for creating more coherence and integration in the safety and security domain. The authors believe that much progress can be made if key stakeholders in the safety and security domain are able to adopt a broader, multidisciplinary perspective when approaching safety and security events.

Despite the international scientific inconclusiveness about the nature of the fear of crime, the strategic layer of the Dutch government aims to reduce the fear of crime in general by 2017. But their policy-goals were not accompanied with a plan how to realize them. Meanwhile, local practitioners claim to be in search of practical tools and substantive support how to fight back the public’s fear of crime. This study was aimed to feed the discussion with a constructive and realistic input from both the practitioners and the scientific view. The research question was: ‘What do local practitioners do against the public’s fear of crime and how can these activities be improved?’ 36 local practitioners from Dutch local municipalities, the police force and the public prosecutor were interviewed. Schön’s idea of the ‘reflective practitioner’ (1983) was the underlying argument to make practical knowledge about reducing the fear of crime explicit. The respondents from both institutional layers of local ‘policy advise’ and ‘policy implementation’ were quite reluctant about fighting back the public’s fear of crime. They aim to reduce the fear of crime in a doubtful and indirect way. Because many sources of the public’s fear of crime were unknown to them or were not in the reach of their professional activities. In this way, the interviewed local practitioners approach strongly aligned with the advice of international scientists to be reluctant and realistic about fighting back the public’s fear of crime. We advised an approach of ‘local fear of and worry about crime’ in dialog between international science and the interviewed local Dutch practitioners. The results of it will probably not contribute to quantitative policy goals at the national level, but rather to custom fit, qualitative improvements on the local level. This will probably be the most effective way to fight back the few tractable elements that make up the fear of crime.

On 1 January 2009, the Dutch Temporary Restraining Order Act (Wth) entered into force. This act allows mayors to impose a ten-day restraining order (which may be extended to 28 days) on (potential) perpetrators of domestic violence, which prohibits these perpetrators from entering their own house and contacting their partner and/or children. During the restraining order everyone involved (evicted persons, those who stay behind and children) is offered a range of support and intervention measures. The law requires that within five years after its entry into force the Dutch parliament is informed of the effectiveness. To this end, a study was conducted between September 2011 and August 2013. The aim of this impact assessment is to gain insight in the effectiveness of the restraining order and the support services that are connected to it. The study was designed as a quasi-experimental study with an intervention group (restraining orders) and a control group (similar situations in which no restraining order was imposed). The study shows that the restraining order is associated with less incidence of new domestic violence. After imposing a restraining order new domestic violence occurs less frequently, and in case it does occur, fewer incidents occur than in (comparable) situations where no restraining order was imposed. The main explanation for the correlation found between the restraining order and the lower incidence of new domestic violence seems to lie in the support that is offered after the imposition of a restraining order. Moreover, the support seems to be more effective in the more serious cases than in the lighter cases. The degree in which antecedents of the evicted person are present and whether or not the evicted person is criminally prosecuted are not related to a lower degree of repeated domestic violence.

The aim of the article is to analyse the correlations between social cognitive factors and behaviour that increases resilience by police officers and to assess in which way intention mediates the possible correlations. The study was based on Ajzen's theory of planned behaviour. A cross-sectional survey study was conducted in which 1.799 police officers in the Netherlands completed a questionnaire. Data was also collected by organising qualitative expert meetings with police officers. The data has been analysed using linear regression. The results show that intention had the highest correlation with behaviour that increases resilience and mediates the correlations of the social cognitive factors partially. Perceived behavioural control and attitude also had a direct correlation with behaviour that increases resilience. Subjective norm had a weak correlation with behaviour. This is the first study which tested TPB for behaviour that increases resilience by police officers. Because the design of this study was cross-sectional, more research is needed to better understand the causal relations between social cognitive factors and intention with behaviour that increases resilience by police officers.

The economic analysis of (potential) disasters is an important method to determine the efficacy and efficiency of investments in disaster prevention and mitigation. The Dutch National Risk Assessment (NRA) provides an integrated, whole-of-government and all-hazard approach to Dutch national security. The strategy does not only intend to identify capacity gaps and define measures regarding individual threats and risks, but also to enhance capability planning and policy development concerning overall national security. The approach is multi-disciplinary and based upon scenarios which are evaluated and graded in terms of impact and likelihood according to a unified scoring method. Economic impact is one of the criteria in the NRA risk assessment methodology. This article provides a review of the (applied) scientific literature of the many economic tools and methods that have been used worldwide to estimate the (potential) impact of disasters and provides concrete applications at the micro and macro levels to Dutch cases and scenarios that were developed during the five annual cycles of the NRA's existence (2007-2011). We discuss pros and cons of applied methodologies.

Nightlife violence is gaining increasing attention and is a substantial part of all violent incidents. In this article we explore the assumption that going out in metropolitan clubs and bars creates a specific moral setting, where the aim is to let yourself go. The main question in this article is to what extent the moral setting of going out contributes to nightlife related violence. We explored this issue by analyzing the case of Amsterdam, in particular the two famous squares, Leidseplein and Rembrandtplein, and de Wallen (red light district). With regard to the moral setting we distinguish between physical, social, professional and normative aspects of the moral setting. Each of these aspects has been described in academic literature as potentially contributing to violence. On that basis a checklist has been developed that was used for observations in nightlife venues that are known for either a high or low disproportionate amount of violent incidents. By comparing the two categories we were able to identify elements of the moral setting which, supported by the literature, can be expected to contribute to the prevalence of nightlife violence. Elements which we discovered that occur more frequently in venues where many incidents occur are visitor density, the loudness of the music, the presence of smokers, the overall comfort, the opportunity to dance, the presence of drunken visitors and their degree of intoxication, overtly sexually charged behavior, opportunities for the staff to observe, security at the exit, the number of bouncers, and whether visitors were searched or not before they entered the venue. Whether situations actually developed into violent conflict depended on one of three possible causes, namely miscommunication, conflict with authority or unsolicited advances. Policymakers can use these insights in order to try to manipulate violence stimulating factors.

Safety authorities in The Netherlands have the obligation to develop so-called risk-profiles. Risk profiles are probability-consequences schemes of all kinds of hazards (ranging from earth quakes to transportation and from floodings to fires in high rise buildings). To develop such schemes, various data sources could be useful. In this paper, we describe an approach to make use of existing database to reveal ‘new’ kinds of transportation-related risks. To this end, we combined publicly available public and private databases related to: hazardous materials transportation and Natura 2000 areas; congested areas and large scale public events; hazardous materials transportation and multi-functional areas.
Our approach makes clear that combination of existing databases has great potential for the safety authorities to develop their risk profiles, do their business intelligence and creating steering dash-boards for their own budget allocations.

In England & Wales the coalition-government has opted for a localisation of the police service. The government dissociates itself from the New Labour policy of centrally-imposed targets, aims to reconnect the police and the people, and carries out a radical democratic renewal: since 2012 citizens have the possibility to choose their own Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) in their region. This new administrator is reigning over police chiefs and is responsible for the management of security policies in the region. That is the main reason why the English police reform diverges fundamentally from developments in other European countries in which centralizing tendencies prevail. The question is whether the radical changes in England & Wales have a beneficial impact on the local embedment of the police. Are citizens more willing to commit themselves with the local police? In the first part of this paper we examine which developments have taken place in the English police, what the localisation-agenda has achieved so far, and which problems it faces. In the second part we discuss the question which lessons can be learned from the English renewals. Would it be a good idea to introduce PCC’s in the Netherlands? Is democratization the best way to strengthen community involvement? How to stimulate local accountability?