The Dutch Minister of Justice has promised that a city’s mayor will be informed if a former prisoner, who was sentenced for a sex offense and/or serious violent crime, returns to the municipality. Because of an improved information position, the mayor is able to take founded and timely measures in order to prevent disturbances in public safety. To determine how this information can be organised in the best way, a pilot was carried out. The evaluation of this pilot suggests that the information meets a need, but that the information processing is vulnerable in certain parts. Following the evaluation the process will be adapted and may be rolled out nationwide.

Lately, mayors’ powers for maintaining public order and safety have been considerably extended, and even more powers are in preparation. These powers must enable the mayor to act quickly against public order disturbances and security threats. The novelty is that the mayor may conditionally use and exercise these new powers preventively against groups of rioters. Their freedom of action and their privacy can also be considerably curtailed. This means these powers have to be used carefully and reluctantly. If the mayor overdoes the crimefighter role, he/she may lose the public’s confidence.

Public safety has always been a core task for local, municipal authorities. However, until rather recently only the police has been actively involved in addressing local problems of public safety and maintaining order instead. Local public safety policy – as a responsibility for local authorities together with many other partners – is a relatively new phenomenon.This article compares the main developments and trends in local public safety policy in the Netherlands and Belgium. Special attention is paid to the role and position of the local, municipal authorities. What strikes most, are the strong similarities between the two countries. National governments played an important and catalyzing role in the development of public safety policy in the Netherlands as well as in Belgium. After many years and not without a lot of trouble, the monopoly of the police on designing and implementing policy for addressing public safety and order came to an end in both countries. Which, amongst other effects, presented the local authorities with new challenges.

Offenders of the law used to be sentenced by the criminal courts of justice. However, the Dutch Government is striving for better and more efficient law enforcement, and is increasingly delegating this enforcement to local authorities, especially to the mayor's level. For example, to maintain order, not only does the mayor decide on camera surveillance, preventative body search, restraining orders and curfews; he/she is now also allowed to shut down houses and evict people from their homes. New laws are in the making to delegate even more power to local authorities. The question arises whether the position of mayor can and should include the Sheriff Star. After all, he/she is politically accountable, plus it would take Superman to take on this new role as upholder of justice. Meanwhile, legal protection is in a sorry state, and citizens rarely take advantage of their legal protection rights. Adequate judicial control is lacking, and whether orders given out by the mayor based on the new responsibilities actually comply with the European Treaty of Human Rights is something that remains to be seen.

The article paints the picture of a mayor who is proactive, assumes a directive role, signals and tackles problems, while also playing a binding role in the community. When it comes to matters of public order and safety, the mayor obviously works in close cooperation and consultation with the other parties of the local triangle, e.g. the chief of police and the public prosecutor. Points of improvement are presented as regards the functioning of the triangle as well the mayor's position in terms of information. The directive role of the mayor can in the near future be embedded, whereby the mayor ‘oversees’ the integral safety policy in his municipality.

In a changing social and political environment, mayors assume quite a few different roles in local government. This is because they face different expectations, held by social and political actors at different times. Based on the distinction between strong and weak mayoral leadership, this article develops a typology of mayoral leadership roles. The authors argue that inherent tensions exist between some of these roles, making it impossible for mayors to fulfill all roles at once. Therefore, political leadership is best conceived as something that is contextually dependent. Mayors continually have to find a temporal balance between different roles, depending on the institutional setting and social and political context in which they operate at that time. Therefore, a caleidoscopic perspective on political leadership may provide valuable insights for mayors on how to develop their own leadership style.