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.

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.

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.