The most important mechanism for crime prevention is just the presence of guardians. Some counter arguments against this thesis are discussed and rejected. By manipulating the presence of guardians it is possible to influence the level of prevention. It is argued that a large scale evaluation of such measures is wanted.

The most important mechanism for crime prevention is just the presence of guardians. Some counter arguments against this thesis are discussed and rejected. By manipulating the presence of guardians it is possible to influence the level of prevention. It is argued that a large scale evaluation of such measures is wanted.

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.

Urban nightlife areas are widely renowned for their emotionally charged nature, affording greater opportunities for transgressions of social norms compared to daytime contexts. Yet, the ways nightlife consumers experience safety in the public spaces of nightlife areas has received limited attention in the academic literatures. This article approaches experienced safety in the public spaces of nightlife areas as emerging from encounters between human and non-human (material, social, cultural) elements grounded in time and space. Such elements include the characteristics of the built environment, the design of public space, police presence, lighting and also first and secondhand experiences and popular media discourses more generally. We hypothesized that encounters between such elements necessarily renders some ambiguity in experienced safety, in the sense that the effect of a particular element on experienced safety is always coproduced in the unfolding encounter. By drawing on a series of interviews with Dutch students in Utrecht, various types of ambiguity are shown to exist depending on both the particularities of the situation at hand and based on differences between individual circumstance and life course. Ambiguity is also shown to exist in the sense that mentioned elements may both comfort and alarm participants at the same time. Our findings infer that we should implement ‘safer nightlife’ initiatives that are tailored to particular contexts, situations and publics. The results also suggest that current interventions seeking to stimulate safety in urban nightlife settings might not be as successful in reducing/enhancing (un)safety as (popular) policy and media discourses have suggested.

This article focuses on mobile organized criminal groups that travel through Europe and commit a broad range of property crimes. The study aims to explore the perspective of individual group members. Information was gathered from fifteen criminal investigations that were carried out in the Netherlands in recent years (2013-2016). The study shows that members of these crime groups view their criminal activities primarily as ‘work’. It is work that is characterized by conflicts and consensus. Conflicts often have to do with the stolen loot and reveal disagreement about leadership, rules and obedience. Rows and threats of violence go along with feelings of fear and distrust. At the same time gang members belong to an international deviant community with a shared common way of life and feelings of togetherness. Performing within this international community gives the possibility to attain social status and to express success and richness. These contractive emotions and symbolic meanings characterize the everyday life of gang members and motivates their daily practices.

In this study the authors examined a criminal youth gang of 35 persons in the Netherlands, using social network analysis, to answer the following questions. To what extent is it possible by means of police records to estimate the size of the complete social network of this criminal youth gang? To what extent are members of this original group part of the core of the complete network? To what extent have members of the original group a central position in the complete network (key players) and are, as such, responsible for holding the complete network together? Information is derived from police records. Results show that the size of the total network of this criminal youth gang consists of 593 individuals with a core of around hundred persons. Seven persons were identified as key players, among which six persons belonged to the original group. The social network approach in this study provides police and justice important indications for a more tailored approach regarding individuals within criminal networks.

Criminal groups have traditionally been the focus of criminological research because of the collective dimension of many criminal activities or deviance. However, what constitutes a ‘criminal group’ or how specific criminal groups, like gangs, should be defined, remains open for discussion in the scientific literature. This introductory article highlights a number of recent developments illustrating the blurring boundaries between various criminal groups as defined by both insiders and outsiders. In addition, it suggests that the rise of social media and smartphones is changing the structure and dynamics of criminal groups. Future research should focus on how these (new) criminal groups originate, develop and function, but should also address the role of the group in criminal activities.

This paper describes the results of twelve criminal investigations into criminal activities of hardcore supporters of a Dutch soccer club. The information from these criminal investigations consists of among other 74,246 transcribed, wiretapped telephone conversations and 643 pages with transcribed, secretly recorded conversations in cars (between March 2009 and June 2013). The organization and execution of these criminal activities (particularly large-scale drugs trade and extortion) is described within the context of the daily activities of these hardcore supporters. This context consists of regularly visiting soccer games (in the Netherlands and abroad), bars and the supportershome, and the subculture of hooliganism. The results show a criminal group using the opportunity structures related to hooliganism for carrying out criminal activities.

This study contains a qualitative framing analysis of outlaw motor clubs in Dutch newspaper articles. These clubs appear in the news as a source for positive framing to counterbalance the prevailing organized crime frame. The study shows with what rhetorical means club members are framed and how news media balance a criminal and a non-criminal image. In news articles club members refer to ethical norms and group values, and appear to employ mitigation strategies which take the hard edges off the frame and simultaneously increase their credibility.

Collective violence around football has been a topic of research since the 1980s. In the Netherlands, in recent decades the size and severity of this problem have decreased sharply and the number of incidents has stabilized due to measures taken. At the same time, these measures have resulted in an increase of football-related incidents outside stadiums and on other days than match days. Confrontations based upon prior mutual agreements, so-called arranged confrontations, are an example of this. Based on multiple research methods, in this article the underlying causes of arranged confrontations and processes influencing individual participation are addressed. Results show that this type of collective violence and partaking in it has various causes and explanations. These fit with extant research literature in the area of group crime and collective violence and are incorporated in the recently developed initiation-escalation model.