Samenvatting

In this article we want to show how different actors (amongst whom residents, professional safety-functionaries and street youth) view the safety situation in Rotterdam’s problematic neighbourhood ‘the Old West’ in very different ways and start from very different parameters. We conclude that the one-dimensional image of an unsafe neighbourhood that emerges from the city’s official, quantitative measurement instrument, the so-called ‘Safety Index’ (Veiligheidsindex), does not do justice to the diversity of opinions and visions of the different actors in the neighbourhood and is thus unsuited as the political ‘compass’ for local safety policy it was intended for. This diversity comes much better to the surface in the qualitative, ethnographic research on which this article is based. Such research enables us first to better understand safety as a local phenomenon and secondly offers more concrete points of departure for policy.