The editorial introduction to this special issue on street-level bureaucracy (36 years after the publication of Michael Lipsky’s book) draws attention to the important role of frontline workers in the implementation of policy in practice. The two narratives as distinguished by Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2000) – that of government as an institution and that of the frontline workers themselves – are discussed in the light of the use of discretionary power by the frontline workers. The various dilemmas that the frontline worker encounters while doing so are briefly introduced and the role of the emergence of New Public Management and the resulting public-private partnerships since the eighties discussed.

Studies indicated that detainees are not always allocated to treatment programs based on official guidelines. Street-level bureaucracy theory suggests that this is because government employees do not always perform policies as prescribed. This study aimed to assess whether this also applies to the allocation of offenders to treatment in Dutch penitentiary institutions. This was studied among a group of 541 male prisoners who participated in the Recidivism Reduction program. The results showed that official policy guidelines were, in most cases, not leading when referring detainees to behavioral interventions. Instead, treatment referrals were influenced by a broad range of risk factors, as well as the length of an offender’s sentence.

First line police officers need a certain amount of discretion as they have to deal with various and complex situations on a daily basis. In this article the author examines the extent to which police officers have room for discretion in their use of force. We start from Mastrofski’s proposition that in case of decisions to use deadly force (use of firearm) police officers’ discretionary space must be restricted as much as possible. In case of less intrusive use of force, police officers may have more room for discretion. We used data from a small survey in three local police forces in Belgium to examine whether police officers have similar opinions on the decision to use their firearm – in comparison with the decision to use lower levels of force (non-firearm/non-lethal). Furthermore, we compare police officers who are highly trained in the use of force, with less trained police officers. Our results indicate that police officers are indeed more univocal when it comes to decisions to use their firearm, especially in case of more trained police officers.

Although group workers in juvenile correctional facilities (JCFs) are restricted in their actions by many rules and regulations, they still have the opportunity for tailor-made actions. Based on Lipsky’s (2010) theory of ‘street-level bureaucracy’ this article explains what this discretion means for group workers in JCFs and how they deal with it. Based on 24 interviews with group workers, this article outlines how they exercise discretion in a context where group dynamics and dealing with emotions affect their actions to an important degree. In addition, this article describes how group workers deal with dilemmas they encounter.

Crime victimization risk is usually calculated by dividing the number of crimes by the size of the local population. This procedure does not account for the mobility of the residents. We develop and apply an alternative procedure that divides the number of crimes by the number of people actually present: the ambient population. The ambient population includes commuters, tourists and other visitors. The regular and the alternative crime rate measures of the four largest cities in the Netherlands are compared using data of the ‘AD Misdaadmeter’. We find that ambient populations are larger than residential populations, in particular in Amsterdam. The differences are small however, and the increased effort of calculating ambient populations does not compensate the increased precision in crime measures. For comparisons between annual crimes rates of cities or municipalities, it is sufficient to divide numbers of crimes by populations.