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.

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.