The police, changing security arrangements and late modernity: the case of the Netherlands.

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The police, changing security arrangements and late modernity: the case of the Netherlands.

Abstract

During the last fifteen years remarkable changes occurred in policing and security arrangements in The Netherlands. These changes are closely related to the shift to late modern society. For many Dutch citizens today safety problems should be the highest priority of the government. Feelings of unease about crime often result from general insecurities related to life in late modern society. On the one hand citizens expect the government and especially the police to solve the problems of crime and disorder, if necessary with harsh measures. On the other hand, however, both the government and the police are confronted with a loss of legitimacy. Five developments in public safety policy and policing in The Netherlands must be understood as answers to these developments: in organizational and managerial arrangements, in relations between the state and other agencies, extra-judicial measures and attention to victims, new technologies of prevention and surveillance and a harsher, stricter policy. These developments, however, create new problems and tensions.

1. Introduction

The prominent police scientists Bayley and Shearing have stated that, over the past ten to fifteen years, modern democratic countries like the United States, Britain, and Canada have experienced a fundamental break in the development of their systems of crime control, policing and law enforcement; 'Future generations will look back on our era as a time when one system of policing ended and another took its place' (Bayley and Shearing, 1996: p. 585). They maintain that a process of pluralizing of policing, coupled with a serious identity crisis, amount to a radical restructuring of policing in contemporary democratic societies.

Their analysis has been criticized by Jones and Newburn (2002) for overlooking the continuities that are equally important in understanding the current practices of policing in western countries. Moreover, they question the assumption made by Bayley and Shearing that the transformations in policing can be seen as global. Their thesis fails to take sufficient account of significant differences between the nature of policing in the United States and European countries.

In this paper we describe and analyse the main changes that have occurred in policing, security arrangements and public safety policy in the Netherlands during the last ten to fifteen years. In the Netherlands in the 1990's public safety became a central concern to many citizens and was a central topic on the political agenda. The last two decades or so have witnessed a remarkable change in the Dutch criminal justice climate. The traditional liberal, permissive criminal justice climate in this country was in many respects replaced by a harsher penal policy. At the same time, however, there were also other, almost contradictory developments.

Following Garland (2...

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