Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
among citizens and visitors. They also increase the likelihood that the city will lose
existing business and experience low inward investment, thereby reducing its future
employment basis, perhaps contributing to a process of economic decline.
12.4.2
A Vision
The next stage is the creation of a strategic
vision
for the reduction and control
of crime through specific measures. The development of such a strategy depends
on what has been called the 'organizing capacity' of the members of the various
agencies that deal with crime and its consequences, as well as various levels of
governments and the residents of the city (van den Berg et al.
2006
, p. 26). The
crime agency organizing capacity depends on several factors that need to operate
as interacting features, rather than isolated factors, namely: the political will of
governments, together with the societal support from the population at large, to em-
bark upon such measures; effective leaders in various crime and welfare agencies
to develop such policies and qualified people to carry them out; the availability of
sufficient resources to pay for these new initiatives, which almost certainly involves
some evidence, or at least reasoned estimation, of the costs and benefits that will
occur from what amounts to a new approach in the fight against crime. In addition
there should be a realistic assessment of crime statistics and trends, given the prob-
lems of measuring crime.
One of the best examples of the development of a Safe City strategy can be seen
in the emergence of the 'Liveable Rotterdam' political party, which proclaimed
'safety' as its main election goal in 2002 and won a third of the municipal votes.
The previous decade had seen many attempts to reduce high crime rates but most
initiatives failed, primarily because the policies were either mainly reactive, not
based on sound information, or were too orientated to individual projects that were
not integrated with each other (van den Berg et al.
2006
, p. 39). A new vision was
created, based on the primary goal of ensuring that the city would have no more
unsafe neighbourhoods. A key measure in the new Safe City strategy was the cre-
ation of the Rotterdam Security Index, based on tax returns, socio-economic data,
and actual as well as subjective perceptions of crime incidence. This grouped the
62 city neighbourhoods into five categories from 'safe to unsafe'. In 2001, 13 of
these areas, mainly in central, west and south Rotterdam, had been classified as
unsafe. But by 2004 only one area was still in this category, demonstrating the
progress in creating a safer city. Certainly the composition of this type of index
always provokes debate, but its value lies in the way such an index focuses atten-
tion on the main problem areas, and provides a base-mark from which progress
in reducing crime can be measured. The danger of such indexes is that they may
label inhabitants of the areas as criminal, although most residents are actually the
primary victims of crime. Similar attempts at quantifying the degree of cleanliness
of various areas of Rotterdam also focused attention of what needed to be done to
improve specific areas of the city, with the aim of contributing to the reduction of
anti-social behaviour and crime rates.
