Goon Squad Democracy? The Rise of Vigilant Citizenship through Victim Support and Neighborhood Watches in Amsterdam (1980-1990)

The Urban Crisis and the Problem of Petty Crime

In the course of the 1970s, a new urban renewal policy slowly became paradigmatic. ³⁰ Residents should not be forced to move. Rather, their environment should be improved. In major Dutch cities, young people and working-class citizens were fighting to keep their houses, viewing capitalist speculators as enemies. Especially in Amsterdam, neighborhood groups achieved a major say in the development of their environment. By the end of the decade, the police were preoccupied with public order problems, notably from squatters. A more communicative approach to policing was pioneered as petty crime increasingly became the focal point in municipal authorities’ analysis of the urban crisis.

This happened when in the 1960s to 1980s, white flight and the departure of major corporate headquarters threatened to leave Western cities “hollowed out and the disadvantaged in a condition of abandonment.” ³¹ The Metropolitan New York population dropped by roughly 10 percent from 7.8 million to 7 million during the 1970s, as citizens flocked to the suburbs, and the poverty rate rose from 14.8 to 20 percent. These numbers, as well as the average unemployment rate of 10 percent, did not improve until the mid-1980s. ³² Amsterdam’s population also consistently shrank by 22.5 percent from 872,428 in 1959, 831,364 in 1970, to 675,570 in 1985, and from there it started growing again. Unemployment in Amsterdam rose from 12 percent in 1981 to around 20 percent in 1983, remaining well above 20 percent for the remainder of the decade, when the national rate slowly dropped. Amsterdam was never forced to ask for federal support, as New York City famously did in 1975, but its economic problems dragged on longer. Unemployment was caused by deindustrialization, showing the precarious economic position of ethnic minorities that lived in the city. ³³

These developments also led to the growth of petty crime, prostitution, and drug abuse, all of which were tied to abandonment of city centers and the lack of oversight, the heroin “epidemic,” and finally the economic crisis, which hit the Netherlands hard after 1979. Like New York in the 1970s, Amsterdam was the heroin center of the country, with dealers connected to Chinese crime syndicates around the Zeedijk area. And as in the United States, heroin addiction was commonly conflated with race, ³⁴ leading to an exaggeration of the number of heroin users from the former Dutch colony Suriname, which gained independence in 1975. ³⁵ Whereas in New York, the heroin problem subsided in the 1980s, ³⁶ only to be replaced by a boom in crack use, heroin remained the main problem drug in Dutch cities. By the mid-1980s, the treatment of drug addiction underwent a major shift: instead of insisting on complete abstention, treatment facilities worked toward a “reluctant acceptance of relapse and chronic drug use in ‘harm reduction.” ³⁷ Addicts were given methadone, a heroin substitute, and from 2000 onward they were even prescribed heroin. Meanwhile, in the United States, where the methadone treatment was developed, a moralistic approach to criminal justice remained dominant. ³⁸

In the early 1980s, the municipal police were still preoccupied with public order. Petty crime was not yet a top priority. Dutch municipalities in the 1970s were occupied with traffic issues, housing renovation, an aging population, and social movements, one of which culminated in a violent protest against the demolition of old houses to construct the Amsterdam metro in the infamous 1975 “Nieuwmarkt riots.” A pile of policy reports, however, created a sense of urgency. ³⁹ The association of Dutch municipalities, the Vereniging van Nederlandse Gemeenten (VNG), wrote in 1984 that traffic congestion, crime, drugs, lack of public order, and an aging population made the city an undesirable place to live. In a way, as the reports cynically pointed out, only the economic crisis saved cities from being abandoned altogether. ⁴⁰

Municipal urban renewal administrators, such as the famous Labour politician Jan Schaefer, who as state secretary from 1973 to 1977 made urban conservation a national policy, also saw the problem of petty crime in dilapidated neighborhoods. In a 1981 conference on financing urban renewal, designated city administrators from Amsterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, and Rotterdam claimed that much more effort was needed to tackle the old, run-down problem districts; they called for a calculation of the increased crime, vandalism, prostitution, and substance abuse that came as a result of stagnant urban renewal to underlie an investment agenda. These administrators, mostly Labour Party members, regarded crime as a socioeconomic problem, and not one that was rooted in civic morale, as conservative parties framed it. For instance, alderman Jan van der Ploeg from Rotterdam thought it more cost-effective to invest in run-down neighborhoods than to “combat the negative developments resulting from their extreme deterioration.” ⁴¹

The Amsterdam police, in particular, struggled with petty crime. After the riots accompanying Princess Beatrix’s marriage in 1966, which were harshly repressed by law enforcement, the police lost public legitimacy. After that, the authorities approached the new-left movements, springing up all over the place, as an inevitable societal development that it was best to accommodate. ⁴² This resulted in a highly permissive climate that was “tolerant” of all kinds of small offenses. By 1980, the Amsterdam police force reached a crisis in crime control, only solving 17 percent of “petty” crime delicts, a category which included vandalism, break-ins, small-time robberies, and sexual assaults. ⁴³ The police had effectively abandoned jurisdiction over squatter neighborhoods like the Staatsliedenbuurt. Until 1984, locally reported crimes went up by an average of 11.5 percent per year. ⁴⁴

Progressive media and politics initially saw squatting as an example of civic engagement of idealistic youngsters that protested property speculation. However, the practice soon deteriorated into anti-politics and basis-democratic radicalism, and by the 1980s, squatters had gained a reputation for violence, making them the antithesis of good citizenship in the public’s opinion. This period was the most violent in post-war Dutch history. In 1980, huge squatter riots accompanied Beatrix’ return to the capital for her coronation. Violent evictions of squatters were the order of the day. ⁴⁵

About the same time, a change occurred in police culture. A landmark 1977 report by upcoming police officials proposed community policing, to replace motorized surveillance. ⁴⁶ In the first half of the 1980s, younger police officials successfully used an intelligent combination of dialogue and repression to combat squatter violence and radical movements protesting nuclear arms. ⁴⁷ Their approach contrasted with that of Amsterdam police commissioner Theo Sanders (1974-1980), who near the end of his tenure took a defensive approach to public order and petty crime, accusing “big groups of misbehaving illegal aliens” of causing crime. He expressed frustration about the criticism of the police from a civic complaints bureau (Klachtenbureau Politieoptreden), among others. The backlash was heavy: Koka Petalo, an advocate for the interests of Roma people, called Sanders’s remarks “reminiscent of 1930s fascism”; liberal dailies like NRC Handelsblad criticized the police’s “hostile attitude toward society.” ⁴⁸ These comments were made in 1980, when Amsterdam was in a state of disarray. Labor Party Mayor Wim Polak (1977-1983), who called himself “simply not a man of authority,” also associated crime with foreigners:

We’ve taken in 10,000 Surinamese. And the result is that we can say: what an absorption capacity our city has. So why does the city seem rundown and dirty? Because it is dirty, and because there is also a striking amount of crime. Eighty percent of those arrested are foreigners. ⁴⁹

Victim Support

Urban crime formed the backdrop for the emergence of victim support. Driven by groups of senior citizens and women, it was diverse in ideological origin, consisting of law-and-order advocates as well as radical feminists, for whom protest against sexual violence was part of a broader emancipatory agenda but also related to the urban crisis. Through their engagement with safety in built urban environments, these advocates helped to make “social safety” a public policy concern. Social scientists, through the WODC, as well as within the police itself, helped to raise awareness of victims. They moved from ignoring to actively engaging with victim care, as social safety in the urban environment slowly became a national policy concern.

As mentioned, victim-support initiatives were also diverse in ideological origin. In 1968, the retired engineer H. “t Hart founded the Stichting Medeleven Gedupeerden (Foundation Compassion Victims, MDM), because whereas ‘criminals receive a lawyer, psychiatric treatment and reintegration support, victims receive hardly any compassion at all.” The foundation’s board consisted entirely of retired men and women. The MDM crowdfunded financial compensation for victims it had read about in the newspaper. Using newspaper advertisements, it soon boasted 300 contributors. ⁵⁰ The organization also sent gifts to policemen wounded in riots and employed law-and-order rhetoric: prisons were “resorts,” criminals should not be referred to as “delinquents.” ⁵¹

Social scientists helped to increase awareness of victims. Criminologists like Willem Nagel and Jan van Dijk pioneered the field of victimology. ⁵² Van Dijk explained the emergence of victim help as a consequence of the democratization that took place in the 1970s: as Western citizens became increasingly involved in governmental decisions, they also approached police and justice departments as critical consumers. Van Dijk characterizes Western European victim advocacy as focused more on care and less on victims’ rights in criminal prosecutions. ⁵³ As its director, he initiated the WODC’s victim surveys in 1973 and, after a small-scale start, coordinated victim support on a national level. While MDM consisted primarily of middle-class citizens employing conservative populist rhetoric, victim-support groups at the end of the 1970s steered clear of criminal justice populism, taking a middle ground in ideological debates and focusing more on moral and practical victim care and rights and less on mediation as in other countries. ⁵⁴ The Amsterdam police’s in-house psychologist Frans Denkers thought victim support pre-empted that citizens would take the law in their own hands, as a form of “reactive crime,” and increase their sense of responsibility to report crimes. ⁵⁵

Others operated independently of and sometimes critically toward the police. In Amsterdam, coordinator Henk Vlaming “initially sometimes advised people to not even report crimes.” ⁵⁶ Vlaming was a community organizer of the hippie-style long-haired, system-critical variety. His victim-support group emerged from the progressive Nieuwmarkt neighborhood center D’oude stadt, during the left-wing contestation of the metro in 1975 and also engaged with the issue of heroin addiction, a major problem around the Nieuwmarkt. He advocated free heroin distribution as the only way to reduce harm to “both drug users and victims” and criticized police brutality against heroin users in the Zeedijk neighborhood for racist targeting of the Surinamese. ⁵⁷

The municipality subsidized Vlaming’s initiative, which was developed in cooperation with welfare organizations. The police played an advisory role. ⁵⁸ The initiative was oriented toward mediation and advocated the use of volunteers, who were often available at the police station for moral support in places such as Rotterdam. ⁵⁹ In the course of the 1980s, local groups generally cooperated with police and justice departments, as was the case in Amsterdam, with support from Sanders’s successor Jaap Valken (1980-1987). ⁶⁰ These local volunteer groups formed a loosely organized platform in 1984 that developed into Foundation Victim Support. The foundation was generously subsidized by the Ministry of Justice, which hosted its first meetings. Its board included high-profile figures such as Utrecht police commissioner Jan Wiarda and former Labour MP Nora Salomons, who was also Amsterdam’s ombudswoman. ⁶¹

Jos Haagmans of Victim Support Amsterdam said that his organization was mainly concerned with break-ins and theft. Only 10 percent of cases were sexual crimes and, as Haagmans mentioned, “in Amsterdam there are other initiatives focused on that.” And indeed, there were many feminist groups concerned with sexual violence, ⁶² including the famous action group De verschrikkelijke sneeuwvrouw (The terrifying snowwoman). Sexual violence was a central element of the feminists’ broader agenda and one that was also related to urban social safety. Women were disproportionately at risk in unsafe public spaces, such as parks in deteriorating inner cities. The economic crisis made municipalities less inclined to invest in surveillance of parks or better lighting. Sexual assaults became part of a narrative that the cities, and urban parks in particular, are dangerous places. WODC studies fed into this, showing, for instance, that feelings of unsafety were strongest among young women in large cities ⁶³ even though other research showed that sexual assaults in public spaces were, in fact, not rising; they were occurring more frequently in domestic situations. ⁶⁴ Respondents also often mentioned sexual assaults among other crimes such as mugging, physical abuse, and break-ins—crimes which spoke to people’s imagination. ⁶⁵

In many Dutch cities, Amsterdam included, witch nights were held each year on May 19. On this night, women would go to bars and parks where sexual incidents occurred, carrying torches and making noise, in a ritual act of “reclaiming the ground.” ⁶⁶ The event was a worldwide phenomenon: in the United States, it was known as Take Back the Night, “to make women’s anger about sexual violence publicly visible and to leverage pressure for changes in law and public policy.” ⁶⁷ In New York City, this led to the establishment of crisis centers for “battered women” in four boroughs with federal funding. By the end of 1977, these centers had handled more than 1,000 cases, providing counseling and documenting evidence. ⁶⁸

Women’s groups, such as Blijf van mijn lijf (Stay off my body), founded in 1974 and most remembered for its activism against domestic violence, also campaigned for the Amsterdam police to take sexual violence more seriously. Sanders, however, replied in 1977 that his corps was overburdened and that this groups’ activities were only marginally related to police work. ⁶⁹ Documenting all reports of abuse was not particularly useful, one inspector thought. ⁷⁰ A neighborhood police officer, Frans van Zwolle, tried to sensitize his colleagues to the causes of women’s advocacy groups. ⁷¹ He was frustrated that the police still considered sexual abuse a novel topic and did not always make note of sexual assaults. ⁷²

Slowly but surely, Amsterdam police were sensitized to sexual violence, and the need to refer victims to support services. ⁷³ Already in 1984, police guidelines stated that preferably a female officer should take the report in a separate room; officers should also avoid making unnecessary comments or making comments on the victim’s physical appearance. ⁷⁴ According to the district attorney’s instructions, crimes should always be documented, and victims should always be referred to proper supportive institutions: “it is important that the police officer writing the crime report (. . .) acknowledges that the victim could be in shock.” ⁷⁵ A 1987 guideline stated that officers should always fill in a “victim form” with the police report and take a serious attitude toward the victim’s emotions, without blaming them for the crime. ⁷⁶ Adequate victim support became part of the police’s desire to be “customer-oriented” and encourage citizens to “work together” in a “new relationship between police and citizenry.” ⁷⁷

Sexual violence slowly became a policy concern for municipalities after women’s groups organized an influential conference in Kijkduin in 1982. The conference was initiated by Hedy D’Ancona, a prominent feminist and State Secretary of Social Affairs responsible for Emancipation between 1981 and 1982. ⁷⁸ Local women’s advocacy groups initiated a wave of studies of “frightening places” in cities. Titia Hajonides of Stichting Vrouwen Bouwen en Wonen (Foundation Women Build and Live), founded in 1983, explained at a spatial planning conference on social safety, attended by Justice Minister Frits Korthals Altes, that in 1979 42 percent of women preferred not to go out alone at night, mainly due to sexual violence. Ninety percent especially avoided parks, where most sexual crimes occurred. ⁷⁹ Dark, quiet, and busy transit places with unclear escape routes were the most dangerous. She called for better informal surveillance, a better police response to sexual crimes, and self-defense classes for girls. ⁸⁰

These women’s groups introduced the concept of “sociale veiligheid” (“social safety”), which soon became prominent in communal crime policy. ⁸¹ Until then, “sociale veiligheid,” like “sociale zekerheid” (“social certainty”) both denoted “social security,” meaning insurance against sickness, accidents, and old age. The redefinition of “sociale veiligheid” signals a shift toward “actuarial justice,” criminal justice approached from the viewpoint of risks, against which criminal justice should be the insurance policy. ⁸² In 1983, the phrase first appeared in a newspaper in connection to the Amsterdam Sloterdijk train station. ⁸³ From then on, social safety referred to the objective and subjective safety of citizens in public spaces.

Geke Faber, the frontwoman of the Labor party’s women’s organization Rooie Vrouwen, said in 1988: “it is about making sure that the problem is acknowledged. (. . .) it can be very satisfying to see a lamp post put up in a dark, unsafe place, like a park.” ⁸⁴ In 1985, Minister for Spatial Planning Pieter Winsemius still claimed that a completely safe city was impossible. The charm of cities would be lost if parks and inner cities were to become completely transparent, and the relative effect of the material shaping of the urban environment on crime was limited. Still, better lighting, signposts, and clearing overgrowth could increase safety, especially in unbuilt public spaces. ⁸⁵ The lobby for social safety was successful, however, as Korthals Altes emphasized victim support in his 1985 flagship policy document Crime and Society (Samenleving en Criminaliteit) ⁸⁶ and Minister of the Interior Kees van Dijk made social safety an integral part of urban renewal policy for 1988-1992, with local experiments in subsequent years. ⁸⁷

The Return of Vigilantes

The VNG observed that if citizens lost faith in city government, they might take the law into their own hands, citing growing numbers of guns among residents, radio piracy, and an expanding private security sector, and also vigilantes. ⁸⁸ The latter resurfaced at the beginning of the 1980s, sparking national controversy. Police, municipal authorities, and local protest groups rejected them as a form of frontier justice. Nonetheless, they helped to create a sense of urgency over petty crime. A government commission recommended reinstating social control within society and enlisting citizens to help combat petty crime.

Burgerwachten, or neighborhood watches, were reminiscent of their highly popular interwar predecessors, which had been a mix of National Reserve, folkloristic community, and neighborhood watch group, led by conservatives who feared a Bolshevik revolution. Authorities saw them as stalwarts of public order, but also distrusted their paramilitary tendencies. After the Second World War, the word “burgerwacht” became taboo, and their energies were channeled into the National Reserve and the Police Reserve. Still, there were incidental upsurges; in 1964, for instance, a neighborhood watch in Arnhem formed over frustration about prostitution in the Hertog- and Karel van Gelrestraat. Youngsters vandalized the cars of the prostitutes’ clientele with baseball bats and gas pipes. National media were abhorred. ⁸⁹ The legal specialist of the Catholic daily De Tijd reminded his audience in 1967 that burgerwachten could easily lead to violence, as demonstrated by the German Freikorps and vigilantes in the American South. ⁹⁰

In July 1982, Amsterdam shop owners and residents around the central Leidseplein area threatened to organize a burgerwacht if the nuisance caused by heroin addicts was not curtailed. ⁹¹ This was a wake-up call: one week later, the police caught seventeen cocaine and heroin dealers. ⁹² A reporter from the right-wing tabloid De Telegraaf reported that residents said neighborhood watches strengthened neighborhood ties and inspired a sense of “pleasure, adventure and excitement.” ⁹³ Amsterdam’s Bijlmer district became iconic for the urban problems of the 1980s. Originally planned as a utopian urban renewal project, the Bijlmer became ridden with crime and drug problems. Around the same time, a large group of immigrants from newly independent Suriname moved to the Bijlmer area, where they were faced with poor employment prospects. White residents started a burgerwacht in the Bijlmer Nellestein neighborhood to patrol parking garages. One of them said, “we wait until the police arrive. When they are late, we only apprehend people, that’s a civic right (. . .) we are no goon squad.” They criticized police officers who encouraged them to use violence, while police inspector Woelders said he wanted to disband the burgerwacht as soon as possible. He claimed that its members underestimated the danger of violence both to and by residents; this defeatist attitude deeply annoyed the group’s initiators. ⁹⁴

It was in this context that Max Wijnschenk’s burgerwacht, as mentioned in the introduction, sparked a national debate in October 1984. ⁹⁵ The Amsterdam police sternly rejected it, but said they could not “do anything as long as they do not break the law.” ⁹⁶ Media officer Klaas Wilting was unequivocal: petty crime was the government’s business, citizen initiatives quickly ended in frontier justice. ⁹⁷ Wijnschenk, however, claimed that he enjoyed a productive cooperation with the police, who “secretly applauded” the initiative. ⁹⁸ A police representative acknowledged that vigilantes were a sign of police failure. ⁹⁹ When vigilantes apprehended two car thieves and brought them to the police station, police officers publicly admitted that their capture had gone “really well”; if the police suspected burgerwachten of breaking the law, they would ask them over to the station for a talk: “There is no clear-cut wrong in this.” ¹⁰⁰

Neighborhood watches like these were in a gray area between the right to defend one’s own body and property, and to individually apprehend other citizens, and the organization of a weerkorps (paramilitary unit) which had been prohibited since 1935. Head inspector G. Kalkhoven had a conversation with Wijnschenk, who, he believed, violated the 1935 law. The police, however, did not want to create a martyr, as Wijnschenk now had a small following among shopkeepers. Wijnschenk struck Kalkhoven as smart and highly motivated. He pressured Wijnschenk about “subversive elements” that could hijack the groups. Wijnschenk acknowledged this, but he said that he could accept “undemocratic situations for some years if this would lead to more prosperity, like after years of crisis and war.” No weapons were involved at this point and no frontier justice had been carried out, “as far as can be confirmed.” ¹⁰¹

In 1983, the new Amsterdam mayor, Ed van Thijn (1983-1994), said in one of his first interviews that the public image of Amsterdam as a crime- and junkie-infested town was strongly exaggerated. To improve the city’s image, he soon started a doomed lobby to host the 1992 Olympics. Wijnschenk said his next campaign would be targeted against that idea. Van Thijn acknowledged that the squatters lost the public’s sympathy when their methods hardened, and they began using barricades during forced evictions. However, he also said that citizens taking the law into their own hands against crime, junkies, or squatters created a risk of ending up in a “goon squad democracy” (knokploegendemocratie). ¹⁰²

Leftist social movements put up billboards against the burgerwachten. ¹⁰³ The Junkie Union, an advocacy group run by drug users, warned that the burgerwachten might set off a spiral of violence, as junkies would resort to ever more risky acts to get their fix. ¹⁰⁴ The municipality also received an angry letter from a neighborhood organization in De Pijp, a working-class district in Amsterdam, condemning political parties for not unequivocally denouncing the burgerwacht, and arguing that petty crime was symptomatic of problems such as bad housing and unemployment. According to the letter, burgerwachten threatened to make Amsterdam less safe for other residents, and police leadership should not denounce the burgerwacht while the street police still cooperated with them. ¹⁰⁵ Shop keepers’ organizations distanced themselves from the burgerwacht as well. ¹⁰⁶

Wijnschenk’s example was followed by a small group in Haarlem. ¹⁰⁷ The burgerwacht soon proved too much to handle for its initiator. In the first week, Wijnschenk withdrew a burgerwacht patrol for fear he could not control the attendance of extreme right sympathizers. “I don’t want to unleash a mass action of hotheads, with a big chance of things getting out of hand.” ¹⁰⁸ His ideas for a political party soon led to an attempted coup by more militant retired police officers and shopkeepers, who initially wanted to wear insignia. ¹⁰⁹ Soon the burgerwachten died out, partially due to this negative publicity, but occasionally they still formed across the Netherlands, most often to make a statement to the police. ¹¹⁰

Minister of Justice Korthals Altes accepted neighborhood watches that warned the police of suspicious activity. ¹¹¹ In October 1984, in a major interview with De Telegraaf, which tirelessly reported on increasing crime rates, the minister said the welfare state gave people the notion that “salvation comes from above.” Repression was, in his view, simply too expensive. Lazy citizens should acquire “responsibility regarding their own and others” safety. Crime prevention should be a public-private collaboration, “without speculating on fear.” The police should devote more attention to victims. Social control should be reinstated and citizens should intervene against criminal activity in streets or supermarkets. ¹¹² Korthals Altes was criticized for thus promoting an aggressive “civic spirit,” but denied having encouraged vigilantes. ¹¹³ In Parliament, he said crime should “biologize and absorb us completely.” ¹¹⁴ All major political parties rejected the burgerwachten, while acknowledging the problem of petty crime. ¹¹⁵ Christian Democrat MP Sytze Faber thought anonymity and a post hoc role for the state had led to an “every man for himself and God for us all” mentality. ¹¹⁶

The wary attitude toward vigilantes and neighborhood watches persisted in popular culture as well. For instance, there was a rise in urban vigilante movie characters, such as Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry (1971), Charles Bronson in Death Wish (1974) and their numerous sequels (often set in New York City). In all of these films, the central character takes the law into his or her own hands as a form of social criticism. Although these films lack a Dutch counterpart, the crime genre is as well developed in the Netherlands as anywhere. Amsterdam’s urban crisis is invoked in movies such as Grijpstra en de Gier (1979) and Amsterdamned (1988), but in both movies it is ultimately the tough police detective who saves the day.

In 1982, Prime Minister Lubbers’s conservative government installed a commission led by Labour MP Hein Roethof to investigate “petty crime,” that published an interim report near the end of 1984. Its peculiar mix of social work and tougher crime prevention measures guaranteed a broad positive reception. “Social control” was at the core of its analysis, and it also aimed its pedagogic criticism at adults. In a page-long Christmas interview, Korthals Altes criticized an overly permissive society, while denying nostalgia for pre-1960s society. ¹¹⁷ His Christian-Democrat colleague at the Ministry of the Interior, Kees van Dijk, argued for a “fundamental reorientation” toward intergenerational transmission of “essential, binding societal norms,” such as respect for property and people, which parents and football coaches should actively enforce. ¹¹⁸

Van Dijk launched an “action plan for frequently occurring crime,” which involved subsidies for building managers in 150 high-rises and stimulated social control via youth work to tackle usury, hooliganism, vandalism, and bicycle theft. ¹¹⁹ Second, the plan called for functional surveillance by shopping personnel and teachers to counter anonymity. Third, the plan proposed an education program against vandalism for unemployed youth. Finally, measures were taken to prevent criminal careers, with alternative punishment for first-time offenders. ¹²⁰

Roethof, like Korthals Altes’ party, the Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD), was in favor of victim support, seeing it as crucial in regaining legitimacy and “norm confirmation,” while also emphasizing removing crime opportunities through urban design. From a social-scientific point of view, Jan van Dijk’s victimology fit in perfectly with Roethof’s and Korthals Altes’ moralizing discourse, stressing the reinstatement of social norms over social justice as well as potential victimhood and ways to prevent it, instead of focusing on offenders and structural reasons for delinquency. Indeed, in 1985 Van Dijk acknowledged that his theory was adapted to Roethof’s policy priorities. ¹²¹

Educating Citizens for Safety

The Roethof report underlay Korthals Altes’ landmark Crime and Society policy report. Amsterdam’s city officials noted it was well received by the municipal authorities that aimed to make “preventive thinking a part of general policy.” The uncharted terrain of “administrative prevention” was tough to integrate into local policy. ¹²² Kees van Dijk wrote that “petty crime” had been substituted by “frequently occurring crime” to make clear that the government had acknowledged the impact of crime on citizen’s emotions. To practically guarantee its monopoly of violence, the government could no longer rely solely on post hoc criminal justice; it needed a civic mentality of prevention. ¹²³ Until 1990, the Roethof committee awarded 45 million guilders from the Ministries of the Interior and Justice for crime prevention projects in Dutch cities, particularly for projects related to vandalism, alcohol abuse in sports accommodations, shop and bicycle theft, and violence against homosexuals. In 1987, Amsterdam received funding to improve the safety of inner-city alleys. ¹²⁴

The modernizing trend within the Amsterdam police following the departure of Sanders and Polak resulted in the adoption of community policing, centered around the “neighborhood team.” This was in step with a more proactive approach to petty crime. ¹²⁵ In an effort to resurrect the police’s public legitimacy and credibility, cooperation with the population was sought in neighborhood prevention. In the second half of the 1980s, the New York City Police Department also experimented with community policing in an attempt to strengthen its public legitimacy. ¹²⁶ However, Amsterdam’s and NYC’s paths diverged markedly: after these NYC initiatives failed, due to their insufficient legitimacy within the corps and the inability to curtail high-profile crime problems ¹²⁷ , they were replaced in 1994 by the aggressive broken window and zero tolerance policing tactics under mayor Giuliani. In the Netherlands, following Crime and Society, these policy paradigms were also increasingly influential, as it

became clear that while a community policing perspective was important, the police still had to be able to serve their old role as the strong arm of government if they were to achieve their primary goals of crime control and public order maintenance. ¹²⁸

A full-blown culture of control, however, never fully overshadowed the “soft” side of community policing. ¹²⁹ This was partially thanks to the discouragement of Wijnschenk-like vigilantes while also encouraging an attitude of alert, vigilant citizenship.

Already in 1978, the Interior and Justice Ministries established the department of Voorkoming Misdrijven (or Crime Prevention), whose regional coordinators set out to teach the police and the population about prevention. ¹³⁰ It focused on home and car break-ins, target hardening with, for example, good locks, and neighborhood vigilance. ¹³¹ It also employed pedagogic statements about how to confront misbehaving youth and how parents should limit their children’s exposure to color TV. ¹³² While the WODC stressed the role of citizens in crime prevention, it also had reservations. The police represented state power: a certain distance, impartiality, and prevention of class justice. ¹³³ Levels of social cohesion and the population’s willingness to cooperate should not be overestimated; moreover, certain groups might not represent all residents, or be intolerant toward “deviant behaviour.” ¹³⁴ Due to these considerations, as well as conservatism on the force, the idea of community policing laid dormant for some years. But from 1984 onwards, the neighborhood team became the linchpin in improving citizen-police relations. ¹³⁵

The Amsterdam police set out to educate citizens on what it euphemistically called “neighbourhood prevention.” ¹³⁶ Ton Johannisse, head of the municipal public order department, believed civic street patrols were not compatible with Dutch rule of law. ¹³⁷ He thought Kees van Dijks “action plan” amounted to moralistic youth “re-education.” ¹³⁸ At the same time, however, he also believed that the police should resume public order maintenance by intervening in cases of neighbor fights, street prostitution, graffiti, garbage dumping, and traffic light violation. ¹³⁹ Johannisse believed that citizens started burgerwachten because they suspected authorities of reluctance, but he also saw the risk of these neighborhood watch groups ending in frontier justice. In one instance, Wijnschenk’s burgerwachten forced someone with dogs to present their ID and subsequently leave, and physical abuse and false notifications had been observed. ¹⁴⁰ In addition, crime prevention efforts risked privacy violations and racial profiling, and the authorities were skeptical of their sustainability over time. ¹⁴¹

A work group took inspiration from the “integral approach” of the city of Zwolle, which involved police, public health, and municipal sanitation departments. ¹⁴² Van Thijn visited Montreal and Toronto in the summer of 1984, ¹⁴³ and Johannisse visited the London Met, which introduced a neighborhood watch in 1983. It suited “big, individualistic cities, where people barely knew their neighbours.” Key to these watches were block collaboration to keep an eye on each other’s properties and tackle structural problems. They were based on the idea that initiative should lie with residents. ¹⁴⁴ A literature study demonstrated that U.S. police often did not view safety education as real police work. ¹⁴⁵ Dutch citizens conversely relied more on government, which distrusted involving citizens in urban safety. ¹⁴⁶

The work group called post hoc repression a dead-end street. “Neighbourhood awareness” should be encouraged (“nurtured” felt too top-down). ¹⁴⁷ But neighborhood prevention also needed existing social bonds, a clear geographic and demographic demarcation, self-motivation of residents and continuity of residence within the neighborhood. A “sufficient response” depended on the neighborhood: In a “police-friendly” neighborhood, 40 percent was low, but in the infamous Staatsliedenbuurt, where a lot of squatters lived, it was high. ¹⁴⁸ Small experiments had to succeed, due to their effect on the police corps, and because it could take ages before neighborhoods would cooperate again. ¹⁴⁹ This demanded a swift response from the police and other municipal authorities, for which neighborhood prevention posed a challenge. ¹⁵⁰ Learning new, responsive policing was a risky undertaking in the context of a drastic organizational decentralization into “district teams.” ¹⁵¹

Neighborhood meetings, like those in London, were organized. Carefully selected policemen and officials would propose the project and clarify their supportive role, so as to avoid creating false expectations from authorities. ¹⁵² Key figures were chosen as coordinators, who would approach other residents. They were “persuasive, but not overly dominant, willing to invest a lot of time,” and be trained by the Voorkoming Misdrijven department. ¹⁵³ The coordinator would organize information meetings about property marking, target hardening, local police contacts, and hang window stickers. The hope was that an early warning system would increase declarations of crimes. The neighborhood’s physical appearance was upgraded, citizens were trained in describing suspicious situations, and resident and housing corporations got involved. ¹⁵⁴ Kalkhoven thought curbing break-ins would decrease other criminal behavior, as well as “racist tendencies.” ¹⁵⁵

There was broad political consensus, as the Labour Party mayor Van Thijn responded positively to a memo by the conservative local VVD party. A municipality spokesman said, “we are not going to put a police hat on citizen’s heads or give them police tasks.” ¹⁵⁶ Problematically, the criterion of social cohesion was exactly what the program also aimed to achieve. Johannisse believed ethnic cultural differences precluded mutual trust, in “this cynical world full of prejudice.” ¹⁵⁷ Thus, Amsterdam North’s Vogelenbuurt, with one of the highest crime rates in the city, was considered too demographically dense, mobile, and ethnically diverse, with too few declared offenses. ¹⁵⁸ Ultimately, two neighborhoods were chosen: Watergraafsmeer, a family district in the east with low mobility and a low percentage of ethnic minorities, and Tuindorp Buiksloot, a working-class neighborhood built in the 1930s with low migration in and out of the neighborhood and only 80 of the 2,064 residents from ethnic minorities. ¹⁵⁹

Residents of Tuindorp Buiksloot, however, felt stigmatized by a July 1986 newspaper article. Relations with the police traditionally “had not been perfect to begin with,” and the entire project was almost abandoned. ¹⁶⁰ This “historically grown” distrust was connected to Tuindorp Buiksloot’s history as a former “placing area” for “antisocial” (onmaatschappelijk) people. ¹⁶¹ Choosing exactly this district meant fighting an uphill battle. ¹⁶² Neighborhood organizations ultimately hosted a public meeting where volunteers were found. ¹⁶³ The resident committee explained that neighborhood prevention did not mean “playing police officers. It means that we, in our own best interest, make our environment liveable and acceptable.” ¹⁶⁴ The municipality stated it was about residents creating a safer neighborhood themselves, not about surveillance encroaching on privacy. ¹⁶⁵ In August 1987, the police encountered difficulties in involving Tuindorp Buiksloot residents. ¹⁶⁶ Only 17 percent unequivocally wanted to participate. ¹⁶⁷ A community organizer complained about the lack of resources and Johannisse’s bad communication. ¹⁶⁸ Van Thijn and Johannisse saw the hesitancy as caused by the fact that the initiative had come from the municipality and the police. ¹⁶⁹

After initial irritations about police response to break-ins, contact improved with the resident committee, which still maintained that the police should not lay responsibility solely with the population. ¹⁷⁰ Although it was hard to get the experiment off the ground, hopes were that it would quickly spread; still, participation was low, which the police linked to lack of trust. ¹⁷¹ A year later, the resident committee distributed a professionally designed newspaper to the entire precinct, depicting residents as the police’s “eyes and ears,” not as “spies” or “informants.” ¹⁷² In collaboration with Voorkoming Misdrijven, social workers and police, the resident committee resolved nuisance issues, for example, from soccer-playing youth, and taught residents to recognize suspicious persons. Residents updated the locks on their homes and asked for more lighting and help trimming hedges. Traffic and vandalism were also tackled, fostering a sense of community. The refurbished Texelplein was reopened with a celebratory ceremony and positive press coverage. ¹⁷³

A commercial agency evaluated the experiments. Although they were small-scale, they resonated with popular initiatives, for example, those in the Nieuwmarkt and the high-crime Eastern Islands. ¹⁷⁴ Involving neighborhood organizations, key residents, and local subcouncils was a “novelty for the police.” ¹⁷⁵ However, communications with the municipality had faltered. ¹⁷⁶ The local platform in Tuindorp Buiksloot distrusted the police, taking a “political” anti-municipality stance. ¹⁷⁷ Still, residents had grown more appreciative: in the Texelplein area, 86 percent of respondents said they liked neighborhood prevention. Amsterdam’s PR strategy, however, was amateurish compared to the U.K. police’s nationwide neighborhood watch campaign. ¹⁷⁸

Neighborhood prevention was also a challenge for the municipal police, which felt it should fit in with their reorganization plans. ¹⁷⁹ A police representative from the infamous inner-city District 2 (Warmoesstraat) stepped down from the commission when his plan was deemed too risky because of his precinct’s proximity to the Red Light District and other “public order problems,” probably referring to squatters. ¹⁸⁰ The report criticized the replacement of neighborhood police officers with district law enforcement teams, which covered territories of about 50,000 people. ¹⁸¹ Van Thijn happily observed that neighborhood prevention could build community if institutions cooperated well: replacing neighborhood officers with teams indeed strengthened collaboration with communities, which, in the absence of structural financial resources, had to finance projects themselves. ¹⁸² Wilting said that the police district teams worked rather well, especially against drug-related nuisance, and also felt residents should take the initiative. ¹⁸³

All of this pointed to the fact that adjustments were hard for the already overburdened police force. “The ability and interest for making and keeping contacts with citizens is rather limited.” ¹⁸⁴ Researcher Van Hummel was even more candid: “policemen after all cannot improve their score with prevention, they prefer catching crooks.” ¹⁸⁵ Wilting saw neighborhood prevention mainly as defusing the dissatisfaction behind the burgerwachten. ¹⁸⁶ However, in 1992, Police Commissioner Eric Nordholt (1987-1997) “applauded” neighborhood prevention, stating that it is something “we have to initiate ourselves. Of course, its limits should be respected.” ¹⁸⁷

In 1988, researchers from Amsterdam University reported that half of the city’s citizens were disinclined toward neighborhood prevention, but the Amsterdam municipality persevered. ¹⁸⁸ It tried to get the bigger Watergraafsmeer, Nieuwmarkt, Eastern Islands and South-East district projects to work. The future for neighborhood prevention looked bright. More police officers were selected. In Watergraafsmeer, thirty-one volunteers stepped forward. Municipal press liaison Kees Loef expressed surprise that Amsterdam’s population, famously “cynical and critical” and distrustful of the police, was enthusiastic about the projects. ¹⁸⁹

Neighborhood prevention started in many Dutch cities, such as Arnhem and The Hague. Voorkoming Misdrijven claimed in 1988 that neighborhood prevention worked in areas with high levels of vandalism, break-ins, and fear, where the population was relatively stable, home ownership and the number of families was high, and where perpetrators were not resident in the area. It is interesting to note that they did not pick neighborhoods with a broad array of problems, in which crime, liveability problems, and distrust of the police were simply too high. This brought the risk of over-demanding citizens. ¹⁹⁰ “Social safety” was definitely high on the policy agenda when Crime and Society was translated into concrete local policies against petty crime. In Utrecht and Amsterdam, experiments with assistants in public order maintenance, known as stadswachten, began as well. ¹⁹¹ “Attention neighbourhood prevention” signs became common. ¹⁹²

The police continued experiments. In his 1989 New Year’s speech, Nordholt stated that catching more criminals simply did not make sense; there was no capacity to prosecute them anyway. Prevention was the answer. ¹⁹³ Amsterdam participated in a Ministry of Justice project subsidizing neighborhood governance (buurtbeheer) in areas such as De Pijp district. Police and welfare institutions cooperated “integrally” with citizens. ¹⁹⁴ At the same time, policy toward drug addicts became more stringent with new regulations against gathering in front of coffee shops and a task force to fight burglaries. ¹⁹⁵

In all of these “integral” projects, the catchphrase that caught on in the 1990s was “liveability,” a culmination of the focus on the fears and irritations of the average middle-class citizen. Again, there was a tension between “involving citizens” and initiatives by citizens themselves, sometimes in rebellion against the authorities, which were widely considered incompetent by residents. ¹⁹⁶ It is somewhat ironic that even though bottom-up engagement of citizens in vigilance was discouraged, authorities spent the next decade trying to get people involved in top-down projects, sometimes achieving remarkable success in increasing liveability.

Conclusion

The 1980s were a laboratory for everyday forms of urban citizenship in Dutch cities. Whereas in the 1970s, activism came from advocates of urban conservation and squatters, the 1980s saw a shift in groups that laid claim to the city via victim-support organizations and vigilante groups. This paper has shown how this led to the emergence of a new kind of vigilant citizenship: If anyone can become a victim at any time, constant vigilance is required.

A close look at the emergence of “social safety” reveals the diversity of groups that campaigned against petty crime and other related liveability issues. Vigilante-style burgerwachten consisted of mostly middle-class citizens, who were often associated with shops or hotels. The first victim-support groups originated within a similar demographic, but when they really became widespread at the end of the 1970s, their initiators were of diverse (un)ideological origins. Women’s advocacy for social safety was initiated by feminist movements, for whom women’s safety was part of a broader agenda, though it also pertained to specifically urban challenges. Through engagement with urban public space design, these feminists helped popularize the concept of “social safety.” Social scientists, notably the government-sponsored powerhouse WODC, helped to strengthen the notion of citizens as victims through their surveys and publications.

Finally, the shaping of vigilant citizenship involved bottom-up and top-down vectors. Victim support was a new topic for the police, which soon partnered with victim-support groups, bringing volunteer assistance into police stations. Vigilante groups served as a wake-up call for the police and municipality, which, in turn, started to raise civic awareness through neighborhood prevention and tried to steer civic unrest about crime in a constructive direction. This proved to be hard work, but it paid off in the 1990s.

In the twenty-first century, neighborhood prevention would grow tremendously due to the development of social media, and from 2010 onward, WhatsApp. ¹⁹⁷ Citizens became more used to the idea of being watched and being constantly on the lookout. Vigilance had definitively become a part of the experience of modern urban citizenship.