23 November 2020
AUTHOR: BERT BERGHUIS Bert Berghuis is a former adviser at the Ministry of Justice and Security. He is available for questions and discussions via the editors, e-mail: secondant@hetccv.nl Translated by Bianca Kreuning and Paul van Soomeren 23 November 2020, article in Secondant – Platform for social safety Secondant: De criminaliteit is zeer scheef verdeeld over Nederland (ccv-secondant.nl) (Dutch)
The level of crime varies greatly between municipalities in the Netherlands. This also applies to neighbourhoods. However, even in the most criminal areas, there are still relatively small numbers of crimes per week and hectare. Making an area-based crime policy successful is, therefore, a difficult task in the Dutch situation.
To what extent is crime concentrated in certain municipalities, neighbourhoods and communities? The more concentrated, the better the use of area-based preventive and repressive actions. After all, if the crimes were spread very thinly, there would be fewer leverage points for a territorial approach to crime.
It is known that a greater degree of urbanization is associated with higher levels of crime
In 2018, 786,280 crimes were registered by the police in the Netherlands on a population of 17.18 million inhabitants (CBS/Statline). Of these, 623,178 are registered in geographical areas like municipalities, neighbourhoods and communities. This concerns property crimes, vandalism and offences against public order, and violent and sexual offences.
At municipal level, it appears that a quarter of registered crime occurs in 1 per cent of the 380 municipalities – these are the four largest cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. It is known that a higher degree of urbanization is associated with higher levels of crime. The crime level varies per municipality from 29 offences per 1,000 inhabitants (on the little island of Schiermonnikoog up North) to 84 (in the capital city Amsterdam). The uneven distribution of crime can be expressed by the Gini coefficient (a statistical measure), which is 0 for completely equal distribution and approaches 1 for very extreme inequality. For the distribution over the municipalities, this coefficient is 0.66. That is relatively high – by comparison, the income distribution in our country has a Gini of 0.29. But that the crime level is unevenly distributed across the municipalities is not surprising, let’s zoom in on neighbourhoods.
25 per cent of crime is registered in 2 per cent of the neighbourhoods
A neighbourhood is a “part of a municipality in which a certain form of land use or development predominates.” In total, 3,086 neighbourhoods have been defined in the Netherlands. In 64 (2 per cent) of these neighbourhoods, 25 per cent of crime is registered. Rotterdam Centre, with 7,400 crimes, and Burgwallen-Nieuwe Zijde (Red Light District) in Amsterdam, with 6,400 stand out. The Gini coefficient for the distribution over the neighbourhoods is 0.68 – so crime is even more unevenly distributed than is the case for municipalities.
We can take it one step further, towards communities. A community is “part of a municipality that is homogeneously demarcated from a building point of view or socio-economic structure.” There are 13,305 communities in the Netherlands. We see the same pattern here. A quarter of crime is concentrated in 300 (2 per cent) of these communities. The Gini coefficient, as with neighbourhoods, is 0.68. The absolute top is formed by 18 communities where more than 1,000 crimes were registered in 2018. This concerns 4 communities in Rotterdam (with ‘Cool’ and ‘Stadsdriehoek’ in the centre of the city as toppers), also 4 in Amsterdam (highest score ‘Central Station and surroundings’ in the city centre), and the inner cities of 10 large municipalities, such as Eindhoven, Nijmegen, Utrecht, The Hague, Enschede, Groningen, Almere, Den Bosch, Tilburg and Apeldoorn. On the other hand, there are nearly 800 communities where no crime occurred in 2018.
In the five most criminal communities, 2,200-2,300 crimes are committed per year
Hence, crime is very unevenly distributed across the country, with a concentration in certain municipalities and neighbourhoods within, and communities within them. In theory, this could offer starting points for measures to be introduced to tackle or prevent these crimes. Let’s look at the leads for this. In the five most criminal neighbourhoods, 2,200-2,300 crimes are committed per year, 40-60 a week. It is plausible that these crimes are not evenly distributed over time but that they occur mainly on certain days and hours (‘hot times’). They will also not occur equally often in the community. If that were the case, then in four of the five most criminal neighbourhoods, it would amount to slightly more than one offence per two weeks per hectare (land area). The question, therefore, arises as to whether it is worthwhile to invest a lot of time and energy in area-specific measures. Are the proceeds in terms of crime detection and prevention in proportion to the time and capacity invested in it? A special case is the Amsterdam Central Station neighbourhood, with a relatively large number of offences on a small area: 2,400 crimes on 14 hectares of land area = 169 per hectare per year = 3.26 per hectare every week.
The literature shows that a police approach aimed at the “hotspots” can make a small but meaningful contribution to reducing crime. Whether that will indeed be the case seems to depend on two factors:
- The crime in those hotspots will have to be sufficient to intervene. As has become clear from our analysis, in the Netherlands, this is only the case in very exceptional circumstances.
- The concentration of crime in those hotspots must be homogeneous; that is to say, it must involve the same type of crime. Moreover, the reason for that concentration lies in an unambiguous factor, such as the presence of certain criminal targets (for instance, travellers/tourists at Amsterdam Central Station), the same type of offender who repeatedly commits crimes or a situation/context that provides an opportunity for crime (such as the lack of supervision/surveillance).
These requirements mean that it will generally be difficult to find good starting points in the Netherlands for an area-oriented preventive and repressive policy against crime. In many places there is simply not enough crime to tackle.