Calvin is back from leave

One or two of you may have noticed that I’ve not been posting stuff over the past week or so.  This is because Julia and I have just had a few days off, which included a trip to my second favourite city – Amsterdam.

I’m fortunate enough to have friends living in the city and, as usual, we met up for dinner in one of the many quirky restaurants you’ll find in this exciting city; this time an old converted farm building built in 1702. Fortunately the food was dated 2015 and was delicious. My friend Paul is a partner in a research company in Amsterdam which does a lot of work for their government, especially in the area of criminology.  Meeting him gave me an opportunity to catch up with how things were going in respect to crime prevention in the Netherlands.

Certainly, in regard to crime prevention, the Dutch and British police have always had a pretty close relationship with lots of sharing of best practice. Indeed the Dutch police copied our wonderfully successful Secured by Design initiative back in the 1990s and (some would argue) made it better by using some of it to introduce a new building regulation for security. However, by the late 2000s the Dutch government decided that the Netherland’s version of SBD was best positioned within the local authorities along with other routine crime prevention and so much of the police involvement with preventing crime came to an end. These changes were made that much easier because the Dutch police is a national service.

Obviously they still promote crime prevention and I’ve no doubt that their police officers give advice to victims of crime as before, but their involvement is a lot less pronounced and it is the local authorities that have taken on the lion’s share of this activity.

In Britain, especially since the budget cuts, we have seen a lot of changes in the police delivery of crime prevention advice, but as we have many individual police services operating across our islands the changes have been very varied with some police services virtually doing away with the service and others still able to retain some expert crime prevention practitioners.

I don’t know what the future holds, but with more police budget cuts to come over the next four years one can’t help wondering how crime prevention will look in the future. It’s difficult to see how we can copy the Dutch since our local authorities have been cutting their budgets as well! Perhaps we will be relying even more on volunteers, such as crime prevention panels and neighbourhood watches and websites like mine; who knows? Only time will tell.