Agressie en geweld tegen ambtenaren-OOV: In de spotlight van de ­burgemeester

Abstract

Municipal advisors for public order and safety are fast gaining more responsibilities in the Dutch local safety domain, making their previously behind-the-screens role more visible. It is unclear to what extent this new visibility also increases the risks they face of encountering citizen aggression and violence. Existing policy and research attention is mostly focused on violence against the police and against more political local public officials such as mayors. In this study, we examine aggression and violence against municipal public order and safety advisors through a survey of people working in this profession in every municipality in the Netherlands.We find that nearly half of those surveyed indicate being victims of violence or aggression, with over 31% having been threatened. In most of these cases, perpetrators were thought to be frustrated and emotional, contradicting the dominant image of calculating, manipulative aggressors.While municipal public order and safety advisors consider their risk of becoming victim of aggression to be lower than that of mayors or street-level safety officials and many of them feel quite safe in their work, they still consider their risk of future victimization to be high. Moreover, those who have encountered aggression before feel less safe, and in many cases feel less supported by their management. Those who feel safe in their work, say they do so because they are not very visible, because their organization does a good job supporting them, or they trust in their own capacities in de-escalating a situation.The results show that as the responsibilities of this diverse professional group evolve, their increased visibility in the ‘mayor’s spotlight’ puts them at serious risk of aggression and violence. Municipalities should take these risks into account and put policies in place for protecting, supporting and training their public order and safety advisors.