Controlling risks in the safe city: The rise of pre-emptive practices in law enforcement, public surveillance and mental health and addiction care (1970–2020)

Litska Strikwerda,Wim de Jong

doi:10.1177/0042098020952669

Abstract

This article describes pre-emptive practices in law enforcement, public surveillance and mental health and addiction care in the Dutch city Amersfoort and the Netherlands in general between 1970 and 2020. These developments are driven by top-down as well as bottom-up interactions on an urban level. The development of this ‘preventive gaze’, though intensified by 9/11, has deeper origins in the urban crisis: the struggle against communal crime and the heroin epidemic in circumstances of austerity encouraged a shift from post-hoc repression to prevention of public nuisance. This shift is analysed in light of the concepts of the risk society, the culture of control and the Disneyisation of inner cities, and its legal and moral implications are assessed. Aiming at unknown future risks, the ‘precautionary culture’ itself risks encroaching on the freedoms of citizens, ultimately making cities less safe.

Highlights

Contemporary society is dominated by an awareness and fear of safety and security risks, as well as by the urge to prevent these risks as much as possible (Beck, 1992 [1986]; Garland, 2001)
We describe the emergence of the preventive gaze in Dutch urban policy, using local and national policy documents, minutes of council meetings, newspaper articles and secondary literature to empirically substantiate how national policy paradigms worked out in urban practice, which we analyse using the concepts of the risk society (Beck, 1992 [1986]), the culture of control (Garland, 2001) and the cultural process of Disneyisation (Bryman, 2004) in the Netherlands
We have argued that the precautionary culture and the pre-crime society it brings about are not caused by the terrorist threat that gripped the Western world after 9/11 but have, in the Netherlands at least, firm roots in the urban sanitisation of the past 40 years

Summary

Introduction

Contemporary society is dominated by an awareness and fear of safety and security risks, as well as by the urge to prevent these risks as much as possible (Beck, 1992 [1986]; Garland, 2001). Disneyisation, precautionary criminal law, prevention, risk society, urban crisis ᴥ᮷ਉ䘠Ҷ ᒤ㠣 ᒤ䰤㦧‫ޠ‬෾ᐲ䱯唈ᯟ鬯⢩

Results

Conclusion