Introduction

The first chapter in this section sees Francis Pakes providing an overview of public protection in the Netherlands, where public protection and community safety are subsumed into the term veiligheid, meaning both safety and security. Pakes is ideally placed to discuss public protection for his research examines the criminal justice system in the Netherlands, concentrating on crime, social change and mental health. The first issue he examines is the essential local nature of community safety policy. It is within these localities where visible

local safety programmes – such as the Rotterdam approach – place public protection at the heart of the community. The second issue Pakes discusses is that of youth crime. He notes that the overriding concern with public protection in the Netherlands is also connected to fears and concerns over groups such as youths and ethnic minorities, particularly those teenagers with a Moroccan and Turkish background. This, he argues, has become a highly racialised discourse, where Moroccan background and Muslim identity are connected with masculine narcissism and violence. Pakes then goes on to highlight the shift in dynamics of the integration and exclusion of mentally disordered offenders. A final issue is how safety and public protection policies in the Netherlands are seen as a ‘grand design’ flagship project. In order to demonstrate this Pakes examines the ambitious Amsterdam 1012 project, an attempt to clean up the city’s red light district. His concluding remarks note that the spread of public protection as the driver for change is uneven. It contains paradoxical elements that are in essence a balancing act between interventionism and the strong tradition of laissez-faire. He suggests that the current public and parliamentary discourses on public protection has toughened in recent years with crime, youth, ethnicity and immigration becoming ‘political footballs’ where these groups are used as folk devils to justify punitive public protection policies.