The political perspective

The Dutch political perspective on these topics was analysed by studying the Dutch parliamentary transactions from the period of 1950-1951 to 1980-1981. The following terms and their synonyms were set as search topics: crime

(‘criminaliteit’); violence (‘geweld’); unsafety (‘onveiligheid’); unrest (‘onrust’);

feelings of unsafety (‘onveiligheids-gevoelens’). It quickly became apparent that the

AN HISTORICAL OVERTURE ON PUBLIC CRIME FEARS

political debates related to the fear of crime were linked to the topic of civil disobedience (‘burgerlijke ongehoorzaamheid’), which then also became a search topic.

In the event, all relevant hits were restricted to the period of 1970 to 1981. The development of political attention to crime and the fear of crime between 1970 and 1980 is shown below (fig. 2). As the table illustrates, the Dutch political debate related to the fear of crime clearly gained its momentum in 1973.

Fig. 2 – Development of the Dutch political debate related to the fear of crime between 1970-1980.

In total, the six search topics led to 216 relevant claims¹ in 42 debates of the Dutch Parliament between 1970 and 1980. No relevant claims were present before 1970.

All relevant passages of these 42 debates were coded² for comparative analysis in Atlas.Ti.

Quantitative analysis of the political perspective

Let us look at the actual composition of the 42 debates and the relative contributions of political parties to them (tab. 1). Debates related to the fear of crime were mainly influenced by right-wing, conservative political parties³: they contributed 131 claims across 63% of the debates. The contribution by parties in the left-wing, progressive camp⁴ was less than half of that made by their political counterparts: 54 claims across 24% of the debates.

1 A political party that made the same claim multiple times in the same debate was listed only once.

Furthermore, search topics had to be in the same context as another search topic and ultimately had to be related to ‘crime’ to be relevant. For instance, debates solely about ‘civil disobedience, ’ or ‘insecurity’ due to high-speed traffic were excluded from analysis.

2 Ideally, all articles would have been coded independently and the ‘inter- coder-reliability-coefficient’

computed (Saldaña 2012:27, also see Lombard, Snyder-Duch & Bracken 2002). Unfortunately this was not possible in the time span of this project, so the next best option was chosen: My research assistant read through all coded articles and checked them with the codebook.

3 KVP, SGP, DS’70, CDA, ARP, CHU & BP.

4 PvdA, D’66, PPR & PSP.

5 3 5

42 33

43 39

2 25

8 11

0 10 20 30 40 50

1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980

Number of claims

KEEPING TROUBLE AT A SAFE DISTANCE

Tab. 1 – Substantive content of 42 debates related to fear of crime 1970-1980.

The political perspective on the fear of crime had an increasing focus on ‘crime’ as its backbone and this became connected to ‘violence’ and ‘civil disobedience’.

More importantly, politicians supposed public sentiments of ‘public unsafety’ and

‘unrest about crime’ during these debates. The left-wing conservative parties⁵ as well as the right-wing progressive party (VVD) found themselves in agreement with the right-wing conservative claim of ‘rising fear of crime’ due to ‘risen crime’ and

‘violence’ as a result of ‘civil disobedience’.

Now that we have a quantitative oversight of the nature of the political debate, we will take a qualitative view to see how the fear of crime was constructed and narrated by Dutch politicians.

Qualitative analysis of the political perspective

It was DS’70⁶ frontman Dr. Willem Drees Jr⁷ who managed successfully to address the topic of ‘rising crime’ and ‘public unsafety’ in the Dutch parliament. On October 11th, 1973 he said⁸: ‘The Queen’s speech⁹ talks about rising feelings of unrest and threat. And indeed, especially in the bigger cities this feeling of unsafety is rising, but the Queen’s speech remains silent on this topic. What is the government going

5 GVP, CPN & RKPN.

6 DS’70 was a centre-right, social-democratic party that was formed as a split from the PvdA due to concerns primarily about the latter party’s economic and foreign politics.

7 Drees Jr was Minister of Infrastructure and the Environment and before then a high-level public official in the Ministry of Economic Affairs. His father was Prime Minister of the Netherlands between 1948 and 1958.

8 Dutch Parliamentary Transactions 1973/1974, 4:95. This and all other translations of excerpts from the Dutch Parliamentary Transactions are mine.

9 Every September the monarch of the Netherlands gives a speech, on behalf of the government, to outline its intended policy for the next year.

AN HISTORICAL OVERTURE ON PUBLIC CRIME FEARS

to do about these feelings of unsafety?’. Neither the government nor the

parliament was given opportunity to react to Drees Jr’s speech, since debating on this topic was postponed until October 31st 1973, when the parliament and government would discuss the ministry of justice’s budgets.

This is when Drees Jr repeated his claim¹⁰: ‘The Prime Minister even acknowledges rising public unsafety! But his budgets for prevention and the police force are very miserable.’ Commotion immediately arose in the parliament. Joop Wolff of the Dutch Communist Party (CPN), tried to close the door on Drees’ fear of crime rhetoric¹¹: ‘Heavy artillery about rising crime and unsafety of our citizens came before this discussion. We are not very impressed by this. (…) The new crime rates are seriously concerning, which every crime rate is, but we give a strong warning against manipulating these rates. This happens. Barry Goldwater did this in America. Nixon was good at it in his better days, and the guys around here know how to do this too. They throw all the numbers in a heap and call for more displays of power, on the basis that the safety of our citizens is not properly guaranteed.’

American influence

This was no idle rumour about the American influence on Drees Jr’s politics, voiced by Joop Wolf. Drees Jr lived in the United States of America from November 1947 to April 1950, while working for the International Monetary Fund (Drees 2000:93-106), and he had a strong interest in American politics (ibid:220 & 258-259).

Looking back on DS-’70’s politics, Drees Jr stated that: ‘(W)e needed to transmit our ideas to society to gain electoral profit. To do this, we used psychological elements to perpetuate our vision among the Dutch public’ (Drees 1991:84-85). And in this manner: ‘(s)ometimes, popular misconceptions were embraced, where others might not have been able to expose our actions’ (Drees 2000:205-206, my translation). Although Joop Wolff did expose his American-inspired actions, Drees Jr’s way of pursuing politics had an impact on the entire Dutch political perspective:

other parties needed to keep up with his – American-inspired - crime and unsafety rhetoric.

The undercurrent of ‘civil disobedience’

As briefly explored before, there was a broader social undercurrent of ‘civil disobedience’ in the fear of crime debates. As with the rest of Western societies, several occupations, strikes, hijacks, riots and protests by civilians irrevocably showed that citizens, students and workers were insisting on a revision of power relations in Dutch society, using various forms of disruption. They embarked on numerous violent confrontations with the authorities during this period, and this led to serious unrest in the Dutch parliament (Spierenburg 2013:14-30 & Kennedy 2007b:146-179).

10 Dutch Parliamentary Transactions 1973/1974, 6:194.

11 Dutch Parliamentary Transactions 1973/1974, 17:698-700.

KEEPING TROUBLE AT A SAFE DISTANCE

Intense, lengthy debates on how to regain social order in Dutch society followed.

Soon, right-wing conservative members of the Dutch parliament (KVP and SGP) stated that ‘(…) given the deliberations on the phenomenon of civil disobedience, considering that an increase of this phenomenon will do damage to our

constitutional state, and will threaten the public’s feelings of security and safety (…)’, they were asking the government to regain its hold on the public and maintain public order¹². Ultimately, the topics of ‘civil disobedience’, ‘rising crime’ and

‘public unsafety’, as well as ‘fear of crime’, became politically entwined in the Netherlands between 1973 and 1976.

Fear of crime in Dutch election programs

Prior to the debates between 1973 and 1976, ‘fear of crime’ and ‘crime’ were absent from Dutch election programs¹³. But by the time of the elections to the Dutch parliament of May 27th 1977, ‘crime’ and ‘fear of crime’ occupied a prominent position on the Dutch political agenda. It was mentioned from the progressive left to the conservative right (D’66 1977, CDA 1977, RKPN 1977, VVD 1977, DS’70 1977, SGP 1977). Drees Jr really set a political snowball in motion. But what did the Dutch public think about crime at the time it was becoming such a prominent “social problem” on the political agenda?