The Construction of Suspicion in Dutch Neighbourhood Prevention Teams

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The Construction of Suspicion in Dutch Neighbourhood

Prevention Teams

by

Nils P.C. Dalmeijer

Supervised by:

Dr. V. Niculescu-Dincă

Second readers:

Dr. E. De Busser

Tim Dekkers MSc

Leiden University

Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs

Crisis and Security Management

June 14

th

_{, 2018}

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The writing of this thesis would not have been possible if I did not receive the support and feedback that I got over the entire process of ten months. Many individuals supported me in a variety of different ways. From providing feedback, spelling checks, mentioning authors to helping me get into contact with academic authors, municipal employees and many neighbourhood prevention team contacts. And of course, the simple but essential moral support. In this section, these individuals are acknowledged and thanked for their contribution to this thesis in their own way.

First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis supervisor Dr. Vlad Niculescu-Dincă. My interest for researching of networks and networks outcomes was developed during the Security Network course he lectured. Over the entire process he gave, sometimes challenging but never useless, feedback on all areas of this thesis. Dr. Niculescu-Dincă brought me into contact with other authors in the academic world, writing on suspicion, neighbourhood prevention teams or using Actor-Network Theory. I experienced our communication as formal, clear and respectful supplemented with the occasional time for some laughter. This thesis could not have been written without you. My acknowledgement also goes to Dr. Els de Busser. As my second reader, she has provided me with broad and structural feedback on my research proposal that helped me start off with writing the thesis while remaining on the right track. I want to thank you for being my second reader, especially as a mixed-up was made and you were not required at all to fulfil this role. I want to thank Tim Dekkers MSc for helping me conceptualise the concept of suspicion and for actually being my second reader after a mix-up was made. Related to this mix-up, I would like to thank Dr. Joery Matthys who discovered this change in second readers and helped clear it up, so the completion of this thesis project could take place. Furthermore, I would like the acknowledge and thank Anouk Mol MSc for taking the time to give some tips on finding and contacting neighbourhood prevention teams. I would also like to thank Wout Broekema MSc for giving me advice on finding a subject.

When it comes to getting into contact with my research subjects, there are also many individuals we deserve to be mentioned for their time and troubles. My good friend Frank Heemskerk, municipal council member Adriaan Andringa, Gerrit Weulen Kranenberg and his son Frederik Weulen Kranenberg all helped me with getting into contact with neighbourhood prevention teams. Therefore, my thanks. Geer de Jager also deserves my thanks, as he provided me with some much more information than I asked for and always actively tried to bring me into contact with other neighbourhood prevention teams and related actors. Of course, all other

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respondents should also be acknowledged and thank for taking the time to contribute to this thesis. Finally, I give my thanks to Renske Brands. Despite doing a demanding internship and writing her own thesis, she never declined my requests for giving feedback or doing a spelling check. Your support in this process was invaluable and gave me the focus and rest to write this thesis. Thank you.

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1. Introduction

1.1 Choice and explanation of the subject

Neighbourhood prevention teams are widely spread in the Netherlands. Signs reading “Warning, neighbourhood prevention”, attached to a lamppost, can be found in all kinds of Dutch neighbourhoods in every corner of the country. Neighbourhood residents organise themselves in teams or groups to make their own contribution beside the tasks of the police and the municipal government in keeping their neighbourhood or area safe. Assisted by new digital technologies such WhatsApp and social media, organising residents towards the goal of keeping their community safe and secure is easier and more efficient. Individuals can share messages, pictures, documents and locations at an incredibly fast pace and reporting suspicious activities to the proper authorities, such as the police or the municipal government, is also just a swipe on a smartphone away.

Before the 1980’s, crime control and neighbourhood safety were viewed as solely the responsibility of the police. This viewed changed after 1980 when other parties such as social institutions, businesses and individual citizens were also seen as co-responsible for crime control. Contributing to the safety of the community is now often considered a civic responsibility of residents. Van der Land states that citizens are increasingly co-producers of their own (neighbourhood) safety (2014: 9). The first neighbourhood prevention teams started appearing around the 1980’s in the Netherlands, as means of informal control on crime (Van Noije & Witterbrood, 2008: 132). Neighbourhood prevention teams are nowadays more present than ever, with 661 different neighbourhood prevention teams active in 124 Dutch municipalities in 2016 (Lub, 2016b: 21-22). There are many ways in which neighbourhood prevention teams have organised themselves and enable residents to contribute to local safety, ranging from only reporting suspicious activity when accidently encountered to groups of volunteers who actively patrol the streets multiple times a week. The relationships that these teams maintain with the traditional providers of neighbourhood safety also greatly differ. There are neighbourhood prevention team who maintain no relationships with the police or the municipal government, others have close contacts with the police and there are even municipalities were the municipal government encouraged the creation of neighbourhood prevention teams throughout the entire municipality.

Despite the growth of neighbourhood prevention teams, not much is known about these Dutch teams as the number of researchers that have spent time analysing them is limited

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(Akkermans & Vollaard, 2015; Boutasmit & Snel, 2016; Van der Land, 2014; Van Essen, 2015; Lub, 2016a, 2016b, 2017a, 2017b). Most of this research, which will be covered more extensively in section 2.2 of this thesis, focuses on the effectiveness of neighbourhood prevention teams in reducing local crime and improving neighbourhood safety. But the results vary, and the effectiveness of neighbourhood prevention teams is still debated. The same applies to the effects the teams have on the neighbourhoods they try to protect, as several authors have discovered negative effects of neighbourhood prevention teams in their research. Neighbourhood prevention teams are characterized by a certain level of ambivalence. Some participants of neighbourhood prevention teams lack proper training and let themselves be guided by their own gut feeling. Actions might be dictated more by an image or an opinion that people have, instead of facts (Lub, 2016a: 36-37). Particularly in high-status neighbourhood, the safety and security ideal can be made superior to all other ideals. This might lead to a tunnel vision, excessive social control or perverse effects when certain neighbourhood residents or groups feel repressed in their own neighbourhood (Lub, 2017a: 135; Boutasmit & Snel, 2016: 49).

When an individual or their behaviour is labelled as ‘suspicious’ by a neighbourhood prevention team, the labelling can have far reaching consequences for individuals. People that have been labelled by neighbourhood prevention teams without committing any criminal acts have encountered community members with baseball bats on the street or have been scared out of the neighbourhood by a large group of residents (Lub, 2016a: 38). Other examples include individuals that were followed at a distance until they left the neighbourhood, youths being sent away from a playground just because they were sitting there and neighbourhood prevention team participants staking out at a truck yard because the Eastern European truck drivers “might have something to do with burglaries” (Lub, 2017a: 135-136, Boutasmit & Snel, 2016: 49). The increased digitalisation that accompanies the growth of neighbourhood prevention teams in the Netherlands has increased the ease with which individuals can be labelled as suspicious. Many neighbourhood prevention teams have organised themselves around the WhatsApp message application. WhatsApp is a messaging service owned by Facebook, that allows users to share text messages, pictures, images, documents and user locations with their smartphones. WhatsApp enables the neighbourhood prevention team participants to share information and communicate at a fast pace. Neighbourhood prevention teams often organise themselves in a WhatsApp group, where a message or picture sent in this group is shared with all members of the group. Information about suspicious situations can be

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2015: 3). A neighbourhood prevention team organised around WhatsApp decreased burglaries by 40% in the participating neighbourhoods in the Dutch municipality of Tilburg (Akkermans & Vollaard, 2015: 20). However, sharing information via social media and WhatsApp with a large number of individuals is not without problems, with neighbourhood prevention team members basing their suspicion, and the reporting that comes with it, on a gut feeling rather than their interpretation of the facts. While the criteria for labelling someone as suspicious in neighbourhood prevention teams might be nondescript, the sharing of the suspicion with the police or fellow neighbourhood prevention team members is just a simple swipe or mouse click away. Impulsive actions by overzealous residents against possible innocent individuals that follow this sharing through WhatsApp are real risks (Lub, 2017b: 12-13).

In this research, Dutch neighbourhood prevention teams are analysed in order to understand how actors in neighbourhood prevention teams influence the construction of suspicion within these networks. The focus of this research will be neighbourhood prevention teams that make use of WhatsApp to share their suspicion and communicate about what they encounter. This research will look at how suspicion enters these neighbourhood prevention teams, how it is further constructed by its members and how it is passed on to the police or the municipal government in local security networks.

1.2 Research questions

The contribution of private parties, such as individual citizens, in the (co-)production of neighbourhood safety is argued to be beneficial due to several reasons. With other parties supporting in local crime control, the police can focus more on a broader range of tasks. Local citizens or institutions might also have a better understanding of the problems and their causes that exist on the local level. And neighbourhood prevention teams are assumed to promote a strong social cohesion in the neighbourhood, which might decrease the feelings of insecurity in the neighbourhood (Terpstra, 2005: 40). But due to a lack of knowledge and research into the workings and effects of neighbourhood prevention teams in the Netherlands, their benefits for neighbourhood safety are still debated. While some researchers state the beneficial workings of neighbourhood prevention teams, others focus on the negative or perverse effects of the teams or their ineffectiveness (Van der Land, 2014; Lub 2017a; Boutasmit & Snel, 2016). Thus, while these neighbourhood prevention teams are widely spread in the Netherlands, it

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cannot be said with complete certainty that they are effective in reducing crime or that their benefits outweigh their negative effects.

This research does not strive to add to the (in)effectiveness debate concerning neighbourhood prevention teams reducing crime control. Rather it offers a better understanding of how neighbourhood prevention teams and their members execute one of their main tasks: preventing local crime by signalling suspicious behaviour. To provide this better understanding, three (sub)research questions are answered in this thesis:

1. How does the phenomenon of suspicion emerge in neighbourhood prevention teams? 2. How is the phenomenon of suspicion further constructed in neighbourhood prevention

teams?

3. How is the phenomenon of suspicion passed on to other security actors in local security networks?

1.3 Scientific and social relevance

Because members of neighbourhood prevention teams might have a tunnel vision and lack proper police training in defining what might be suspicious, the criteria of what constitutes a suspicious situation could be stretched indefinitely. As demonstrated in section 1.1, labelling someone as suspicious can have a big impact on their privacy or day to day lives. This research contributes to the knowledge of neighbourhood prevention teams in the Netherlands and the construction of suspicion within these teams. Previous authors that have researched Dutch neighbourhood prevention teams have stated that these teams can have negative effects related to suspicion such as (the threat of) violence, informal social control, classification of residents and stigmatisation (Van der Land, 2014: 67-69; Lub, 2017b 11-13). This research strives to focus more on the construction of suspicion within these neighbourhood prevention teams. When is something defined as suspicious, how is the suspicion further constructed and how do participants of neighbourhood prevention teams pass on this suspicion in local security networks? On an academic level, the answers to these questions contribute to the academic literature on neighbourhood prevention teams and the broader community citizens’ participation in local security networks. More specifically, this research will provide a complex illustration of the construction of suspicion that will add to the academic understanding of how suspicion in neighbourhood prevention teams comes about and will therefore contribute to an academic understanding of the concept of suspicion. On a social level, this research strives to

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shed more light on the possible negative effects that accompany neighbourhood prevention teams. By creating more awareness and a better understanding of these effects and their implications, this research can help policymakers create improved policies or legislation on neighbourhood prevention teams and citizen participation in providing safety and security for local communities.

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2. Theoretical Framework

This research strives to present a better understanding of the construction of suspicion in neighbourhood prevention teams. The results and conclusions of this research cannot be seen as detached from the contributions and theories from other authors on relating subjects. In this chapter, the theoretical framework in which this research is conducted is outlined. The first section of this chapter illustrates the theoretical knowledge of local security networks. These local security networks provide the context in which neighbourhood prevention teams function. The second section describes the theoretical framework of neighbourhood prevention teams themselves. In the remaining section, further theoretical context that is relevant for this research is explored: the construction of suspicion and the influence of technologies, such as social media services around which neighbourhood prevention teams are often organised.

2.1 (Local) security networks

Present day security is increasingly pursued through the form of networks comprising of different actors (Whelan, 2012: 11). What is meant by these ‘security networks’ as organisational forms providing security? Defining a security network is difficult as there is no universally accepted definition of what is or is not a ‘networked organisation’ (Whelan, 2012: 15). Still, several authors have presented their definition of a (security) network. In the simplest of terms, a network is defined as a set of actors that are linked by various relationships (Whelan, 2012: 11). O’Toole defines networks as: ‘structures of interdependence involving multiple organisations or parts thereof, where one unit is not merely the formal subordinate of the others in some larger hierarchical arrangement’ (O’Toole, 1997b: 45 in O’Toole, 2014: 361). Dupont defines a security networks as: ‘a set of institutional, organisational communal or individual agents or nodes that are interconnected in order to authorize and/or provide security to the benefit of internal or external stakeholders’ (Dupont, 2004: 78). Different actors connected through all sorts of relationships are thus recurring themes in these definitions. Concerning security networks, these actors have the same goal of addressing security concerns, but they differ widely in form, structure and participants.

The focus of this research, neighbourhood prevention teams, operate in local security networks. According to Dupont, local security networks are security networks that harness the

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issues in this community. Besides the more traditional security actors on local level, such as police, local government and social services, these local security networks can also consist of community citizens, private security providers and business interests (Dupont, 2004: 79). Inside these local security networks, members of the community provide and share local information and resources to construct solutions to community security issues that transcend institutional boundaries (Dupont, 2004: 79). Creating typologies for security network models, Terpstra distinguished between security networks that included citizen participants or only included institutions. These typologies of security networks that included citizen participants are often informally organised and are characterised by a cooperation between police and citizen actors. The citizen participants can be described as ‘the eyes and the ears of the police’ in these network, as they are (co-)responsible for enforcement of standards, but the true power of enforcement still lies with the police (Terpstra, 2005: 41). Close relations between neighbourhood residents and the creation of social fabric are seen as important in these citizen participant networks, as stronger social control in the local community is seen as leading to more informal social control and self-reliant behaviour (Terpstra, 2005: 40).

Neighbourhood prevention teams are a form of community members contributing to community safety in local security networks, where they cooperate with more traditional security actors. While citizens participating in local security networks are (co)responsible for enforcing standards and social control, these local citizens often lack any professional police training or are minimally trained by means of courses and workshops. Their participation in these security networks, and therefore handling of sensitive information, giving alerts and reporting of or reacting to suspicious behaviour, makes the research of the construction of suspicion highly relevant for these networks. While lacking professional training and having different objectives and goals in the network, these citizen participants can have a great amount of influence on the creation and development of suspicion. Especially as the construction of suspicion in local security networks often emerges in neighbourhood prevention teams. The police and the traditional security actors still preserve the power to react on suspicion, but the labelling of someone or something as suspicious might already have had far reaching consequences by then, as demonstrated by the examples given in section 1.1.

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2.2 Neighbourhood prevention teams

Neighbourhood prevention teams are forms of Dupont’s local security networks and Terpstra’s security networks that include citizen participation that are described in section 2.1. In neighbourhood prevention teams, community citizens engage in a form of collective action to contribute to community safety in a local security network. These collective actions exist of teams that patrol the neighbourhood or engage in low-level local surveillance where the neighbourhood prevention team functions as ‘the eyes and ears’ of the police (Tilly, 2008: 161). While the core task of neighbourhood prevention teams is to observe and report suspicious and/or unsafe situations, the specific focus of teams can differ greatly. Neighbourhood prevention teams in lower-status neighbourhood more often focus on quality of life issues, such as broken infrastructure, while the focus of teams in higher-status area’s is mainly directed at preventing burglaries (Lub, 2017a: 126). Neighbourhood prevention teams can also differ in the way they are organised. Some neighbourhood prevention teams organise patrols throughout the neighbourhood while other teams only expect their members to report suspicious situations when they encounter them in their daily lives.

The earliest forms of neighbourhood prevention teams started appearing in the Netherlands around the 1980’s, when local security was increasingly seen as not only the responsibility of the police and municipality but also other parties such as individual citizens (Van Noije & Wittebrood, 2008: 132). A survey conducted by Lub showed that there were 661 neighbourhood prevention teams in the Netherlands between November 2014 and January 2015 (Lub, 2016b: 21-22). An earlier assessment of neighbourhood prevention teams in Dutch municipalities in 2012 found that there were 122 neighbourhood prevention teams at that time (Van der Land, 2014: 23). This indicates a multiplication by 5,5 times of Dutch neighbourhood prevention networks in approximately 3 years. This shows a big increase in Dutch neighbourhood prevention teams in recent years.

Research in the English-speaking world on neighbourhood prevention teams almost exclusively focuses on the effectiveness of neighbourhood prevention teams in reducing crime and improving safety, with diverging conclusions (Husain, 1990; Sherman, 1997; Bennet et al., 2008). As for Dutch neighbourhood prevention teams, Akkermans and Vollaard found that neighbourhood prevention teams based around WhatsApp strongly reduced crime in Tilburg (2015: 1). Burglaries in the municipality decreased by 40% since the introduction of the teams, and the crimes did not shift towards the neighbourhoods that did not have a neighbourhood

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are less effective than neighbourhood fathers (buurtvaders), fatherly residents who are known in the neighbourhood, in reducing youth problems in the Schilderswijk neighbourhood of The Hague (2016: 55-57). They also found that the neighbourhood prevention team in the Schilderswijk had some perverse effects. Members of the neighbourhood prevention team send young people away from a park because they were hanging around. This makes the youths feel driven away from their own neighbourhood and might result in escalation (Boutasmit & Snel, 2016: 49). Besides the effectiveness of Dutch neighbourhood prevention teams in reducing crime, the research of Van der Land draws attention to the positive as well as negative effects of neighbourhood prevention teams. He found that besides reducing crime and creating social control, neighbourhood prevention teams could also lead to a sense of insecurity, provocation of citizens and stigmatisation (Van der Land, 2014: 66-70). Lub conducted both a quantitative analysis based on the data of 340 Dutch municipalities and a qualitative ethnographic research within four neighbourhood prevention teams in Rotterdam and Tilburg. His research into Dutch neighbourhood prevention teams focused on three perspectives: the causal mechanisms of the teams, the capacity of the teams to contribute to public safety and the social effects and moral implications of neighbourhood prevention teams (Lub, 2017a: 6).

As mentioned in section 1.1, Lub found a high degree of ambivalence in the practices of neighbourhood prevention teams, which generates several moral issues (Lub, 2017a: 135). According to Lub, many participants of neighbourhood prevention teams suffer slightly from professional deformation, meaning that the safety ideal is made superior to all other ideals such as mobility or privacy. Seeing everything through ‘safety & security’ goggles can lead to tunnel vision or excessive social control. This increases the risk that actions are taken based on perceptions rather than facts (Lub, 2017a: 135). The second moral issue is that neighbourhood prevention teams often do not have clear criteria of what constitutes a suspicious situation or act. A neighbourhood community is not a collective, but exists of many residents who differ in opinions and have their own personal interpretations. This complicates the goal of neighbourhood prevention teams, ‘observing and reporting’, as interpretations of suspicious behaviour might differ between participants (Lub, 2017a: 135-136).

Unlike police officers, neighbourhood prevention team members receive no to minimal training in performing their duties. Boutasmit & Snel, Van der Land and Lub illustrated some of the negative aspects of neighbourhood prevention teams that follow from this ambivalence or lack of training, as they can lead to stigmatisation and excessive social control (of certain groups). Research has shown what negative effects can follow from neighbourhood prevention teams, stigmatisation and excessive social control, and what problems lay at the base of these

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negative effects, professional deformation and personal interpretations. This thesis adds to this research by analysing the influence of human and non-human actors on suspicion during the observing and reporting of neighbourhood prevention teams. How suspicion emerges in neighbourhood prevention teams, how suspicion is further constructed and how suspicion is ‘passed on’ to other actors in local security networks.

2.3 Suspicion, social media & Actor-Network Theory

The theoretical frameworks of local security networks and neighbourhood prevention teams, described in sections 2.1 and 2.2, create the context in which this research will be done. But three more aspects of this current research play quite a large role. It would be beneficial to explore the academic literature on these subjects, related to this research. The first subject is suspicion, as this research analyses the construction of suspicion. The second subject focuses on the influence of technologies, specifically social media service like WhatsApp around which neighbourhood prevention teams are often based. Lastly, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and some notions, or tools of ANT, are described. These notions of Actor-Network Theory offer an adequate understanding of how the two subjects of section 2.3 (the construction of suspicion and the influence of technologies in constructing this suspicion) are included in this research.

No substantive research has been done into suspicion in neighbourhood prevention teams, but many authors have researched risk profiling or suspicion in the context of another provider of security: the police. Police officers assess individuals and situations based on the norms defined by their work. When an individual or situation deviates from these norms, this might indicate possible criminal activity or at least suspicious behaviour that warrants further surveillance (Niculescu-Dincă, 2016: 135). Dekkers and Van der Woude touch on the debate of using risk profiling to identify possible suspicious individuals by investigative officers and supervisors. Risk profiling is the systematic selection and categorization of persons on the basis of different characteristics (Dekkers & Van der Woude, 2014: 52). Where organisations as the police emphasize the efficiency and effectiveness of using risk profiling to come to suspicion, critics point to the dangers that come with it. These dangers are very similar to Lub’s moral dimensions of neighbourhood prevention teams: discrimination, stigmatisation and inefficiency (Dekkers & Van der Woude, 2014: 52). In their research, Dekkers and Van der Woude analyse which factors play a role in labelling something as suspicious. They found that personal characteristics (ethnicity, skin colour), behaviour (nervous, sudden movements,

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avoiding eye contact) and the vehicle (adjusted cars, license plates) play a role in the decision of investigative officers to check or stop somebody (Dekkers & Van der Woude, 2014: 56-65). Researching the influence of (surveillance) technologies in police practices, suspicion (in police literature) can thus been seen as a deviation from certain norms established by police training and work experience (person, behaviour, vehicle) that indicate criminal behaviour. This research will show if this conception of suspicion also applies to neighbourhood prevention teams, who’s participants also contribute to (local) safety but lack (police) training.

Niculescu-Dincă found that technologies influence police work, influencing who the police look for (2016: 139). When analysing the technologies used for social media monitoring of ‘problematic youth groups’ by Dutch police, he found that these technologies led the police to define new indicators of what constitutes suspicious problematic youth on social media, rather than using the same indicators of what constitutes suspicious problematic youth used for youth on the streets. Dutch police label youngsters as suspicious of being problematic youth when information indicates that these youngsters engage in ‘risky activities’, such as spraying graffiti or being a nuisance on the street. But when labelling youngsters as suspicious on social media, the Dutch police use different indicators, such as the number of retweets they get on their social media posts or the clothing they wear in their profile picture (Niculescu-Dincă, 2016: 140-105). Social media monitoring technologies have thus influenced the indicators that Dutch police use for determining what or who is suspicious. This example shows that technologies should be included in analysing how a neighbourhood prevention team network, consisting of both technologies and social actors, influence the construction of suspicion.

Before the influence of technologies in neighbourhood prevention teams is explored, an argument must be made about how technologies should be included in the analysis. Technologies are often portrayed as useful tools that help human actors accomplish their goals. In police literature, technologies are often described as ‘tools that officers have to have in order to perform their law enforcement duties’ (Williams & Williams, 2008: 165). In this conceptual framework, technology is framed as passive tools that are obedient to their users. They are neither good nor bad as their value comes from what they are used for. Technology in this framework is value-neutral. This conceptualization of technology is described as the standard instrumentalist attitude (Sclove, 1995). But when technologies are seen as value-neutral, they cannot be seen as actors, or having agency, influencing the construction of suspicion in neighbourhood prevention teams. The standard instrumentalist view of technologies is therefore not a useable conception of technologies for this research, and another conception of technologies is required.

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A more adequate way for understanding the role of technologies is offered by the Actor-Network Theory. While the name would suggest it, Actor-Actor-Network Theory is not a theory. It is a disparate family of tools, sensibilities and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located (Law, 2009: 141). A theory strives to explain a phenomenon, but Actor-Network Theory does not. It illustrates how relations assemble or not. As Law describes it, Actor-Network Theory “is better understood as a toolkit for telling interesting stories about, and interfering in, those relations” (Law, 2009: 141-142). Several of the ingredients or tools of Actor-Network Theory are relevant for this research: semiotic relationality, heterogeneity, materiality, and Mol’s notion of multiplicity. Semiotic relationality entails that all actors or elements in the network shape and define one another. Heterogeneity notes that there are different kinds of actors, human and otherwise, and materiality entails that there are not just ‘social’ actors but also material actors in the webs of relations of Actor-Network Theory (Law, 2009; 146). Mol’s notion of multiplicity argues that, in practice, multiple realities of a certain phenomenon can exist, instead of it having only one single reality (Law, 2009: 151-152). These tools out of the Actor-Network Theory toolkit are described rather abstractly and might be complex to understand. Actor-Network Theory is grounded in empirical case-studies that show how these abstract tools or notions function in practice. Therefore, some examples of research will be given to provide a better understanding of the tools relevant for this thesis.

The notion of multiplicity is exemplified by Annemarie Mol’s description of diagnostic and treatment practices of the medical condition lower limb atherosclerosis. Mol describes that the same condition of lower limb atherosclerosis means very different things in different places within medicine practices (Mol, 2002). For surgeons, the condition means white paste scraped out of blood vessels, for radiography it means an X-ray photo of a narrow or blocked blood vessel, and for the ultrasound department the condition takes the form of Doppler readings detecting increased blood speeds at narrowed blood vessel sections. Mol rejects that these differences stem from different perspectives on the same medical condition but instead argues that each practice has an own reality of lower limb atherosclerosis. This notion of multiplicity shows that multiple realities can be formed, when in theory it concerns of single body or issue. These multiple realities may come together, but equally they may be held apart, contradict or include one another in complex ways (Law, 2009: 152). This notion of multiplicity is relevant for this research as multiple realities of a suspicious situation can exist. Suspicion in a neighbourhood prevention network is not a unitary phenomenon but consists of multiple

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realities of suspicion emerging from different interpretations and perceptions of neighbourhood prevention team members.

The Actor-Network Theory tool of semiotic relationality entails that all actors in a network shape and define each other. Supported by the notions of heterogeneity (different actors) and materiality (not only social but also material actors), the Actor-Network Theory thus describes a web of relations in which human and non-human actors shape each other and produce certain outcomes. Bruno Latour, publishing under de pseudonym of Jim Johnson, argues against a divide between a social actor and a technological artefact. He illustrates that a door-closer, or groom, can be viewed as a highly social actor. A door-closer is not only created by humans and substitutes actions of people (closing the door), but also shape human actions (Johnson, 1988: 303). As the hydraulic door-closer needs the force of an able-bodied person to close the door, very little or very old persons cannot open the door (Johnson, 1988: 302). The door-closer is thus a social actor as it prescribes what sort of people should pass through the door. Sanders describes how the technologies of Computer Aided Dispatch systems (CAD) influence the way that police dispatches are prioritized. Based on standardized questions, the technologies automatically establish the priority of the 911-caller for police dispatch. When new calls come in, the CAD technologies change the priority automatically (Sanders, 2006: 725). The CAD technologies thus are active agents in the prioritization process of police dispatches. These examples show how both human and technological actors in a web of relations influence outcomes. Therefore, human and non-human actors are included in the analysis of how suspicion is constructed in neighbourhood prevention teams.

The technologies that are most present in neighbourhood prevention teams are social media services, like WhatsApp, that enable neighbourhood prevention team members to spread their interpreted suspicion at an incredibly fast pace, to a great number of persons. As hinted in section 1.1 and will become more evident throughout this thesis, suspicion shared with WhatsApp can induce residents to react impulsively. The modern-day technologies such as social media and smartphones have made the organisation, surveillance and deployment of neighbourhood prevention teams more effective, but they have simultaneously increased the risk of vigilantism (Lub, 2017a: 136). Sharing suspicion with other neighbourhood prevention team members or the police is made very easy by technologies, today it is just a ‘phone swipe’ away. This has greatly lowered the threshold of reporting suspicious behaviours. It is therefore relevant that these technologies are included as actors in the analysis of the construction of suspicion in neighbourhood prevention teams

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All of these possible aspects and effects of neighbourhood prevention teams mentioned in sections 2.2 and 2.3 (professional deformation, no fixed criteria for suspicion, differences in interpretations, increased speed and volume with which suspicion can be shared and a lowered threshold for reporting suspicion) might enable subtle, but excessive forms of social control of both marginalised groups and the wider neighbourhood population through neighbourhood prevention teams. It is therefore meaningful to gain a better understanding of how neighbourhood prevention teams construct suspicion by analysing the influence of human and non-human actors on suspicion construction (for reasons explained in section 1.2).

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3. Methodology

3.1 Research design

To answer the research questions, an inductive research has been done. Inductive research takes the observations and findings as starting point and strives to formulate a theory out of this data (Bryman, 2012: 26). Through research methods, this study gathers data on how suspicion is constructed by both the human and non-human actors in Dutch neighbourhood prevention teams.

To gather the data for this research, a qualitative multiple case study design was chosen. Qualitative research, contrasted to its counterpart quantitative research, focusses more on words instead of numbers (Bryman, 2012: 380). Besides this simple characterization of qualitative research, some of its more detailed features are relevant for this research. Qualitative research often takes an inductive view concerning the relationship between theory and research, like the inductive research chosen to answer the research questions. The epistemological and ontological positions, the assumptions about how research should be conducted and the assumptions about the nature of social phenomena respectively, of qualitative research also greatly corresponds with the research of the thesis (Bryman, 2012: 6). The epistemological position of qualitative research takes an interpretivist stance, meaning the understanding of the social world is achieved through an examination of the interpretation of this social world by its participants. The ontological position is described as constructionist, implying the social world is the outcome of interactions between individuals (Bryman, 2012: 380). Inductive research, focused on interpretations of participants and the constructionist stance of interactions producing outcomes, are all important features of the research of the construction of suspicion in local neighbourhood prevention teams. Therefore, a qualitative research design is chosen. The interpretivist stance of qualitative research in this thesis argues that the construction of suspicion in neighbourhood prevention teams can be understood by analysing how members interpret suspicion. This stance also corresponds with the notion of multiplicity as described in section 2.3, as suspicion is not seen as a unitary phenomenon but consisting of multiple realities emerging from different interpretations. The constructionist stance of qualitative research argues that construction of suspicion is an outcome of interaction of participants of neighbourhood prevention teams. Using the tools of Actor-Network Theory described in section 2.3, this research broadens this stance with the influence of non-human actors, such as technologies, besides the human actors, on the construction of suspicion.

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Therefore, the social phenomenon of this research (the construction of suspicion) is analysed as an outcome of interactions within a web of relations consisting both human and non-human actors.

The construction of suspicion in neighbourhood prevention teams is a complex process with many aspects. Therefore, a research design is chosen that has the potential to unveil these obscure and detailed relations and interactions. For the collection and analysis of data, a multiple case study design is chosen. A case study consists of a detailed and intensive analysis of the chosen cases to unveil its complexity and particular nature (Bryman, 2012: 66). Because of this emphasis on an intensive examination of the setting or cases and its ability to uncover complex processes, the case study research design fits perfectly with the aims of this study (Bryman, 2012: 67). While a case study design enjoys a high internal validity, meaning that the relationship between the dependent and independent variable can be ascertained with confidence, the external validity of a case study design is low. External validity is concerned with the generalizability of the study. A small number of cases of neighbourhood prevention teams is not easily generalizable to the entire population of neighbourhood prevention teams in the Netherlands. To increase the generalisability of the results of the cases chosen for this research, exemplifying cases are chosen. The objective of an exemplifying case is capture the circumstances and conditions of an everyday situation (Yin, 2009: 48 in Bryman, 2012: 70). Because the chosen cases are representative for everyday neighbourhood prevention teams, the generalisability of the research is heightened.

For typical neighbourhood prevention teams, cases are preferred where citizens participate by sharing information through WhatsApp and/or patrol the neighbourhood. Because of limited resources for this research, cases are also selected in the region of Leiden and The Hague. The case selection has produced the following cases of neighbourhood prevention teams:

• WhatsApp-Neighbourhood Prevention Vlietweg • LDP Neighbourhood Prevention Leiderdorp • Neighbourhood Prevention Team Voorburg-West • Neighbourhood Prevention Team Park Leeuwenberg

These neighbourhood prevention teams were contacted to be researched through official contact information, such as listed email addresses, through the snowball method of interviewing and through personal contacts of the researcher such as residents of these

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municipalities or members of municipal councils. A further description of each individual case is given in chapter 4.

3.2 Research methods

To increase the internal validity of this research, two research methods are used to gather the data. By gathering data through two different research methods, there is more certainty that the research observes what is meant to be observed. The research methods that are the best fit for this research and therefore used to gather and analyse data are ethnography and qualitative interviewing. These methods are of qualitative design, meaning in simple terms that they are more focused on words (complex relations and nature) than on numbers (statistics). The two research methods, ethnography and qualitative interviewing, are further described in section 3.3.

3.3 Data gathering and analysis

To gather valid data on how suspicion emerges, how it is further constructed and how it is passed on to the local security network, research methods are chosen that produce data originating as close as possible from the source itself (the neighbourhood prevention teams). In order to unveil the complex processes of suspicion construction, the research methods must have methods of analysis capable of uncovering these complex, detailed and obscured relations and interactions. As mentioned in section 3.2, ethnography and qualitative interviewing are the most adequate methods that meet these requirements.

Ethnography is used in researching the case of Neighbourhood Prevention Team Voorburg-West. This neighbourhood prevention team frequently patrols their neighbourhood in teams of three to observe and report not only suspicious and possibly unsafe situations, but also cases like loose pavement tiles to improve the appearance of the neighbourhood. Using ethnographic research, their patrol teams were joined two times to gather data. Participating in these teams gave rich and detailed data of the workings and nature of these groups, and valuable insight into how participants report and respond to suspicious situations. While participating in these teams, field notes of notable reporting or activities were made. These field notes contain a detailed description of what happened, allowing this data to be analysed later in the process of research (Bryman, 2012: 432). Some problems with legitimacy of joining these neighbourhood prevention teams occurred as the researcher is not a resident of the

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neighbourhood represented by the researched neighbourhood prevention teams. Joining WhatsApp groups of the neighbourhood prevention teams was always impossible due to privacy rules and not preferred by members and coordinators of each individual neighbourhood prevention team. Only two out of the four teams made use of patrols through the neighbourhood. Neighbourhood Prevention Team Park Leeuwenberg left the choice of joining patrols to the individual participants who were patrolling the neighbourhood, who did not prefer the researcher accompanying them. Therefore, ethnographic research was only applied on Neighbourhood Prevention Team Voorburg-West

Qualitative interviews were conducted with members from all four neighbourhood prevention teams. Contrasted to quantitative or (semi-)structured interviewing, qualitative interviewing is unstructured, and the focus is more on the interviewee’s point of view to gain rich and detailed answers. The goal of these interviews is to gather rich and detailed answers, not data that can be processed quickly. These unstructured qualitative interviews allowed significant departure from any schedule or guide and ‘rambling on’ by interviewee’s is often encouraged (Bryman, 2012: 470). The data was gathered by recording each interview and transcribing them, so that the data could be analysed more extensively later on. These interviewees are sampled through the snowball method, meaning that sampled interviewees of this population will be asked if they know other participants from the population who are relevant for the research (Bryman, 2012: 424).

The data collected through ethnography and qualitative interviewing was analysed using the qualitative data analysis and research software ATLAS.ti. This software lets the user organise interview transcripts or field notes in a well organised manner. Then parts or sections of the data can be provided with codes. Coding entails reviewing transcripts and field notes and giving labels to component parts that seem to be of potential theoretical significance and/or that appear to be particularly salient within the study (Bryman, 2012: 568). Through the coding method of analysis, using ATLAS.ti, certain patterns or logics are discovered within the data that illustrate how suspicion is constructed within the researched neighbourhood prevention teams.

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4. The Research Cases: Neighbourhood Prevention Teams

The data gathered through semi-structured interviews and ethnography is derived from four neighbourhood prevention teams divided over three municipalities. The researched neighbourhood prevention teams differ in many ways, such as experience, organisation, activities, size, image, income and relationship with both the police and the municipal government.

4.1 Leiden: WhatsApp-Neighbourhood Prevention Vlietweg

The WhatsApp-Neighbourhood Prevention Vlietweg team operates within the municipality of Leiden and covers a single road. The Vlietweg road is almost four kilometres long and connects the municipality of Leiden with its smaller neighbour, the municipality Leidschendam— Voorburg. The residents living on the Vlietweg engaged in yearly community activities, such as a New Year’s reception, which caused a strong social cohesion amongst the residents living on the road. Two female residents decided to start a neighbourhood prevention WhatsApp group when there were a few burglaries among residences of the Vlietweg. An ‘Alert’ WhatsApp group was created for members of the neighbourhood prevention team but the group experienced some start-up problems when members send irrelevant messages that were not about neighbourhood safety issues. Other members experienced these messages as annoying and residents started leaving the neighbourhood prevention team. This problem was solved by the creation of a second WhatsApp group, the cosy group (de gezellige groep in Dutch). Since then, all messages of neighbourhood activities are shared in this group and the Alert-group is reserved only for neighbourhood safety or criminal issues. The Vlietweg neighbourhood prevention team now has about eighty members, which includes almost every household on the Vlietweg. As the Vlietweg largely follows a canal, some residents who live on the other side of the canal, and therefore can observe the Vlietweg, have also become members of the neighbourhood prevention team.

The WhatsApp-Neighbourhood Prevention Vlietweg team does not maintain an official relationship with the police or the municipality. Some residents of the Vlietweg maintain informal connections with the police and sometimes use these connections to the benefit of the neighbourhood prevention team, but no formal connections exist with the traditional security-providing actors. The neighbourhood prevention team thereby does not seem to be cooperating strongly with other safety or security actors in a local security network or operating as the ‘eyes

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and ears’ of the police, as described in section 2.1 and 2.2. What is consistent with the literature is that the Vlietweg road is a high-income area and the neighbourhood prevention team mainly focuses on preventing burglaries, as is stated in section 2.2 by Lub.

Only one semi-structured interview has been conducted with a coordinator from this neighbourhood prevention team. Further interviews with another coordinator or members of the neighbourhood prevention team, or becoming part of the neighbourhood prevention team by being added to the WhatsApp group, were not possible as it was not preferred.

4.2 Leiderdorp: LDP Neighbourhood Prevention Leiderdorp

The neighbourhood prevention team in the municipality Leiderdorp was founded two years ago as a citizen initiative but was highly sought after and promoted by the municipal government. A Facebook request for volunteers who wanted to create a neighbourhood prevention team in the municipality was send out and two residents responded. Soon after, the two volunteers found themselves in a meeting with the mayor who promised them support and freedom in setting up the network, as long as they made sure that the organisation of the neighbourhood prevention team would cover the entirety of the municipality. The volunteers started recruiting members and after two and a half months they had the entire municipality covered. They decided to centre the neighbourhood prevention network around the technology of WhatsApp since this technology was found accessible, wide spread among the residents of Leiderdorp and enabling fast communication. Each individual neighbourhood of the in total twelve neighbourhoods in the municipality has their own WhatsApp group consisting of the neighbourhood prevention team’s members residing in that particular neighbourhood. Each individual neighbourhood WhatsApp-group also has an administrator and a back-up administrator who coordinate the communication of the network. The core WhatsApp-group on the municipal level is the Calamity WhatsApp-group. This group consists of all the administrators of the individual neighbourhoods together with other relevant network actors such as the local police, representatives of the municipal government and housing associations. The neighbourhood prevention network operates according to the SAAR method, an abbreviation that stands for Signal, Alert, App, Respond. When a participant of the neighbourhood prevention team signals something suspicious, a safety issue or a possible criminal situation, he or she first calls the police emergency number if this is relevant, then reports what he saw in the neighbourhood prevention WhatsApp-group and responds

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often refused to call the police. Administrators of individual neighbourhood WhatsApp-groups can send the message in the Calamity-group where it is decided if it is relevant to spread the message to other individual neighbourhood WhatsApp-groups.

In contrast with the Vlietweg neighbourhood prevention team in Leiden, the LDP Neighbourhood Prevention Leiderdorp network includes traditional security-providing actors. The municipal government, certainly the mayor, wants the neighbourhood prevention network to exist and provides a lot of support in the form of promotion materials for recruitment. Representatives of the municipal government with knowledge of the specific neighbourhoods are also present in the Calamity WhatsApp-group to advise the community members on their actions. The local police are also present in the Calamity-group, being able to give insight into the actions of the police and advise the members on how to respond to certain situations. The team of LDP Neighbourhood Prevention Leiderdorp thereby seems to be much more operating in a local security network as described in section 2.1 than the neighbourhood prevention team of the Vlietweg in Leiden. The neighbourhood prevention network organised on the level of the municipality Leiderdorp does not entirely fit the description of a neighbourhood prevention team as given in section 2.2. While it does focus on preventing safety issues by observing and reporting, the network covers an entire municipality where individual neighbourhood prevention teams coordinate and communicate information to each other. As mentioned in section 2.3, the neighbourhood prevention network makes use of the social media message service of WhatsApp to communicate information to a large number of participants in a short time.

Data gathered from this neighbourhood prevention network was gathered through semi-structured interviews with the founders of the network, an administrator of a neighbourhood prevention team and a participant of a neighbourhood prevention team. Ethnographic research by joining one or multiple WhatsApp groups was not possible, as the researcher did not reside in the municipality. Joining the Facebook group of the neighbourhood prevention team was offered. However, no usable data was retrieved as this social medium was not intensely used by the members.

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4.3 Leidschendam-Voorburg: Neighbourhood Prevention Team Voorburg-West & Neighbourhood Prevention Team Park Leeuwenberg

In the municipality of Leidschendam-Voorburg, some forms of neighbourhood prevention teams already existed before the municipality started supporting these existing teams since the last months of 2016. In a neighbourhood of the Voorburg-West area, residents decided to start a neighbourhood prevention team after several residents showed their alertness to neighbourhood safety issues when an unknown parked car was spotted and observed by residents for a couple of days. The neighbourhood of Park Leeuwenberg is the wealthiest neighbourhood of the municipality and relatively isolated from the rest of the municipality by water, highways and a family attraction park. No neighbourhood prevention team was present before the current format was introduced, but some form of social cohesion and a monthly newsletter was organised by senior residents of the neighbourhood. The municipal government started seeing merit in the alertness of neighbourhood communities and their supporting role for the police. Therefore, the municipal government decided to support these neighbourhood prevention teams. The neighbourhood prevention team of a neighbourhood in Voorburg-West was asked to expand their network to all the neighbourhoods in the Voorburg-West area. The Voorburg-West neighbourhood prevention team now incorporates all the neighbourhoods of the area, except one neighbourhood who also already had a small neighbourhood prevention team and did not wish to join or merge with the others due to the extra work they perceived in this cooperation. In the neighbourhood of Park Leeuwenberg, a neighbourhood prevention team was set up but expansion to other neighbourhoods is not possible due to her isolated location. Other neighbourhood prevention teams were also started or professionalised in the municipality of Leidschendam-Voorburg but no data or information was gathered from these teams for this research. The neighbourhood prevention teams in Leidschendam-Voorburg operate differently than the neighbourhood prevention teams in Leiden and Leiderdorp. Where the latter teams consist of almost all the residents of the area and neighbourhood security related issues are signalled trough alertness during daily tasks, the former teams in Leidschendam-Voorburg patrol their area in small groups and consist of a smaller group of volunteers. These neighbourhood prevention teams actively patrol the neighbourhoods in groups of three participants with rounds lasting about two hours. Each member of the patrol groups has a specific role, one member who actively engages with encountered situations and individuals, one member who follows close by to jump in when needed and one member who keeps distance and writes everything down. This last member of the patrol team also writes a report of

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everything they encountered after their patrol round. These reports are send to the coordinator of each single neighbourhood prevention team. The neighbourhood prevention team coordinator takes further actions, such as sending the patrol report to the municipal coordinator of the neighbourhood prevention teams, reporting a public space notification to the municipality, or sending information to the local police.

The neighbourhood prevention teams in Leidschendam-Voorburg have strong ties with the police and the municipal government. Each individual neighbourhood prevention team in Leidschendam-Voorburg has their own storage location where they start their patrol rounds. These are small buildings that are lent out to the community teams, such as a scouting loft for the Voorburg-West team and a tennis club building for the Park Leeuwenberg team. The volunteers store their neighbourhood prevention vests, flashlights and a mobile phone with the direct number to the local police department here. Starting the round, the patrolling members call the police department to let them know they are starting their round and ask if there are any particularities for the duration of the round. Similarly, they call the local police department again when they end their rounds and let them know if something noticeable has occurred. If something happens during the patrol rounds that would require direct police assistance, the patrolling members can call the police department directly and do not have to call the police emergency number. This way of operating of a neighbourhood prevention team is a strong example of community member being ‘the eyes and ears’ of the police, as described in section 2.2. The individual neighbourhood prevention team coordinators also maintain contact with their local neighbourhood police agent, as they send relevant information directly to them. The municipal government has a coordinator for all the neighbourhood prevention teams in the municipality. She stays in contact with all the teams and reads all their reports of patrol rounds for anything of note with which the municipal government could be of assistance. This municipal coordinator also assists the neighbourhood prevention teams with creating their financial budget, organising trainings and sets up a meeting where the different teams can interact with each other. In this way, neighbourhood prevention team members and traditional security actors such as the municipal government and the police are united in several local security networks, as described in section 2.1, that are being guided from the municipal level.

Data from Neighbourhood Prevention Team Voorburg-West was collected through ethnographic research and one qualitative interview. Two patrols were joined, one in the evening and one during the day, which covered the entire Voorburg-West area and lasted for two hours each. A qualitative interview was also conducted with the coordinator of the Neighbourhood Prevention Team Voorburg-West. Through the snowballing method, two

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qualitative interviews were held with two actors outside of the neighbourhood prevention teams but who supported or operated alongside the neighbourhood prevention teams in the local security network of the municipality of Leidschendam-Voorburg. These two interviewees were an extraordinary investigative officer who remains in close contact with the neighbourhood prevention teams of the municipality and the municipal coordinator of all the teams in the municipality. Again through the snowballing method, another interview was conducted with a neighbourhood prevention team coordinator from a different team but in the same municipality of Leidschendam-Voorburg: Neighbourhood Prevention Team Park Leeuwenberg.

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5. Data Analysis

The data is gathered through ethnographic research during two patrol rounds and eight qualitative interviews. The interviews were conducted with members of the neighbourhood prevention teams, with different levels and functions in the teams, and people outside of the neighbourhood prevention teams but working in close relation with the teams in local security networks. The interpretations of research participants regarding suspicious situations provide useful insight for answering how the phenomena of suspicion is constructed in neighbourhood prevention teams. These insights that originated from the analysis of the data are described in this chapter. Section 5.1 focuses on the emergence of suspicion in neighbourhood prevention teams. Section 5.2 describes how suspicion is further constructed and section 5.3 places the construction of suspicion in neighbourhood prevention teams in the broader context of local security networks.

5.1 The emergence of suspicion

The first question of this analysis is: ‘how suspicion emerges in neighbourhood prevention teams?’. The data on the emergence of suspicion presents three elements that are almost always present when suspicion emerges. These three elements are: a deviation from the norm, lack of a clear explanation for the situation and a possible criminal explanation. The three elements are described in this section, starting with the first element: a deviation from the norm. As mentioned in the literature on suspicion in section 2.3, police officers make assessments of situations according to norms defined in their police work. A deviation from this norm is interpreted as an indicator of a suspicious situation (Niculescu-Dinca, 2016: 135). Deviation from a norm as indicator for suspicion is also found in the data of this research, as the first element in the emergence of suspicion in neighbourhood prevention teams. But where police officers have undergone years of training and the norm that they maintain is drawn up professionally, members of neighbourhood prevention teams have had little to no training and their norm is created by personal experience and interpretations. As becomes clear from the data, neighbourhood prevention team members describe the norm they uphold as ‘the normal situation’. Members always report situations which they interpret as not fitting into their picture of what constitutes ‘the normal situation’. This finding corresponds to Lub’s second moral issue within neighbourhood prevention teams, as described in section 2.2. Lub states that

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neighbourhood prevention teams lack some clear criteria of what constitutes a suspicious situation and these teams consist of individual members who differ in personal interpretation of a situation (Lub, 2017a: 135-136). The second element playing a role in the emergence of suspicion in neighbourhood prevention teams is the lack of a clear explanation for the observed situation. This element does not indicate a lack of a single explanation for the observed situations, just that not one of the explanations jumps out as the most logical explanation among all others. It is important to note that these explanations are interpretations by the observer and thus interpreted as lacking. Based on the notion of multiplicity mentioned in section 2.3, suspicion in this research emerges out of many different realities of the same situation. One reality might exist where an explanation for a situation is interpreted as lacking and therefore the situation is perceived as suspicious. At the same time, another reality might exist where an explanation for the situation might not be interpreted as lacking and therefore the situation might not be suspicious in this reality. The third and final element that is often encountered when suspicion emerges is a possible criminal explanation, as interpreted by members. When suspicion emerges, a criminal explanation is often present for a situation that is interpreted as deviating from the norm and lacking a clear explanation.

The vignette below, vignette 1, contains two quotes from the qualitative interviews of this research. The three elements of suspicion emergence can be recognized in these quotes. The first quote, given by an administrator of a neighbourhood prevention team, describes a situation in which an unknown man was observed while he was looking into houses and went into the alley behind the houses. Because the first two elements of suspicion emergence were interpreted as present in the mind of the observer, suspicion relating to the unknown man emerged within the observer. The man was reported in the WhatsApp group of the neighbourhood prevention team and suspicion further emerged among members of the team. The first two elements of suspicion emergence, a deviation from the norm and a lack of a clear explanation, can be recognized in the administrator’s interpretation of the situation. The second quote comes from an extraordinary investigate officer who is not part of a neighbourhood prevention team but comes into regular contact with multiple neighbourhood prevention teams. He describes a situation observed by members of a neighbourhood prevention team where several cars were noticed in front of a closed garden complex at night. All three elements can be recognized in this quote as, in his interpretation, the cars being there was a deviation from the ‘normal situation’ and while he had multiple (criminal) explanations for the situation, none of these explanations stand out as the most logical explanation. The vignette provides examples

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Vignette 1

Identity can also influence the emergence of suspicion in a neighbourhood prevention team. An identity that is not often encountered in a certain neighbourhood can be viewed as deviation form ‘the normal situation’ inside the mind of a resident. Two examples in which identity influences the emergence of suspicion are displayed in vignette 2 and vignette 3. In vignette 2, an administrator describes how foreign salesmen went from door to door in the neighbourhood, offering services at abnormally high prices. In vignette 3, a situation is described in which the police enlisted the help of a neighbourhood prevention team to find two women who had committed a burglary. In both examples, the identity of the individuals involved were explicitly mentioned: foreign salesmen and Gypsy women. Identity, as a deviation from a norm, influencing the emergence of suspicion corresponds with Lub’s warning that disproportionate control of specific groups by neighbourhood prevention teams are a real occurrence, especially in high-income neighbourhoods (2017a: 136).

Vignette 2

“We also had a man in the neighbourhood once who was looking inside of homes. And then suddenly, he disappeared through the gate into the alley behind the houses. Then I think to myself: Yeah, why do you need to be there?”

– Neighbourhood prevention team administrator

“In another neighbourhood, there were a couple of cars that were parked in front of a garden complex. And that complex was, of course, closed during the Winter season. Then there were cars with their engines on parked before the closed complex. Yes, that is a suspicious situation. There may be several things going on. They might be dealing drugs, or they might be trying to break into the complex to steal something. (…) The complex is on a main road, so it might have been somebody who stopped to make a call”.

– Extraordinary investigative officer

“Another example of a suspicious situation is that foreign individuals offer their services for €800, - or something. A nonsense amount of course. They are not allowed to just sell their service at people their doors. In any case, €800, - for a lousy job as cleaning the gutters is just way too much money. If old people fall for that scam, that is just sad.”

The Construction of Suspicion in Dutch Neighbourhood Prevention Teams