Why European mayors emphasize urban security: Evidence from a survey in 28 European countries
| Author | Daniel Kübler,Jacques de Maillard |
| Published date | 01 July 2022 |
| Date | 01 July 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1477370820921486 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370820921486
European Journal of Criminology
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370820921486
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Why European mayors
emphasize urban security:
Evidence from a survey in
28 European countries
Daniel Kübler
University of Zurich, Switzerland
Jacques de Maillard
Centre de recherches sociologiques sur le droit et les institutions pénales (CESDIP) and
Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin, France
Abstract
Urban security has become a pressing political issue in many European cities. This study seeks to
understand why some city governments consider urban security to be a policy priority, whereas
others do not. Using data from a recent survey of 2674 city mayors in 28 European countries,
we test four hypotheses on factors associated with the prioritization of urban security by local
politicians. The results show that European mayors’ emphasis on urban security as a policy goal
varies strongly across countries, as well as across cities within countries. Besides contextual
factors related to national political culture, welfare regimes and local autonomy, we find that
mayors’ preferences on security policy are most strongly associated with political ideology, that
is, their self-placement on the left–right spectrum. In addition, crime trends and public opinion
about crime play a role. The study demonstrates that there is no convergence of political agendas
on urban security issues across European cities.
Keywords
Political agenda, urban security, cities, crime, local government, Europe
Corresponding author:
Daniel Kübler, Department of Political Science & Centre for Democracy Studies, University of Zurich,
Affolternstrasse 56, Zurich, 8050, Switzerland.
Email: Daniel.Kuebler@ipz.uzh.ch
921486EUC0010.1177/1477370820921486European Journal of CriminologyKübler and de Maillard
research-article2020
Article
2022, Vol. 19(4) 712–729
Introduction
Urban security has become a pressing political issue in many European cities (Devroe
et al., 2017; Edwards et al., 2013). To name just a few examples, in Italy (Calaresu and
Selmini, 2017; Quassoli et al., 2018; Selmini, 2005), France (de Maillard, 2005; de
Maillard and Mouhanna, 2017; Ferret and Mouhanna, 2005), the Netherlands (Prins and
Devroe, 2017; Van Swaaningen, 2005), England and Wales (Edwards et al., 2017b;
Hughes, 2007) or Belgium (de Pauw and Easton, 2017), local authorities have mobilized
around the issues of crime, incivilities and insecurity. Through the use of local police
forces and administrative tools, the adoption of new technological devices (the most
widely used being CCTV; see Welsh and Farringdon, 2009) or the espousal of a more or
less tough rhetoric, mayors and, more globally, local authorities have developed local
security policies, sometimes challenging the traditional dominance of the central govern-
ment on these issues. As Adam Crawford (2014: 126) aptly put it, we have witnessed ‘the
emergence and institutionalization of a new urban politics in which public safety has
become a new policy preoccupation’, marked by several commonalities: a focus on pro-
active prevention rather than reactive detection, an emphasis on wider social problems
– including quality of life issues; a focus on modes of informal social control; delivery
through a partnership approach; an orientation towards holistic solutions.
To analyse this new urban politics around the issue of security, a broad range of
notions have emerged at the intersection between political discourse and academic anal-
ysis: public order, local safety, public security, and crime prevention, often used inter-
changeably (see, on the discussion, Calaresu, 2017; Edwards and Hughes, 2005). In this
article, we will primarily refer to the notion of ‘urban security’, because it has come ‘to
express a number of key tensions, if not contradictions in European thinking about crime
and violence – between the importance of prevention and sanctioning as policy priorities
established by “active citizens” as well as scientific and political elites’ (Edwards et al.,
2013: 265). The analytical interest of the notion is that it just delineates a policy field,
without presuming the content of actual urban policies. A large body of literature has
discussed the complexities of this new local governance of urban security. Crawford
(1999, 2001) has stressed its contradictory components, completely joined-up and frag-
mented, at arm’s length but hands on (‘hands on’ central government interventions),
wide-angled (partnership approach) but with tunnel vision (intra-organizational focus on
‘outputs’; performance indicators), relying on a growing demand for trust and on the
institutionalization of distrust (role of procedures, new managerial rules), based on coop-
eration and negotiation in a cold climate of competition (bids and benchmarking),
marked by nostalgia disguised as modernization (crime as a result of the breakdown of
communities) and ambivalent political responses (combining preventive strategies and
populist punitiveness). The normative orientations of this new local governance of urban
security have also been debated. Using the example of Rotterdam, Van Swaaningen
(2005) has stressed how the repression of incivilities and the fight against crime have
become central issues, and how the local governance of safety is currently focused on
street crime, pointing to a turn towards a more punitive rhetoric and, to a lesser extent,
policies (see also, for France, Ferret and Mouhanna, 2005). Based on the French and
Italian experiences, de Maillard (2005) and Selmini (2005) have obtained some more
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Kübler and de Maillard
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