Comparative Analysis of Public Safety Policy of Antwerp and Rotterdam

Contesting crime and ensuring safety have been on the national and local political agendas in many European countries for quite some time. Public attention shifted more and more to this topic the last years because of rising crimes rates, but also because people felt more unsafe, especially in larger cities. The evolution of local safety policy can be seen as a collective effort to stand up to new challenges in tackling crime and safety issues, restoring public confidence in the process. In our paper we present a framework for the comparative analysis of local safety policy. In this framework not only policy learning and policy transfer are important, but also the interplay between policy development and political and societal dynamics. We illustrate our approach by comparing the development of local safety policy in two cities: Antwerp (Belgium) and Rotterdam (The Netherlands).