Victimization (staff and pupils), incidents, and seriousness of offenses/offenders

The number of incidents reported in the survey (shown in Table 25.2) astonished everyone; not only the number of incidents reported by victims (staff and pupils) but also the number of incidents reported by the offending pupils themselves. In addition, the fact that about 40% of all incidents were considered serious incidents convinced people that action had to be taken. The research showed that schools only had knowledge of about 15% of all incidents. For the police, this figure was about 1%. Pupils themselves knew about far more incidents compared to the school and the police, and of course pupils talk about these incidents with one another.

The research also showed that young pupils committed more crimes than older pupils. This result is similar to the result of research done in primary schools in Amsterdam (pupils aged 4-12 years). According to that research, children start committing incidents/crimes at the age of 10.¹¹ Boys report they commit more such incidents than girls, and boys are also more often a victim of such incidents. The research also showed some important regional differences. From the perspective of crime victimization studies, self-report research, and risk assessment studies, these results were not extremely surprising: On a global scale, the Netherlands ranks high on the crime charts, Amsterdam ranks high within that country, and schools (youth/workplace contacts) are a risky part of society.

However, the schools reacted in a surprised or shocked manner and were angry sometimes. Evidently, this thorough research brought most schools to the development stage of Breakthrough as mentioned in the 3S maturity matrix presented above. Schools—as well as other institutions like local authorities, police, and so forth—started to ask themselves questions like “How come there are so many and such serious incidents?” “What can be done about this?” and “Why shouldn’t we work together to combat crime and insecurity?”¹⁴

There was one more important outcome of the research. Everyone realized that structural registration and research was important to monitor the development of safety and security in schools. Hence, the research was also the starting point of a project to register incidents, not only for high schools but also for primary schools and professional education institutes in Amsterdam. Registration of incidents by schools themselves was an essential component. To be able to compare results and analyze these data, they were stored in a CD-ROM that made it possible to register incidents in a uniform way. The result was the start of the tool IRIS. The CD-ROM was distributed to all schools in Amsterdam by a researcher who traveled to all schools every few months to collect the data. This registration tool became an instant success; later on it became web based and was used in more and more schools in the Netherlands.

CPTED focus group

The research summarized above had already shown the importance of looking at the routes from and to school and the school neighborhood and surroundings. Not only were the routes from and to school and the school neighborhood perceived as more unsafe and insecure than the school premises and the school building itself by the pupils but also the real crime or incident risk was high. The perception of crime and insecurity problems outside the school were sadly proven true by an incident that happened around this time: Several schools in Amsterdam-West are located next to a line of the light rail public transport system. There were frequent rows and fights between pupils at the roads to the station and on the platform. One day, two girls were fighting on the platform and one of them pushed the other onto the rail, where she was killed by the approaching train.

This case sadly showed several things: a strict division between inside school and outside school is not a very helpful distinction for incidents because problems and conflicts often start inside and explode once outside or the other way around. This case also showed the difficult intermingling of problems and solutions and the number of participants involved. For instance, possible solutions were to prevent fights, take quick action when fights are seen or reported (the station was equipped with closed-circuit television, CCTV, but no one monitored the images), change school hours and thus prevent students of different schools from clashing into each other while leaving school, have more tram carriage capacity available on peak hours, crowd control, and educating pupils about risks and about quick intervention tactics.

Within each regional CPTED focus group, the schools learned a lot from the practices and experiences of each other. Schools, together with officials from police, public transport, local authorities, and city management, were able to formulate a set of new and comprehensive measures in the fields of public transport, neighborhood maintenance, fire prevention and evacuation, and multiagency cooperation. Some of these measures were so simple that they could be implemented instantaneously while other plans—such as architecture and urban planning—needed more time. Also, a new way of analyzing problems emerged: mixed groups of stakeholders (pupils, teachers, police, staff, etc.) simply walked in and around the school premises to make an inventory of problems they perceived. This was later elaborated upon in a structured method for risk assessment: a review. This so-called review emerged where individuals or groups walking around—in sun and rain, light and darkness—made notes and took photographs, resulting in prestructured risk/solution assessment reports. Years later (2009), this prestructured method for risk assessment was integrated with IRIS. This review—nowadays everyone uses the IRIS review app (see Figure 25.1)—enables schools to register incidents (e.g., a broken window), mark and photograph hot spots, and assess security risks.

Another thing the CPTED focus groups found out while identifying measures already taken was that most schools were already very active in the field of combating crime and insecurity. However, most security measures are not really incorporated into sophisticated policy plans. There is no connection between the research outcomes and analysis of the problem and the goals/plans and the measures. There is much action, but often the wrong action. For instance, the biggest problem for pupils is the unsafe and insecure situation in the school neighborhood and the routes from and to school, but schools had hardly implemented any measures aimed at this problem and did not invest in cooperation with those who might be able to change this situation. There was also a profound lack of systematic evaluation of measures already implemented. In short, there is a lot of action but it is questionable how effective and efficient this action is.

Registration and monitoring

The same problem could be seen by the registration policies; schools did put effort into the registration of incidents, but it was done in a rather clumsy way (e.g., by the registration of incidents in the personal files of pupils). This way there is never a systematic and statistical sound overview available because the registration is completely personalized; there is no central place to compile the information. From the beginning of the 1990s, it was clear that not much was known about the actual crime situation and/or the risks in a school as long as there was no (uniformity in) registration. In one of the focus groups, the layout of a sound system for IRIS was developed step by step. Altogether, this process took about 10 years. This digital tool was distributed on a CD-ROM to all schools in Amsterdam and from there it was copied by schools nationwide. The first real investigation into incidents in Amsterdam was started by a researcher on a bicycle who visited all schools and tried to get the data that were registered on a stand-alone computer somewhere in a school. There was a uniformity in registering incidents, but it was hard to gather the information.

The CD-ROM spread through the Netherlands, and schools in other cities (Rotterdam and Haarlem) started to use it as well. By this point, schools wanted to access the tool on the Internet and thus have easier accessibility and better and easier benchmarking possibilities, though in the beginning privacy issues scared some schools. IRIS developed into a web-based tool in 2004. First, a school must know basic facts about what the problems with crime and incivilities are (what, where, when, who), but an even more important next step is to know what to do to tackle and prevent these problems. Hence, a standardized method on how to organize school safety, one for which a school could get an official national certificate, had to be developed. It was based on the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) control cycle, where schools decide for themselves what their goals are and how they are going to reach these goals. This PDCA (or adjust) cycle is an iterative four-step management method used in business for the control and continuous improvement of processes and products. It is also known as the Deming circle/cycle/wheel and it forms the basis for a lot of international standards for quality management (e.g., ISO 9000 series) and crime prevention (e.g., the European standards of the CEN 14383 series).¹⁵ The standardized method for safe and secure schools was developed with the Dutch Ministries of Interior and Justice.

This standardized method¹⁶ starts with a step in which a school has to do a thorough analysis of the crime and safety situation, preferably not only in and around the school but also in the wider neighborhood. As we have seen above, this was not that easy a task. In Amsterdam only, 15 years ago, we had to do long and difficult victim surveys that lead to a breakthrough for action to tackle and prevent crime. But nowadays, this difficult and costly research is no longer needed. Every incident that a schools feeds into the registration tool IRIS—and the info from school surveys/monitors and factual reviews as well—is stored (anonymously) in a central database (see Figure 25.2). Hence, every school using the IRIS tool can not only research and analyze its own crime and safety situation but can also compare and benchmark their situation with other schools (e.g., of the same type). An interesting side effect of using this crime and safety registration/survey/review tool was that the terminology of the problems with crime and incivilities (for example) were standardized (the “what is the problem” question), but also the indications of places (where, hotspots), time, and types of offenders and victims was more standardized. The IRIS tool was used for a while as a stand-alone software package, but later on it was completely integrated in the regular administrative school software which is sold by the main administrative software companies in the Netherlands. The same incident can now be seen in the personal file of a student and it can be used to make a complete safety analysis. Nowadays, the IRIS system is used in 30% of all the Dutch high schools, 20% of the primary schools, and 20% of the professional education sites.