Brussels, One Single Police Zone?

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Johan Leman, 21 November 2024

From recent conversations with several police inspectors, I’ve learned that in Brussels, there’s a growing belief that Police organization will need to become more large-scale and cross-municipal than it is today. At the same time, there’s a call for enhanced community policing. The key question, of course, is how to reconcile these two approaches.

How can you have fewer police officers confined to one neighborhood or zone, allowing for greater mobility across multiple municipalities, while also functioning better as a corps in the context of the desired community policing?

On one hand, residents are asking for more neighborhood officers, but on the other, there’s a push toward greater cross-municipal mobility. Both directions have their merits. However, I fear that the disappearance of neighborhood officers (already largely a reality) has created a void and a sense of distance between citizens and the police. With even fewer neighborhood officers on the streets, this could result in a poorer flow of concrete information to the police and a reduced level of trust in some neighborhoods regarding the presence of uniformed officers (potentially leading to increased aggression).

Let’s hope that police reform doesn’t become something designed purely hierarchically from behind desks but instead involves frontline officers, each bringing their specific points of concern to the table.

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