Terrorism and Governance Strategies in Brussels

This means that two different kinds of police agencies were created (the federal and local police), which were integrated by means of functional instruments (e.g., a common planning cycle, a shared educational programme, the same databases, etc.). The federal component of the system was designated as being responsible for supra-local and complex forms of public disorder and crime, under the supervision of the minister of internal affairs and of the minister of justice. The local component was no longer implemented on the scale of the 589 municipalities, but on so-called ‘zones’, which lowered the number back to 196 ‘zonal’ forces. In Table 1 the total capacity of local and federal police personnel is shown per 31/12/2013. Table 1 illustrates that the local component significantly outnumbers the federal component in terms of capacity. At implementation on January 1, 2001, 196 zones were formed. Since then, some zones have voluntarily merged together, but in 2017 there are still 189 zones. This reform was fully implemented in 2001. No hierarchical link was introduced between the federal and local levels [2]. The reform coincided with an impressive international consensus in the academic literature concerning the inadequacy of traditional police models such as a military-bureaucratic model or a crimefighting model. Belgium adopted the reform of a COP policy on this occasion. We summarise some of the critiques being recognised as important, including one by decision-makers [3]: