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(Horeca) in Belgium Programme Future and Society TA/00/020 Project DANGER WORKING PAPER SERIES No. 10 Vulnerability to Crime of the Hotel, Restaurant and Café Business (Horeca) in Belgium Noel Klima Accepted for publication in Governance of Security, Maklu: Antwerp Vulnerability to crime of the hotel, restaurant and café business (Horeca) in Belgium Abstract This paper reports on explanatory qualitative research into vulnerabilities to crime within the Horeca (hotels, restaurants and cafés) sector in Belgium. The sector’s vulnerabilities expose its members to becoming a victim, but also a perpetrator (an accomplice, facilitator, etc.). Low profitability, exacerbated by pricing pressures from Horeca customers and suppliers, predispose Horeca entrepreneurs to attempting a variety of non-legal modes of economic survival, including involvement in a ‘black market’ (‘off the books’ trading) between Horeca providers, suppliers and some customers. There are similar arrangements for the highly fluid workforce, whose hours and wages are only partially declared to the authorities, the untaxed payments then partially compensating for the low wages prevalent in the sector. Certain aspects of rules and regulations ‘backfire’, for example high VAT rates stimulate the grey economy; these and other evasions are being facilitated by sympathetic accountants skilled in hiding illegal transactions, and by complicit customers and suppliers. Illegal service providers and suppliers emerge to create an underground economy, and disputes are solved without recourse to the authorities. These sector conditions create an attractive, fertile soil for more serious criminal activities like human trafficking and money laundering activities. Key words Hotel, Restaurant, Café, Horeca, Crime, Vulnerability, Opportunity, Belgium Introduction In recent years Belgium’s hotel, restaurant and café sector (in Belgium and the Netherlands abbreviated Horeca1) has been considered one of the chief legal sectors (next to construction, 1 This sector consists of two codes (NACE-Bel 55-56) that are part of a classification system defined and applied through the European Union and its Member States to facilitate the comparison of economic activity data between the member states and statistics. The code system NACE (Nomenclature générale des Activités économiques dans la Communauté Européenne) is based on the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC) of the United Nations. The classification system is comparable to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The NACE sections are classified by the EU but the subsections may be amended by the Member States after approval of the European Commission. For Belgium the amended NACE-Bel 1 transport, export–import and textile) related to organised crime in Belgium according to the published organised crime reports of the Belgian Federal Police (DSB-SPC 2001, 2003, 2005, 2008). The Belgian Federal Police differentiate between legal economic sectors and companies as a ‘victim’, and the ‘use of commercial structures’ which consists of three sub - categories: (i) mixing legal and illegal structures, (ii) the use of existing fully legal structures and (iii) the use of front organisations (DSB-SPC 2001, 2003, 2005, 2008). The line between the different forms of interaction with crime and the legal economy is obscure and blurred, as some researchers have found. Passas (2002, 2003), for example, has developed typologies of the ‘interfaces’ between the legal economy and (organised) crime activity with respect to cross-border crime. Some other contributions studied the situation from the perpetrator’s perspective (see for example Kleemans & de Poot 2008, Kleemans & van de Bunt 2008), highlighting the use of legal structures for illegal activity or infiltration. Vander Beken and his colleagues examined the interaction by looking at the existing legal structures in economic sectors and their weak points (vulnerabilities) that might be exploited by (organised) criminals (Vander Beken et al. 2003, 2004; Vander Beken 2005, 2007a, 2007b; Vander Beken & Van Daele 2008; Klima et al. 2009). In these studies different roles of the legal sector and enterprises are considered such as perpetrator (accomplice), victim or facilitator. Following this line, we also hold the view that the sector’s vulnerability should be considered from different perspectives taking the different roles into account. However, it is sometimes not easy to make a distinction between the perpetrator and victim in this sector. Therefore this study considers both perspectives, while maintaining a clear distinction between them to avoid misunderstandings. The nature of the relationship between crime and the legal environment is particularly important in vulnerability studies, and this is reflected in our analysis. Many interviewees from the sector believed that its vulnerability was a risk of victimisation, whereas police interviewees viewed sector participants as both victims and perpetrators, and focused particularly on perpetrators when discussing vulnerability. This shows that vulnerability depends strongly on one’s perspective. Only a few studies attempt to analyse the sector from both perspectives, but a theoretical approach should cover both perspectives. As most crime-explaining theories focus on victims or perpetrators, these theories need to be integrated to explain the sector’s vulnerability to crime. Integrated approaches that bring together different criminological theories, for example Vila (1994), provide a basic idea for studying vulnerability to crime. This approach discounts a mono-causal reasoning for crime and is willing to take models and theories from other disciplines into account. Earlier research on crime vulnerabilities also took a ‘holistic’ view, but did not always make a clear distinction between the different roles a sector might 2008 nomenclature is valid since 2008 (see http://statbel.fgov.be/nl/statistieken/gegevensinzameling/nomenclaturen/nacebel/index.jsp). 2 play with respect to crime (Vander Beken 2005). However, as precedent vulnerability studies we initially focussed on opportunities and in the legal environment settings that might be exploited by criminals. The settings in which criminal events take place and the recognition that opportunity is an important causation for crime has been extensively studied by environmental criminologists during the last three decennia (for a good overview see Wortley & Mazerolle 2008). The three recent (complementary) theoretical perspectives within environmental criminology are Routine Activity Theory (Cohen & Felson 1979), Crime Pattern Theory (Brantingham & Brantingham 1993) and Rational Choice Theory (Cornish & Clarke 1986). While Crime Pattern Theory helps to explain the relation of crime and places, Rational Choice Theory deals with the decision-making processes of offenders. The complemented version of Routine Activity Theory (Cohen & Felson 1979, 1995, Eck 1994, 1995) explains crime as a convergence of a target and an offender in a place at a time in absence of a guardians, place managers and handlers.2 This vision serves as the basis for several practical applications such as e.g. Situational Crime Prevention (Clarke 1980, 1997) and is applied to several crime types (see for an overview Clarke 2009). Opportunity approaches are thus no longer limited to property crimes like theft, burglary and vandalism but also to more complex crime phenomena such as organised crime (Bouloukos et al. 2003, Cornish & Clarke 2002, Felson 2006, van de Bunt & van der Schoot 2003, van der Schoot 2006, Bullock et al. 2010). The present study approaches the legal hotel, restaurant and café sector by looking for opportunities and the circumstances that facilitate and stimulate (organised) crime in the sector. Our starting point is not a certain crime type, but the Horeca sector and its structures and conditions with regard to crime. In this context, criminal activity refers to all ‘unlawful activity’ that was detected in the case files we studied, and that was mentioned by the interviewees. The central question was: what is it that makes the Horeca sector vulnerable to criminal activity? With the exception of Hoogenboom & Hoogenboom -Statema’s Foute Kroeg (1996), no reported criminological research has concentrated on the Horeca as one single economic sector (although Hoogenboom & Hoogenboom -Statema did not consider the hotel business in their research). Most of the international literature focuses on nightlife (Hobbs et al. 2000, Hadfield et al. 2009), exploring crime phenomena such as violence (Hobbs et al. 2003, Recasens 2007, Hadfield 2006, Graham & Homel 2008), drugs (Decorte 1996, Morris 1998, Hunt et al. 2010), bouncers (Lister et al. 2000, Hobbs et al. 2002, 2003, Pratten 2007, Rigakos 2008), theft (Sidebottom & Bowers 2010) and public nuisance (Van Duyne 1978). For an 2 Recently, Sampson et al. (2010) proposed to add a third dimension to the crime triangle, the ‘super controllers’, the people, organisations and institutions that control guardians, place managers and handlers, having merely an indirect effect on the criminal event. 3 overview of the nightlife and crime situation in different European countries see Hadfield (2009). Analyses of other Horeca business, such as the hotel business, are less widespread and reduced to some single contributions, such as Ho et al. (2009). The link between restaurants and crime, in particular, is rarely researched although restaurants are often
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