The latest Security Monitor that surveys some 150,000 people across Belgium has found that 19% of residents in the Brussels-Capital Region feel unsafe in their own neighbourhood.
The survey found that the increase in the percentage of people in the capital who don’t feel safe where live is linked to the consumption and sale of narcotics and other crime related to the trade in illegal drugs.
Federal interior minister Bernard Quintin has described the figures as “worrying” and has once again called for the merger of the Brussels’ six local police services into one local police force for the whole of the Brussels-Capital Region.
Quintin told journalists that “In some Brussels neighbourhoods, a lot of problems on top of each other: nuisance caused by drugs, intimidation on the streets, damage to vehicles, fly-tipping… We need a structural response to that.”
