These are the Labs of the Embassy of Safety

Embassy Lab: Jonge Aanwas

The youth is the future’ is a statement you often hear. In practice, however, for many of them the future lies in serious crime. Especially in the drug trade. In ‘Embassy Lab: Jonge Aanwas’, we focus on the development of repressive and preventive interventions to protect young people from participating in serious crime. We will do this in various municipalities, each with a different approach. In the municipality of Amsterdam, design studio Greenberry will be working on the design of a new methodology for a new pilot of the Youth & Safety Department (J&V), which is responsible for tackling problematic youth groups in the Zuidoost district of Amsterdam. In this pilot, J&V wants to work in broad cooperation with the police and youth work to strengthen insight and supervision concerning the behaviour of (at-risk) young people on social media. The aim is to use the online world of young people as a source of information for the timely and tailored deployment of interventions.

Embassy Lab: Cashback

In the Netherlands, tackling undermining crime is a topical theme that is high on the political agenda. Newspapers are full of news about found hemp nurseries, incidents in drug labs and money laundering constructions. There is a great deal of criminal money in circulation, and the possibility of ‘seizing’ this criminal money is being used with increasing success. In some cases, the confiscated money is reinvested back into society. A structural way of combining confiscation, giving back to society and strengthening the approach is not yet available. The Province of North Brabant and Taskforce-RIEC Brabant-Zeeland are therefore looking for an effective approach that focuses on the public value that crime does not pay. What process do you go through to set up a successful approach? What are the building blocks? How do you achieve maximum impact when criminal money is returned to society? Studio Sociaal Centraal will take on this question! They will design a process and an accompanying tool(box) to invest seized criminal money back into society. By doing so, they will map out what should and should not be done in order to make citizens aware that crime does not pay.

The Embassy Labs are based on the developed and tested methods of What if Lab, a programme of Dutch Design Foundation. They form the link between inspiring visions and concrete applicable solutions.