Tourism has long been recognized as a crime generator. This poses a dilemma in the sustainable development context: is continued tourist expansion sustainable if it generates increased law and order problems? Using the example of Brașov, Romania, this article considers the ways in which criminal justice agencies and the tourism sector have operated in partnership to ensure the security of both local residents and visitors. We argue that the success of the initiative depends on multi-agency working at the local level, but that the involvement of local residents is also crucial. This commitment may be tested as the nature of tourism changes. The research consists of an analysis of primary and secondary data. The results revealed that among the main security issues mentioned by tourists are not only robberies and other social and situational features that contributed to tourists feeling anxious or unsafe, but also the need to have access to good health services and easy access to money changing facilities, information centers, etc. Some improvements are suggested for the local Sustainable Development Strategy of Brașov.

Specialist tourist police units are a recent development in many countries where tourism is important to the economy and where crimes associated with tourism are recognised. However, such developments are scarcely universal. This paper focuses on three contrasting examples: the UK, where there are no specialist tourist police, despite a clear relationship between tourism and crime and disorder; Ghana, where tourist police have been introduced relatively recently; and the USA, where tourist police units are an established part of policing structures in tourist areas like Florida. After describing the current situation in each area, the paper concludes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of specialist units and the reasons why contrasting policies have emerged.

Discourses concerning risk have become increasingly popular among tourism academics. While these cover a wide range of safety and security concerns, there is rather less of a focus on risk from conventional crime than on terrorist threats. In contrast, criminologists have written extensively about the actual and perceived risk of crime. Both tourism academics and criminologists have addressed the question of who is most concerned about crime, but in each case this analysis has focused on questioning people at one point in time. This paper differs in that it compares the perceptions of risk of those arriving on a visit to Istanbul with perceptions of safety among a similar sample of those returning from their trip. In the former case, we consider tourists’ perceptions of risk prior to their arrival. In the latter case, their perceptions of safety after their trip, and the consequences of this for future visits, a key concern within the tourism industry.

Police-recorded crime data is commonly used to assess the crime risk of tourists and locals. Police records, however, are affected by different crime reporting rates across population groups. No research has explored the different crime reporting propensities of tourists and locals. We analyse two sets of surveys in Barcelona, a general population survey and a survey to tourists. Our results show that while international tourists are less likely to report personal crime to the police than locals, and domestic tourists may also be more likely than international tourists to report personal crime, both international and domestic tourists report vehicle crime more often than locals. Moreover, some individual predictors of crime reporting vary between locals and tourists. New means of encouraging visitors to report crime are needed, for example, through further dissemination of information about how to report from the hotel, specialist tourism police units, or dedicated tourism victims’ support services.

This paper compares the perceptions of risk and safety of those arriving on a visit to Istanbul with a similar sample of those returning from their trip. While the two samples are of different individuals, the research does provide a proxy measure of change, or lack of it, in the light of personal experience. In this sense, it offers an advantage over traditional crime surveys that present a snapshot of perceptions at one point in time. The findings are discussed in the context of more general research on fear of crime and perceptions of risk, and how these are – or are not – influenced by personal experience.