The Netherlands' disgrace: racism and police brutality

A man wearing a t-shirt commemorating Mitch Henriquez. Demotix/Jaap Arriens. All rights reserved.Despite the murder of Aruban-born Mitch
Henriquez by police late last June in The Hague, the Netherlands has largely been ignored by the international press. Nonetheless, the event is
important because it is symptomatic of a broader international trend towards an
ever-increasing level of police violence against minorities in the western
world. The kind of violence which led to the death of Henriquez is similar
to that which led to the demise of Eric Garner. Official reports from the Dutch
public prosecution department suggest that the cause of Henriquez’ death was asphyxiation.
Suffocation seems to have become a popular means of police repression internationally.
The bodies on which such lethal techniques are used are mostly male and of
colour.

The case of racial police
profiling in the Netherlands has taken on a dangerous dimension. An Amnesty
International report published in October 2013 demonstrates that what Dutch enforcement
officers categorise as “suspicious behaviour” is strongly correlated to
specific ethnic characteristics. “This suspicious profile [verdacht profiel] is related to characteristics such as age, colour
of skin and ethnic origins. Police officers consider young men with dark skin –
and people from Central and Eastern Europe – as especially ‘suspicious’… According
to [Amnesty’s] research, these are the features that characterise the dominant
stereotypical mode of thinking of police forces.” Such findings correspond to
written accounts of racism given by former police officers. Speaking during a TV
interview in 2010, the current district police officer of The Hague implied that
certain peoples are culturally and/or genetically more inclined to violent
forms of behaviours.

Interviewer (Anil Ramdas): Why is it that Dutch nationals with a
Moroccan heritage [in Dutch often problematically grouped together under the label
of “Moroccans”] are often involved in criminal behaviour? Is this a cultural
phenomenon? Or does this relate to other causes? What do you think?

Police Officer (Paul van Musscher): I have been taking classes on
multiculturalism with a Moroccan male teacher. We take this issue seriously.
The person teaching us informed us that the people responsible for violence in
Gouda [a Dutch city] come from the Rif Mountains. They are Berbers. The word Berber
derives from the word ‘barbarian’. And that naturally means they are culturally
somewhat more tempered. They find it easier to live on the streets. You could
say that it is a genetic trait.

Interviewer: Genetic?

Police Officer: That is what he says.

Interviewer: What do you think?

Police Officer: You can see immediately that they share habits that
are culturally different to ours.

Rally held on UN International Day Against Racial Discrimination. Demotix/Hans Knikman. All rights reserved.The relation between the
construct of race and the environment shares a history which can be traced back
to nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe. The imagined
relationship seems however to have remained stubbornly present in today’s Dutch
law enforcement culture. When asked in 2014 to retract his words, Van Musscher
denied any responsibility. “I do not know whether or not there is a
relationship between criminality and genetics. I am a police officer, not a
scientist”. Despite such self-acknowledged ignorance on the politics of race, Van Musscher was recently put in charge of the national police budget for “Diversity and Discrimination”.

The lack of knowledge is certainly
not the only contributor to the widespread racial profiling among Dutch law enforcement
officers. The national chief of police, Gerard Bouman, recently revealed that phrases such as “fucking Muslims” (kutmoslims) and calls for the “burning
of mosques” are frequently overheard in police circles. He warns that “a poison
has started to infiltrate the organisation.” More recently, a retired officer
of Moroccan descent wrote a letter to the municipal government in The Hague, explaining that
“discrimination is much more of a problem in the police than in many companies.
The police have a monopoly on violence and can exercise it in illegitimate
ways.”

Such alarming developments are, however,
not the root cause for racial police violence. I argue instead that such trends
need to be socially and historically contextualised. Racial profiling among
Dutch police forces should be seen as symptomatic and deeply embedded in contemporary
popular attitudes towards those considered as 'non-Dutch'.

From the soil

Silent March for Mitch Henriquez. Demotix/Jaap Arriens. All rights reserved.The very word for a person publically
and institutionally classified as non-Dutch, allochtoon (in Greek literally referring to a person from another
soil) versus autochtoon (autochthon,
in Greek “from the soil itself”), serves as evidence of the still persistent
environmental determinism in Dutch nationalist imaginings. Dutch national identity
is in fact firmly rooted in ‘primordialist’ ideas that the soil shares
specific genetic characteristics. Those imagined belonging to another ‘genetic’
make-up or thought of and seen as ‘culturally’ different continue to be considered
primarily as guests who have to compensate for their lack of rootedness in the
‘Dutch’ soil by strictly adhering to the cultural codes and rules of the land.

A former right-wing MP, now member
of the European Parliament, Marcel de Graaf, argues in a 2014 interview that “Moroccan culture is
inferior to Dutch culture.” Such sentiments are widely echoed by fellow members
of the right-wing PVV Party but also find resonance in less explicitly extreme
forms. A well-discussed example of the normalised practise of racial Othering
is the infamous traditional character of “Black Pete” which not that long ago
received outright condemnation by representatives of the United
Nations. They noted that “many people, especially people of African descent
living in the Netherlands, consider that aspects of Zwarte Piet are rooted in
unacceptable, colonial attitudes that they find racist and offensive.” The
result of the UN intervention was a national backlash against anyone inside and
outside of the Netherlands who even dared to allude to the idea that racism
could exist in the country. Popular responses to the critique soon relapsed
into dismissive comments on popular online forums: “if you
don’t like it here, why don’t you go back”, or “this is not racism, but freedom
of speech.”

These are not incidental examples
but form part of a much wider existing and (worryingly) growing societal trend
of what ‘at best’ should be described as racial Othering. A particularly
damning report
by the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance concluded that the
“settlement of Eastern Europeans in the Netherlands – as well as of Islam and
Muslims – has been portrayed by politicians and media as a threat to Dutch
society.” The report’s suggestions for improvement have largely been ignored or
loathed by Dutch authorities. The question of race and racism in a country, which praises itself
for its liberal values, is naturally a very sensitive issue. In fact, the
political spectrum has recently started to shift so far to the right that you
will find it difficult to find a Dutch person willing to even discuss the very idea.
Indeed, as a Dutch anthropologist has explained, “those that bring up the idea of exclusion are put aside and
labelled as soreheads… Over the last couple of years we have shown ourselves to
be insufficiently capable of coming to terms with structural forms of
inequality and exclusion within our own society.” She continues, noting that “this
is odd considering that we notice the same mechanisms in situations of police
violence in the US.”

Police brutality

100 protesters arrested during unrest in The Hague. Demotix/Geronimo Matulessy. All rights reserved.Meanwhile, however, trends
towards more intense forms of racial profiling run parallel to increasingly more
frequent and violent forms of police repression against minorities. A national news
website counted a daily average of 35 reported instances of police violence.
Information on police brutality is widely said to be opaque which suggests that
the actual number of such cases could be much higher. Other sources show that information requests are often denied, while
investigations are “no longer independently conducted”. A Vice commentary notes that only 0.7 percent of the annual 15,000 reported cases of
police violence gets transferred for official investigation. Empirical research
conducted by the national ombudsman shows that official investigations into police
violence are often ignored as a result of a lack of institutional “self-reflection”: “The first reaction of police leadership to situations of police violence is
often one that attempts to protect the officers involved.” The same report
notes that there is often a feeling of ambiguity among the police over the
legitimacy of police violence. When the researcher confronted an officer by
saying that the police should not hit people in their face, the officer
responded: “But when confronted with football violence, I’ll hit them anywhere
I can.”

Such reckless and lawless
attitudes in combination with common and politically sanctioned practises of
ethnic profiling seem to have led to the death of the unarmed Mitch Henriquez who
was thrown to the floor before being strangled to death. There has been little
response from the ruling political parties to the tragedy. Instead, the mayor
of the city stated repeatedly that “racism exists neither among local nor
national police”. Politicians on the national level were instead quick to focus their
attention on the riots and protests that followed after the death of Henriquez.
Hundreds of people were arrested while MPs and mainstream media outlets
denounced the enraged crowds by labelling them hooligans [relschoppers] and retards [achterlijke
gladiolen
]. The mayor of The Hague, a former Dutch MP, depoliticised the
riots and protests further by blaming warm weather and Ramadan. Indeed, as one
Dutch researcher notes, "these are 'utterances that are shot through with
condescension'. Politicians seem to voluntarily embrace a state of denial, which
characterises previous experiences in London, Paris, or Ferguson, to mention
but a few places on an increasingly growing list of marginalised and
politically enraged minorities".

Even Dutch academics seem to find
it difficult to come to terms with the radicalisation of police violence and
the increasingly visible phenomenon of ethnic profiling. An article written by
academics from the University of Leiden on ethnic profiling instead seems to attempt to trivialise these
issues by arguing that there is no “hard empirical evidence [for ethnic
profiling]” and that “[the] disproportionality [of ethnic profiling]” is a term
open for interpretation. It is perhaps of little surprise that the “Journal for
the Police” [Tijdschrift voor de Politie]
decided to reward the article with an annual prize. The article goes as far as
trivialising the very concept of “ethnic profiling”, which the researchers
argue is of American and British origin; “[it does not seem] productive to
link the term automatically to discrimination without considering the tasks of
police officers on the street.” Law enforcers have themselves however acknowledged that there is a serious problem
with the construct of race among their ranks. Such research also too willingly ignores
the wider societal and historical contexts from which police brutality and
ethnic profiling emerges and proliferates.

Schilderswijk. Flickr/Elvin. Some rights reserved.One should not shy away from the fact
that the killing of Mitch
Henriquez did not occur in a white middle-class neighbourhood but in the
predominantly coloured Schilderswijk, which mainstream media and the
politicians have stereotypically stigmatised as the “Sharia-triangle”. Police
violence is known
to be rampant
in a neighbourhood in which officers enjoy a ‘zero-tolerance’ mandate. A
local TV documentary and a news agency conducted interviews with former police officials who told them that “mouthy
suspects had to be silenced with the fist… We covered each other, files went
missing, local police offices were labelled ‘cowboy bureaus’ etc. We used to
say that we would go on ‘Murk hunting’ [ie. a Dutch contraction of the words ‘Turk’
and ‘Moroccan’]. It is all good fun, everybody laughs, nobody protests…” One of
the former police officials revealed that many officers share the views of the
extreme right-wing PVV and associate with the Party leader’s fanatical call
for “fewer Moroccans".

Police brutality and political responses
from local politicians and national MPs are reflective of a much wider societal
problem which the liberal Dutch population seems very reluctant to engage with.
The murder of Mitch Henriquez should not be seen as an incidental occurrence,
nor should the tragedy be detached from wider societal currents. Dutch society
seems to live in a comfortable shell of denial that condones, tolerates and therefore
legitimises racial profiling, increasing police violence and extreme-right-wing
rhetoric. Rather than confronting the discourse of race and the problem of
racism, Dutch society seems to be more disposed to allowing for a further
escalation of what is already a worryingly dangerous development. What is
urgently needed, therefore, is a thorough and honest public discussion on the
problem of racial Othering in the Netherlands.

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