NOS
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NOS News•today, 19:00
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Remco Andringa
editor Police and Justice
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Remco Andringa
editor Police and Justice
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“The police cannot handle your case now. Other crimes will be given priority.” That is how it was stated in the letter that Shedeen Rodrigo Rama received from Rotterdam, exactly one week after her report of identity fraud.
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She is one of the many people for whom the police have not been able to free up time in recent years. Because, the police wrote: “A lot of new cases come in every day. We cannot tackle them all. Choices are made together with the Public Prosecution Service.”
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Last year, police set aside more than 60,000 cases without investigation. Sometimes because they were deemed to have no chance in advance, sometimes because the police simply did not have the capacity. The number of cases that the police stopped in advance has more than doubled since 2018.
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Too few leads
Rodrigo Rama reported the theft of her DigiD login code in 2019. The fact that the police did not have time to investigate this had unpleasant consequences, according to her: she had to go to court on her own to try to prove that her digital signature had been used by someone else.
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The declaration of Rotterdam student Koen Deelen was also not followed up. At the end of last year, he made a report of assault in traffic. “Someone thought I raised a middle finger, which I didn’t. The man opened my car door, right in the center of Rotterdam and dealt blows.”
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Deelen made an appointment with the police to file a report; a few days later he was able to go to the office. “Then they said: we’re busy, we don’t know if we’ll get around to it.” He then received a letter stating that there were too few leads to consider the case. Deelen accepted his fate: he would never hear anything about his declaration again.
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He has had a few sleepless nights, he says. “I am a law student myself. I have faith in our legal system. You think: they will pick up an assault. If that turns out not to be the case, you feel powerless. Why don’t the police get enough money to deal with these kinds of cases? to solve?”
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‘Always a matter of choice’
The police say they always have to operate in a context of staff shortages. There are simply more crimes than the police will ever be able to investigate. Last year there were more than 750,000 in total.
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“Confidence in the police in the Netherlands is very high,” says Hanneke Ekelmans, a member of the National Police Force Command. “But that trust can be dented after filing a report, I am aware of that. That is why we always have to explain why we do things and why we sometimes cannot do things.”
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Because the police will continue to struggle with personnel problems in the coming years, alternative ways of handling cases are being looked at. For example, by victims of fraud to claim damage yourself to use the perpetrators or neighborhood mediation in quarrels and nuisance.
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Little consolation for victims: the police often keep the option open that an investigation will still be conducted at some point. So it was stated in the letter to Shedeen Rodrigo Rama: “We will keep your case in our records. If we decide to investigate your case at a later time, we will let you know.”
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In Rotterdam, student Koen Deelen stumbled upon the man who had assaulted him a few weeks after the incident. He immediately called the police. He didn’t go out with bells and whistles, which Deelen can understand. They promised to call him back within 24 hours. “But I never heard anything again.”
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