Since 9/11 the production of safety has been a great political concern in the Netherlands. There has been a steady call for more effective law and order measures, e.g. more uniforms in the street. This demand has given rise to a pervasive security industry, which consists, among others, of government funded private-security firms and so-called city guards (stadswacht).
Regardless of recent developments, like the closing of eight prisons, Dutch citizens and politicians are still captivated by crime. As expected, recent campaign pledges promised Dutch citizens yet more police officers on the beat. In political discourse safety has, for all intents and purposes, been equated with increased surveillance—in spite of the fact that camera surveillance and more police officers on the streets have hardly made any difference to crime rates, as studies have shown.
The campaign pledges to safeguard public safety and security are not stand-alone promises, but tie in with a larger narrative of European border control and the reduction of a seemingly unrelenting influx of migrants, or “unwanted elements.” In 2006 Juliet Stumpf coined the term “Crimmigration” to highlight the convergence of immigration and criminal law discourse.
As part of the government’s staple tough-on-crime agenda Minister of Security and Justice Ivo Opstelten launched a little while back a crime prevention initiative. The initiative is meant to reduce robberies—although the number of robberies has gone down significantly in the last three years. Nationwide the number of robberies has dropped by 8% this year (from 1386 to 1279), however, Minister Opstelten contends “it is still unacceptably high.”
Government.nl writes about the new initiative
“In the campaign “Ruthless against robberies”, a number of top sportsmen from Rotterdam, including Raily Legito who has played 249 international matches and basketball player Chip Jones speak out firmly against robberies. The campaign commercial clearly shows how differently life works out for an athlete and a robber. The target group is juveniles from Rotterdam in high-risk groups such as school dropouts, the unemployed and juveniles without a basic qualification.
The campaign currently focuses on the municipality of Rotterdam; the aim is to rollout the campaign in other municipalities with high robbery figures as of next year.
The campaign presents the target group juveniles with the question who they want to be: a top sportsperson who has decided to live his life positively or someone who leads the life of a criminal with all that that entails. The top sportsmen act as ambassadors for this campaign, serving as role models for the target group juveniles.”
Ruthless Against Robberies
“Ruthless against robberies” is the latest in a line of expansive regimes of policing. Last year the government introduced the “Get the robber. Get your mobile” campaign in which citizens were urged to “film or photograph robberies with their mobile phones and then call 1-1-2.” The campaign, which in Dutch is dubbed “De pakkans vergroten heb je zelf in de hand” (Increasing the chances of arrest is in your own hands), essentially asks citizens to become auxiliary constables, and participate actively in the production of safety.
Correspondingly, earlier this year the city of Rotterdam conducted a pilot of selective preventive stop-and-search; in other words, the police targeted specific people who fit a certain (undisclosed) physical description in specific neighbourhoods in order to “prevent crime.” The unambiguous message is that society needs to be protected, at all costs, from the risk of violation that criminals present. Accordingly, it is perfectly acceptable, in the name of safety and security, to single out certain individuals who fit a certain profile. To be safe, it follows from these initiatives, is not only to be policed by the State, but also to police others and internalize this panoptic gaze that dictates desirable behaviour and normative appearance.
These policing strategies and campaigns are animated by a cultural mentality that mystifies the interplay between policing strategies, the fear of crime in urban areas, and the racializing policies of the Netherlands. The aforementioned logic of discrimination as a technique of risk-aversion, which is present in many contexts other than law enforcement, produces a worldview that makes room for the justification of the construction (and reconfiguration) of a normative somatechnics. Nikki Sullivan defines somatechnics as
“the construction of the embodied subject through a consideration of various technologies, from the ‘soft’ or invisibilised technologies of power, such as gender and sexuality, through the conscious techniques of discipline involved in performance or sport, through to ‘hard’ technologies such as prosthetics, computers, surgeries and other medical interventions.”
“Ruthless against robberies”, which uses two Black men as role models, exposes not only the socio-political, or canonical, ways in which particular subjects are produced and fixed in certain power structures, but also how these subjects are envisioned to perform.
Apart from its offering an extremely paternalistic “solution” to a complicated and multiaspect issue, this campaign presents a problematic composite image of Black masculinity. In its attempt to offer Black men role models, or, to put it more straightforwardly, discipline the Black body, “Ruthless against robberies” simply ends up reinforcing the negative expectations toward Black men. While the commercial doesn’t explicitly highlight the robber’s racial identity because of the proximity by way of editing it creates a racialized impression: the perpetrator is conflated with the baseball player.
At the end of the day, Black men become associated with criminality and sports. As a result, the body of the Black Allochtoon Other becomes either an object to be avoided, or an object to marvel at. In the commercial the gaze shifts intermittently from one of horror (the robber) to one of entertainment (the baseball player), which suggests that the Black body is either fit for the prison-industrial complex, or the sports-industrial complex. This dynamic puts the Black body and the White Autochtoon Dutch body, the implied victim, in permanent tension.
There is no doubt that perceived difference is central in the production of safety. The centrality of difference has significant implications for the relationship between the police and citizens from minority ethnic communities.
The Biopolitics of Crime
The manufacture of safety through increased state control and the deadly logic of belonging has affected minority ethnic communities adversely. Racial profiling by the police is widespread and not just the expression of some police officers’ racist inclinations: it is, in fact, a symptom of the ethno-racial mythologies about who Allochtoon people are as persons and as a community.
The claimed relationship between race-ethnicity and social problems has led to undisguised racist proposals, ranging from the deportation of convicted criminals of Moroccan descent, and extra alcohol checks for foreign drivers, especially those coming from Poland, to forced abortions for pregnant teenage Black girls.
The police and policing regimes, inherently, aid in the construction of dominant forms of White Autochtoon Dutch national identity. “Ruthless against robberies” is an illustration of the many ways through which ethno-racial mythologies are constructed and disseminated. These techniques of governance are structured on a colonial logic, which promises inclusion in public spaces only when citizens conform to particular modes of being. At the heart of this logic lies the notion of Whiteness as a claim to purity and cleanliness.
Incidentally, the affective and representational value of Whiteness is fully represented in the motto of Rotterdam, which is “schoon, heel en veilig” (clean, whole, and safe). The abstract rationality of the “schoon, heel en veilig” policies has led to the exclusion of the homeless in the city centre (due to a ban on begging in the city centre). In addition, it has led, as mentioned earlier, to the targeting of specific ethno-racial groups. Public space isn’t only shaped by abstract city policies (or the norms of dominant groups), but also by the movement and presence of Othered bodies.
What this “clean, whole, and safe” policy has proven is that public space isn’t for everyone; only certain bodies are safe from being targeted. Safety, wholeness and cleanliness are, thus, strategically produced, and deployed. The salient questions then are, “for whom is safety being produced, and at whose expense?”
Ironically, the policy in Rotterdam against anti-social behaviour has resulted in more cases of police brutality, which prompted the Green Left party to launch a website to document police brutality. In 2010 the party published an anthology of complaints lodged against the Rotterdam police department. Unfortunately, this publication did not herald a decline in police brutality.
In 2007 police officers in Amsterdam manhandled a disabled woman.
Last month DJ The Flexican was allegedly brutally arrested. A bystander filmed the arrest on her cell phone. Evidently, a police officer from the Brabant-Zuid police department didn’t appreciate the scrutiny; he confiscated the phone, and deleted the video. The case is currently under investigation by the Brabant-Noord police department in order to safeguard “neutrality.”
In a highly publicized case in June a police officer from the Rotterdam-Rijnmond police department denied misconduct after a video surfaced in which she was seen kicking a drunk man several times, as her colleague stood and watched, before arresting him. (You can watch the video here.)
Frank Paauw, Chief Constable of Rotterdam-Rijnmond, was quick to defend the police protocol, and acted as though the police could not have possibly done anything wrong. He argued that the man arrested behaved “extremely unpredictable and aggressive.” Shortly after the incident the Dutch judiciary vindicated Paauw by stating that the violence used by the police was “proportional”. They contended that the man had been violent prior to the events captured on film (at least one eye witness has denied this), and that an attempt to use pepper spray had been ineffectual.
Despite asserting that “the police officers had used disproportional violence” national ombudsman Alex Brenninkmeijer will not be carrying out an investigation into the incident—citing “there is not enough reason to suppose an investigation into the Rotterdam incident would clarify events.” At any rate, the police officer received a bouquet from the city council (the man in question received a € 480,- fine).
A cynical person could argue that the rise in policy brutality is a necessary by-product of “safety.” Recent statements by Frank Paauw go a long way towards corroborating this cynicism. In an interview with local news station RTV Rijnmond Paauw stated that,
“The police is not your best friend. [...] The police should be the boss in the street. That means doing things that you would not do to your best friend.”
Moreover, Paauw is no stranger to redrawing the borders of what is “proportional.” Last year he proposed storing the DNA of the entire Dutch population in order to better solve crimes. According to Paauw safety comes at a price, and privacy is subordinate to criminal detection and investigation. He told the Telegraaf
“If you want the make the world safer, you’ve got to pay a price.”
The price to be paid, it seems, is an infringement of privacy, civil rights, the misuse of such information, and the further stigmatization of people of colour.
Minister Ivo Opstelten of Security and Justice came out against the storage of the DNA of the Dutch population. He called the proposed measure “disproportionate.” Despite the many negative reactions mayor of Rotterdam Ahmed Aboutaleb asserted that it was “a useful contribution to the discussion on the limits of use of DNA.”
The control and management of bodies, especially “dangerous Others,” has become due to the fusion of migration policy and crime control and economic strains extremely important. At least for now, the storage of DNA is considered a bad idea. However, I wonder how much longer this will be seen as “disproportionate.”
The Cost of Citizenship
Earlier this year Pieter van Vollenhoven, Queen Beatrix’s brother-in-law, argued for “compulsory contraception for serious drug addicts, psychiatric patients and the mentally handicapped”. Recently, Ira Helsloot, a professor at the university of Nijmegen, argued that society should attach a price tag to human lives so as to make it easier for the government to conduct a cost-utility analyses. Helsloot stated in the Dutch daily De Volkskrant,
“Security is a product, like herring in the market. Quality is not the only thing that counts, but also the price you pay. You can argue how much one Quality-adjusted life year is worth. However, at a certain point you have set the bar, simply because resources are limited. Moreover, a price tag helps to expose how absurd some measures are [...] The debate on the extremely expensive medication for Pompe disease and Fabry, which is currently being conducted, is necessary for the same reason: more people’s lives can be saved if the same amount of Euros if spent on something else.”
These “concerns” are not “isolated” and should be viewed in a larger context of governing techniques that operate on the level of individual bodies (e.g. ethno-racial profiling). Apparently, bodies matter only insofar as they have social worth. Moreover, the “rights” of bodies need safeguarding only insofar as they are not a burden to society.
In this framework the production of safety boils down to risk management of human capital. Anyone who deviates from the established norm, for instance ethnic minority groups and the homeless, are essentially implicit financial risks. The deaths as a result of the money saved are perceived, in a perverse manner, as a gain; “more people’s lives can be saved” by depriving others of care.
Post-colonial theorist Achille Mbembe captured this logic perfectly in his reformulation of biopolitics as ‘‘necropolitics.’’ Mbembe defines necropolitics as the sovereign prerogative to determine not only who may live, but who must die—or, in this case, who must not reproduce.
The production of clean, whole, and safe public spaces centres on ideas of a normative and useful (productive) body. All these different discourses, which work in tandem in the construction of public spaces, play an important role in the manufacture of the normative body. Public spaces shape how certain bodies are read. How bodies are read, in turn, determines their freedom to move, whether they are seen as knowing, or “dangerous,” subjects, and ultimately how much they are worth. The affective economy that the Dutch government and academics seek to create, which effectively rests on the existence of a subordinate class of people, will only further exacerbate general concerns about crime. It is impossible for the Dutch government to reduce the economy of fear (of crime) to a group of certain Others. Sara Ahmed writes in Affective Economies
“The impossibility of reducing hate to a particular body allows hate to circulate in an economic sense, working to differentiate some others from other others, a differentiation that is never “over,” as it awaits for others who have not yet arrived.”