 gun and yell, “Police! With every suspicious move, I shoot”.
C) Blood? I take my first aid kit, and I run to the victim to help him.
The correct answer is B. The officer must pull out their gun and yell, “Police! With every suspicious move, I shoot”.
There are no suspicious movements. You arrest the boys. They are searched, one by one. On one boy, you’ll find a gun, and on another, you’ll find a bag of white powder.
(I imagine you, police, immediately notice if the gun is a real- or toy gun. If I can tell the difference, so should you.) What should you do next?
A) You give the boys a fine.
B) This is really bad. The boys must be detained, and you take them to the police station. We can take a look at the gun and drugs. (white powder)
C) I call my colleague. She secures the gun and checks if it is a real one.
The correct answer is, again, B.
It is a toy gun that shoots rubber balls. This could have ended badly. What are you going to do now?
A) I talk to the boys. How did they get this weapon?
B) Oh, if the gun is fake, the boys can just go. Only real weapons are prohibited.
The correct answer is A. Police officers talk to the boys. As it turns out, the blood and drugs were fake too. They were filming a school project. The agents take the toy gun into custody. It looked real from a distance, and that too is prohibited from use in the Netherlands. The parents and school are called. The boys get away with a warning.
If you still want to work for the police in the Netherlands today, you’ll need to get some schooling. It will take you 1,5 years of police academy and internships to become a surveillant, an agent-to-be needs 2 years and 4 months, and to become head agent, it takes you 8 months longer. You’ll need to go back to a training institute 4 times a year, so you be frequently trained while on the job too. Other opportunities to expand your police career involve more study courses in your private time. It is safe to say that every police agent must have had some form of diversity training. Still, you can ask yourself how much impact this has on racial disparities in traffic stops or scenarios, as sketched above. How many implicit and explicit biases remain, even after targeted and intensive training? I don’t accuse officers of being intentionally racist; although this can be true, I doubt the training work because institutional pressures remain intact.
Diversifying the workplace is often seen as another ‘solution’ to the problem of racial profiling, but even the most diverse forces have major problems with it. In America, for example, “…individual black and Latino officers appear to perform very much like their white counterparts.” notes Vitale on page 17 of The End of Policing. And the Dutch Employee Monitor (2016) showed that half of all agents who describe themselves as ‘immigrants’ experience discrimination at work, which often causes them to quit their job. I guess that racial profiling and excessive use of force are often done by a small group of officers, who tend to be male, young and working in high-crime areas. They may find themselves in a culture of machismo that rewards this aggressive policing, formally ánd informally. The police have a special status that comes with the special power of being the sole legitimate users of force, and this too adds to the mindset of “them against us”. The institution’s ultimate purpose of the police has always been that of managing the poor and non-white, rather than generating equity and fair play.
“There’s No Justice; There’s Just Us”Reni Eddo-Lodge, title of the last chapter of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (2017)
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Now imagine that the white powder from our example story was indeed real drugs. The Opium Act prohibits the possession, trade, sale, transportation, manufacture, etc., of the substances covered by the law. Use by itself is not a criminal offence. The Opium Act consists of two lists in the Netherlands. The first describes hard drugs—cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamine, LSD, and heroin. The second depicts soft drugs; hash, weed and 