Mayor of Amsterdam: A mistake in the Stop and Frisk plan

A briefing given to police officers about targeted weapons tests in the Amsterdam West District contained inaccuracies that led to errors during preventive searches of people in the area. Mayor Femke Halsema wrote about the situation in a letter to the city council on Monday.An attempt to resume targeted weapons testing, which could stop and search anyone in a designated area, was halted in mid-November due to problems. Among them was a police officer mistakenly conducting a preventive search at a youth center.

The mayor said he relied on a fact-finding investigation into the search when West District police conducted searches in several locations outside the designated security area on November 10 and 11. People in the building and all occupants of his GVB bus were also searched. According to Halsema, these checks “just shouldn’t have been done.” The fact that it happened was due to an inaccuracy in the briefing to the officers who participated in the test at West.

For example, the briefing mentioned several locations outside of the designated safe areas, including where the youth center used to be, which Halsema said was due to “human error.” The briefing also referred to an example of the erroneous procedure of checking everyone in a hospitality facility: “This is one possibility of inspection in a building that is accessible to the public, provided that everyone is checked.” It logically suggested to the implementers that there is.” Halsema stressed that the internal tests were not at all consistent with what the heads of the municipalities, the police and the public prosecutor’s office had in mind during the tests. .

“Furthermore, an erroneous assumption was made during implementation that the checks should be aimed primarily at young people. This is also included, for example, in leaflets distributed to neighborhood teams,” Halsema said. Told. The Dutch Crime and Law Enforcement Research Institute (NSCR), which was an outside observer during the tests, also concluded that young people between the ages of 25 and 30 were disproportionately selected for weapons checks.

A fact-finding concluded that ethnic profiling was not conducted on the date in question. “Researchers did not find that non-white people and men were disproportionately selected for weapons testing,” Halsema said.

The mayor said police and the municipality had spoken to people whose homes had been raided without authorization during checks, and police had apologized to them.

Previous weapons checks in Zuid, Zuidoost and Noord districts were conducted in good order according to administrative agreements.A total of 10 searches were conducted during the trial, and 1,211 persons were searched as part of the programme. A total of 23 weapons were found.