Internal police documents: men of color most likely to be victims of police violence

For the first time, the police made an internal investigation regarding who and when they used force. Based on this analysis, the then Minister of Justice and Security, Ferd Grapperhaus, claimed that the police used force "indiscriminately". But research by the investigative journalism platform Follow the Money (FTM) found that police used force primarily against young men of color and drunken clubbers.

It is not unusual for police to be busy in common hotspots such as Leidseplein or the Red Light District in Amsterdam, and to be confronted with drunk people, as 96 of the 421 Dutch hotspots are located in entertainment districts. On average, police had to intervene violently 11 times in these entertainment areas between January 2019 and September 2020, Follow the Money reported.

The comprehensive report on police violence, generated by the collaboration of the judiciary, police and Statistics Netherlands, found that police used force in 0.51 percent of all incidents. Especially on weekends, when there are usually more people on the streets, this percentage quadrupled to 2 percent at night. Police violence occurred mainly in the 96 hotspots in the entertainment districts, highlighting that drug use plays an important role.

Data from the internal police report showed that among Dutch people against whom police used force, about 36 percent have a "non-Western immigrant background," while their share in the total population is 13 percent. Accordingly, this group of people is almost three times more affected by police violence than white Dutch people, reported FTM.

Nevertheless, the conclusion drawn from the analysis was that the effect or factor of immigrant background should be considered "very limited." This is because the overrepresentation could be explained by the combination of young men in an urban setting, and young men in large cities are relatively more likely to be confronted by the police.

However, previous research has found that nearly half of all people who die as a result of police violence have a non-Western background. For example, between 2016 and 2020, about 23 out of 50 people with "a non-Western background" died as a result of police violence. In particular, young people from Antillean or Moroccan backgrounds are twice or three times more likely to be suspected by police, Police & Science reported in 2021, FTM wrote.

Nevertheless, the police has not established a correlation. The police continues to believe that young men in an urban setting are simply an "elevated risk group" and, accordingly, ethnicity is irrelevant to police and is not a selection criterion for stops , wrote the investigative journalism platform