Video: Women accuse cop of police brutality, racism after violent Utrecht arrest
Two women are accusing a police officer of police brutality after he kicked one and hit the other with his baton during an arrest at a Utrecht shopping center on Monday. The cop also made racist remarks such as: “You don’t belong in this country,” lawyer Anis Boumanjal, who is representing the women, told Nieuwsuur. The women will press charges of assault and attempted aggravated assault.
The incident happened on Monday at the Hoog Catharijne shopping center. Bystanders filmed the incident. The video shows a police officer leading a veiled woman away. A second woman follows behind with a phone in her hands. The officer turns halfway and kicks the second woman. He then strikes the first woman with his baton.
According to the police, police officers responded to an incident involving about 20 people. The police say the officer arrested the woman for insulting and verbally abusing an officer.
The women tell a different story, according to Boumanjal. They say they were having a “discussion” with another woman, and the officer rudely ordered the women to leave. According to the lawyer, the discussion wasn’t “a big deal.” The women have no idea what the police are talking about in their statement about a major incident.
Both women sustained injuries from the incident with the cop and are receiving medical treatment, Boumanjal said. “We’ll have to see what the outcome is.”
Nieuwsuur asked police sociologist Jaap Timmer of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam to review the footage. He said it was difficult to assess how proportionate or disproportionate the violence was. “It certainly doesn’t look good, but we don’t know what the circumstances were or what the officer had to endure beforehand.”
The footage clearly shows that the second woman was filming the officer, but that is allowed and “certainly not grounds” for police brutality, Timmer said. Officers are permitted to use force if someone tries to evade arrest. In the video, the arrested woman appears to be moving away from the officer, but Timmer can’t say whether she was trying to get away.
According to Nine Kooiman of the police union NPB, the officer involved is receiving serious threats. “The team is in enormous shock about the inappropriate aggression being shown to them here,” she said to RTV Utrecht. “There are now keyboard experts all over the place, and officers, including this officer, are being threatened because people think they know what happened.”
Kooiman thinks people should mind their own business. “Officers can always use force in situations that call for it. And whether that was the case here: leave that to the experts.”
The woman the cop hit with a baton was eventually arrested on suspicion of insult. According to the police, she is a 23-year-old woman from De Koog, a village on Texel.
A spokesperson for the police could not comment on the women pressing charges because the investigation is ongoing. The Utrecht police reported on Wednesday that they were taking the case very seriously. “We realize that these images are disturbing and raise questions about racism, among other things.”
