The municipality of Assen is taking measures against the continuing nuisance of a group of young people in the city center. Especially on Koopmansplein it is regularly restless because young people challenge each other, play loud music and drive around with Fatbikes.
The group of young people has been around on Koopmansplein for at least a year. According to the local VVD, many residents feel unsafe in the Stadshart. The party wants to know what it is doing from the municipality to improve safety in the center.
The municipality states that there have been ‘not many incidents’ in the city in the past year. That is not entirely in line with police figures of nuisance and crime. Only in the area around the Koopmansplein did the police pull out more than five hundred times in a year. Usually because of nuisance (175 times), bicycle thieves (86 times) and shoplifting (64 times).
To tackle the nuisance group, Assen wants to accurately map the police and the Public Prosecution Service (OM) who the nuisance perpetrators are. According to the municipality, a first attempt to do so show that most of them do not come from the city.
The municipality further states that the young people ‘do not necessarily come from the asylum seekers’ center’ in the city. The municipality of Assen cannot yet answer the question where they will come from.
After being portrayed who the nuisance perpetrators are, the municipality wants to take further measures against the entire group or individual young people. In the meantime, the municipality and the police have imposed several area bans and issued warnings.
Assen will extend the knife ban, which has been in place since July 2024, by one year. The center of the city has been a security risk area for two years, where the police can search preventively. In the most recent promotion on 6 June, the police seized seven knives. In the meantime, extra attention is being paid to knife use among young people at schools.
The municipality would also like to use more boas against the nuisance, but that is at the expense of other places in the city. Cameras hung in the Gouverneurstuin and the Drostenlaan until October. According to the municipality, the nuisance has fallen sharply there. But there is no plan to hang cameras in the city center again.