It was actually quite pleasant in Amsterdam-West until twelve o’clock on New Year’s Eve. Nine Kooiman, chairman of the Dutch Police Union, had put on her uniform and walked with police officer Rob and his colleagues. Small groups everywhere on the street, which she said were “very approachable” to the police. Jokes were made back and forth. The police officer asked a mother: ‘Hey, your son is under house arrest, right? Where is it now?’
It was like a switch turned on at noon. The balaclavas went on, the hoodies were pulled over the heads. The small clumps of people clumped together into groups of sixty to a hundred people. Young people, with ten-year-old boys in their wake. In the streets that had been so carefully kept clean by the municipality, household goods suddenly appeared outside and were set on fire. Flames shot up everywhere in the neighborhood. From the same group with which Kooiman had just been chatting nicely, a string was now thrown which exploded next to her feet.
As a trade unionist, Kooiman is in contact with many police colleagues and she has received reports from all over the country. “I’m in an app group for riot police. They saw the same dynamics everywhere.” Everywhere the police and fire brigade and ambulance workers were shot at with fireworks. “Fire arrows were fired at officers, cake boxes were tilted and aimed at officers, shells were thrown at them. Everything that should actually be shot vertically into the air was now fired at us horizontally. I was pelted with fireworks three times.” Officers had to be treated in hospital for burns and cuts. Kooiman had his ears ringing for half an hour from the explosions. With so much violence, she says, it is a miracle that no aid workers have been killed. “I heard from officers who had part of their protective suit melted by the fireworks.”
Machine guns
Confrontations between citizens and the police were filmed on the streets throughout the Netherlands. Out Floradorp, a district in Amsterdam Northa video was released showing a line of riot police being shot at with an incessant volley of arrows. These ‘fireworks machine guns’, a tube from which one arrow comes out after another, can be seen in many videos. This also applies to images from the Schilderswijk in The Haguewhich shows police cars being shot at with flares from all sides. Or in Leidschendam. In the Rotterdam district Vreewijk Emergency workers were pelted with fireworks when they assisted in the resuscitation of a newborn baby. A firearm was shot into the air in the Schuytgraaf district of Arnhem, the deputy mayor told NRC.
The violence is not reserved for one group of Dutch people, says Kooiman. “It is not tied to color.” If she sees a common denominator, it is that “lower social classes are overrepresented.”
Ambushes
The authorities’ conclusion was: it has never been as bad as this year. Two deaths, dozens of injured, 250 arrests, countless fires and fires, overload of the control room, seven 112 reports per minute in Rotterdam-Rijnmond. “The massiveness of it hardly registers,” says union chairman Nine Kooiman. “You are really in a different film when you work for the police. And the rest of the Netherlands does not get to see that film.”
Deputy Chief of Police Wilbert Paulissen told NOS that the police are deliberately being ambushed. “You see that a fire is being deliberately set. Then they assume that the fire brigade will come, which will come and then they go all out with firecrackers. Then the police come and then we are bombarded. Then there is violence and the confrontation follows.”
That’s right, says Nine Kooiman. “It is a cat-and-mouse game with the police and emergency services. But if we are not there, they focus their destructiveness on their own neighborhood.” She saw it herself in Amsterdam West. “If we arrived too late to a report, a fire had already been set on the square and everyone had disappeared.”
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She thinks that a lot of violence has been prevented. In Amsterdam, the police carried out preventive searches in various neighborhoods prior to New Year’s Eve, to remove as many fireworks as possible from circulation. The local police officer worked to de-escalate. “But if people decide to riot, you can’t stop them. They take New Year’s Eve as a license for total anarchy.”
Fireworks ban
She is grateful for the fireworks ban. “If you put explosives in someone’s hands, things will escalate. This is not the panda star in your backyard. This is not the sparkler you wave at a party. These are large explosives.”
There is a good chance that the violence will not suddenly disappear next year, she says. She compares it to the smoking ban, it takes time before people accept it. But by banning fireworks, “at least you take some of the firepower away from the crowd,” she says. She does not listen to protests along the lines of ‘fireworks are a tradition’. “We are not taking away tradition, we are taking away weapons. What we see at New Year’s Eve is a tradition that you don’t want to have.”
As long as fireworks are ubiquitous, the police will always be behind the scenes, she thinks. “The more fire on the street, the more chaos. It is simply too large a group to give such weapons.”
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