Last year, the police spent about 37 million euros on 800,000 overtime hours, which were mainly used to deploy officers in corona riots and demonstrations, and to enforce the corona measures. Another 7 million euros went to the extra efforts of the Mobile Unit at those events. The police confirm that reporting from newspaper AD, which has seen the annual accounts for 2021. A smaller part of the overtime went to extra security for threatened persons, which was necessary after, among other things, the murder of Peter R. de Vries.
Chief of police Henk van Essen calls the year 2021 in a press release on the annual accounts a ‘year in which the contradictions in society were sometimes considerable’. The curfew riots at the beginning of the year and the series of riots that started in Rotterdam in November are emphatically mentioned. The overtime that officers worked must be made up for, which according to the police will mean that fewer police officers can be deployed in the coming years.
“Classic crime” decreased
The annual report will be officially presented on Wednesday afternoon, but the police already announced that ‘classic crime’, such as robberies and street robberies, decreased again last year. For example, the number of home burglaries fell by 23 percent, to 23,452. A total of 741,111 crimes were registered; 7 percent less than in the previous year. Online crime was more common. That shift “clearly had to do with the corona crisis,” said a police spokesman.
The number of 112 reports increased by 150,000 to 3.2 million; 41 percent of the total number were ‘pocket calls’. This increase was largely due to the increase in the number of reports of nuisance in 2021. That rose by 11 percent to 536,946, mainly because people were at home a lot and nuisance was therefore more noticeable. A quarter of the reports concerned confused people.