There is something in every family, of course. There is arguing, fussing, bullying and gossip. But if relations are not too bad, unity is preserved and relatives are spared. Not with the family that calls themselves blue, and no, that’s not KLM, but the Dutch police; 40,000 officers on the street, on horseback and in the office. That family is doing very well; they bully, discriminate, exclude their own flesh and blood and thus chase the black sheep away. And the light brown ones, the yellow ones, the sheep that have a different name, believe differently, love differently and of whom it was thought from the start: do they actually belong?
Filmmakers Maria Mok and Meral Uslu received Monday evening in the blue family (KRO-NCRV) disowned family members in an anonymous hotel room at Schiphol. Whistleblowers, so to speak. A motorcycle cop, a community police officer, inspectors, an assistant public prosecutor, an informant runner. In all, almost two hundred years of experience, all eloquent, vital men and one woman, who think the police work is wonderful, but no longer want to be a police officer. Because they have colleagues who talk in the app group about “cancer people, cunt Africans and pauper allochtonen”. Who during a struggle with a detainee shout: “Get that cunt negro off me.” Making jokes they don’t find funny. Because they hear a signal in every joke.
With name and surname in the picture
One after the other knocks on the hotel door and tells his story in full on screen, by name and by name. The fact that they do and dare says everything about the trust they place in makers Mok and Uslu. Peris Conrad tells of the “baptism of fire” in his first year. Colleagues hung a picture of him in the police academy with ‘monkey in the cage’ underneath. Laugh. Twenty-six years of service later, his “boyhood dream” is finally broken. If his eighteen-year-old son wants to join the police, he will forbid him. Dwight van de Vijver stops as an agent after eighteen years (he becomes a presenter at the EO). He explains perfectly why yelling “cuckoo monkey” or “cunt allochtoon” roar is not just a bit of “letting off steam” or a “release” after a stressful day at work. He says: “So those words were already in your brain, you already found it and then you throw it out.”
Bilal Addou, eleven years with the police, was trained in an ‘immigrant class’. His loyalty is constantly questioned by colleagues. Does he pray? Had they heard him say he thought gays were unclean? Who does he belong to and how ‘blue’ is he really? He is treated as a “terrorist,” he says, and “terrorized” by his superiors. Süleyman Ortaç, 36 years of service, says he does not feel safe with his own organization. Quite a statement for someone who has been involved with organized crime for years. It is obvious that he has a very serious labor dispute. But whether (and what) that has to do with his (Turkish?) background was not clear to me in the fifty minutes that this documentary lasts.
Worse than the humiliation and racism, the door knockers say, is the whitewashing of it. Abuses are toned down and covered up by bosses, and only if there is absolutely no other way, punished with the lightest punishment. After which not the perpetrator, but the person who reported the abuse is transferred. Because who talks who goes.
Chairman Jan Struijs of the Dutch Police Union, who has been in service for thirty-five years, confirms the hardening within the corps. Team chief Margot Snijders, thirty years with the police, also sees the exclusion, the discrimination and the racism. In every police station there is a sign with Article 1 of the Constitution – the prohibition of discrimination. But the police themselves, says lawyer Richard Korver, “wipe his ass with it.”
This documentary will undoubtedly get a tail.