The police in the Northern Netherlands had to disappoint more than 4,200 people in Drenthe, Groningen and Friesland last year. Their reports have been set aside or have not been investigated at all. “But filing a report remains important,” said spokesperson Anne Carlijn Kok.
The police in the Northern Netherlands understand that these people are disappointed. Kok: ,, As the police, we naturally want to deal with all reports and resolve all issues that arise from them. Unfortunately, that is not possible due to various factors.”
To set priorities
According to Kok, police work has always been a matter of making compelling choices, setting priorities and distributing scarcity. All reports are assessed by the police on the basis of the seriousness of the crime and/or the probability of identifying suspects.
Kok reports that in the Northern Netherlands there are 659 reports that the police saw last year as not likely to be prosecuted. Furthermore, there are still 3573 cases that are not investigated further, simply because the police do not have the people for it. According to Kok, the Public Prosecution Service is always involved in these decisions.
“But it remains very important to report, even of less promising cases,” says the Northern police spokesperson. “Suppose someone reports something that five others have also reported at that time. Then that can still be a reason for the police and the Public Prosecution Service to get started with it.”
750,000 crimes reported nationally last year
In total, the police in the Netherlands set aside more than 60,000 cases without investigation in 2021. The number of cases that the police stopped in advance has more than doubled since 2018. Last year, 750,000 crimes were reported to the police for investigation nationwide.
Hanneke Ekelmans, member of the police force management team of the National Police, told NOS: “Confidence in the police in the Netherlands is very high. But that trust can be dented after filing a report, I am aware of that. That’s why we always have to explain why we do things and why we sometimes can’t do things.”
The police do not count on having more officers in the near future and therefore being able to pick up more reports, such as smaller cases such as bicycle theft. For some time now, experiments have been done with alternative ways of doing business. For example, the police let victims of fraud, for example, recover the damage themselves from the perpetrators. Neighborhood mediation is also used in quarrels and (noise) nuisance.