1/2 The police are doing everything they can to keep criminals away from the transport sector.
The police are doing everything they can to keep criminals away from the transport sector. They are busy this week visiting transport companies and conducting major traffic checks. Writing tickets or finding drugs is not the most important thing. They mainly want information to stay one step ahead of the criminals.
During the Week against Subversion, the police, customs, tax authorities and seventeen municipalities in East Brabant work together. They want to prevent criminals from abusing legal companies for illegal activities.
“We look out for vehicles without text on them.”
“This can be done, for example, through transport companies,” says Veldhoven mayor Marcel Delhez, chairman of the Undermining Action Council. “We are now collecting information to see exactly how this works. It can happen that fruit is transported with drugs in between.”
Transport companies throughout East Brabant were visited. The police do this with three goals:
- Tackling companies involved in criminal matters.
- Preventing companies from ending up in a criminal network.
- Collect information about the transport companies and their employees.
So tackle and prevent undermining. Information will be collected on Thursday morning with a traffic check at wholesaler Makro in Den Bosch. Officer Bram removes suspicious trucks and vans from the road. “We keep an eye out for vehicles without text on them, which are often interesting vans to check.”
Not much later, Bram sees a white van driving with two men inside. You can’t see which company the van belongs to. Enough reason for an inspection. The driver receives a follow-up sign. In the parking lot of the wholesaler, the occupant details are checked and customs checks what is in the van. They do this, among other things, with a scanner that can see right through trucks and vans. This way they also see hidden spaces.
In this case there is nothing wrong. “People often want to know how many criminals we have already caught, but now we are concerned with the information,” says Delhez. “Which companies are there? What do they transport? Do they really transport that? Which people work there?”
“The drugs world involves billions.”
He has an example: “We visited a transport company that is registered with a number of trucks, but we did not see any trucks. That’s special. Now we are going to find out exactly what that company does and whether it is punishable.”
Brabant is an ideal province for criminals, says Marieke Stuart from the police. This is partly because it is a border province. “Brabant has a good location with connections by water, road, air and rail. Great for our economy, but that also offers opportunities for criminals, and we don’t want that.”
The criminals can still make money too easily and too quickly, Delhez thinks. “The drugs world involves billions, more than the turnover of all Jumbos combined in the Netherlands.” And that turnover was 10.2 billion euros last year. “That is a huge amount, we have to do something about it.”
This week, drugs were found during various actions and people were arrested. The exact results of the actions will not be announced until Friday. But it is already a success for the police, says Stuart.
