Mayor Eric van Oosterhout has reservations about the VVD’s proposal to designate the station area as a safety risk area and to issue area bans to those causing nuisance. According to him, the plan offers little certainty to prevent weapon-related incidents. He calls the criterion of single weapon incidents too limited to officially designate the area as a risk area and states that the VVD plan is a dead end within the existing approach of the municipality, police and Public Prosecution Service.
According to Van Oosterhout, the solution lies in a broader approach to the problems surrounding safe landers, care groups and the flow of asylum seekers. “It is scandalous that we have been struggling with the problem surrounding safelanders for three years. The dispersal law is not getting off the ground, even though it does offer the real solution,” he says. With regard to expanding the capacity of special investigating officers (BOAs), he does want to scale up, but only carefully and well prepared. Not with steam and boiling water, but step by step, says Van Oosterhout.