Last December, hiphop café De Duivel in Amsterdam had a shoot out where two people were wounded. Four suspects were arrested and the reasons for the violence were not confirmed, but I’m sure it’s all sorted by now.

Daniel Eeuwens, owner of the café, who just sent round a long explanation about how he is trying to reopen his café, is being stonewalled by the local police, although he’s been in talks with the city for weeks. The café was asked to come up with a serious plan to avoid any kind of future incidents, and so the café lawyered up and wrote a serious plan that the cops are now blocking.

The owner is particularly worried about what the cops are saying about his patrons, which is why he sent the letter round. The cops accused the café of sometimes playing gangsta rap and that attracts ‘a specific crowd’, which is code for ‘criminal-like people of the non white persuasion’. But come on, blaming a café for playing a song or two of gangsta rap, as if nobody else does that anywhere else, is not a reason to close a place down, it’s an excuse and a racist one at that.

I know for a fact that De Duivel played anything from old Ice-T tracks to the Jeugd van Tegenwoordig and had a mixed bag of visitors, mostly locals of different age groups, none of which ever made me feel like I was in the wrong place. People were very much chilling and swaying to all the low BPM music and singing along to the Dutch stuff.

Granted, I don’t really want to hang out in places that have shoot outs, but hey, there was a shoot out in front of my door last November, a lower middle class mixed neighbourhood, and I didn’t hear the police making any racist remarks about the neighbourhood.

Here’s some old Osdorp Posse with ‘Where is the cop’.

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