August 28, 2018

Policeman found guilty of hurtful poetry

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 3:56 pm

Never mind kruidnoten already being stocked in a Dutch shop this summer, today the court in Limburg ruled that a policeman has been found guilty of neglect of duty by way of tasteless Sinterklaas poetry.

Usually for Sinterklaas when people give gifts to each other, they also write funny poems about its recipient. However, one man thought it would be laugh to write a hurtful poem about a female colleague, making fun of her failed relationship [they were going to marry, but that didn’t go through] with another colleague.

And it gets worse: he decided to read the poem out loud in front of 140 colleagues dressed as Sinterklaas. The end of the poem basically says ‘now you’re stuck celebrating Christmas on your own’, and then he sang a song about being lonely at Christmas.

The court said this showed zero respect for the female colleague, and has now had 16 hours of ‘furlough’ revoked, which by the way is from the Dutch ‘verlof’, basically meaning time off.

Even if the man disliked the woman and/or the other colleague involved – we don’t know – I don’t understand why he thought this form of humiliation was in any way funny or appropriate.

(Link: nu.nl, Photo by Facemepls, some rights reserved)

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July 19, 2018

Dutch police start using expandable batons

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:58 pm

The Dutch police are learning all about a the expandable or telescopic baton that has the ‘desired effect’, that the shorter, older ones didn’t have. The expandable baton is more modern and more effective, according to pilots carried out in Deventer and Zwolle. A lot of other police forces around the world use them as well.

The expandable baton is being phased in, just like with other weapons, and the cops need to be trained to use them properly. At the end of this year if all goes well, all Dutch cops will be sporting the new baton. Trainer Michael Huijs seen in the video below assures us that although this is a new weapon, the rules on how and when to use violence haven’t changed.

Check this Dutch video for how the Dutch police train their folks on using these new batons:

(Link: politie.nl, Photo of Expandable baton by Dmg ie, some rights reserved)

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July 12, 2018

Dutch university tries new way to catch criminals

Filed under: General,Science by Orangemaster @ 2:16 pm

politie-uniform-2016

As of yesterday, the police, together with Eindhoven University of Technology, started a trial using data correlation to determine the bad behaviour of criminals such as pickpockets more quickly.

In Roermond, Limburg, a city next to both Belgium and Germany that welcomes tens of thousands of visitors from other countries every day for their outlet shopping centre, the city has a major pickpocketing problem. A university team led by data-mining professor Mykola Pechenizkiy is helping the police analyse various databases containing information about shopping centre visitors, including automatically recognised number plates, data collected for marketing purposes, messages on social media and camera images.

Of course, privacy is an important part of this project for both the criminals and visitors. “For this reason, we also work closely with the mayor and public prosecutor, for example. Based on the experiences in the living labs, they can assess the impact on the privacy of citizens and decide whether this is acceptable in order to achieve the desired goals’, explains Marius Monen of the university’s Data Science Centre.

In Rotterdam a while back, a dynamic teenage duo was following pickpockets, taking pictures and calling the cops on them.

(Link: phys.org, Photo: of Dutch police officers politie.nl)

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June 15, 2018

Teenage girls help police catch pickpockets in Rotterdam

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 4:24 pm

Two teenage girls in Rotterdam have quite the hobby: they hang out in the main shopping area, track pickpockets, film them on their phones, and report them to the police.

Both girls, who want to become police officers when they grow up, say that they can easily spot pickpockets because their clothes are usually ‘one year out of style’. The dynamic duo work together with a police officer who goes through their footage and presents them to colleagues.

Not only do the girls want to become police officers later on, but they say that their dream would be to set up a livestream to follow the activities of pickpockets.

(Link: nu.nl, Photo by Facemepls, some rights reserved)

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July 28, 2017

Visit the Netherlands’ smallest police station

Filed under: Architecture,History by Orangemaster @ 5:36 pm

Sloten-politie

The smallest police station in the Netherlands is in Sloten, a 10th century village that today remains the oldest part of Amsterdam. Sloten was eventually integrated into Amsterdam in the 20th century and is now part of Amsterdam’s Nieuw-West district.

Built in 1866 the station is apparently the source of some great stories. Until about 1965, constable Freek Raat would let the locals sleep off their hangovers in the station’s 4m2 cell. Even local youth that caused trouble were locked up for a few hours to teach them a lesson.

These days, the small station has been empty and slowly falling in disrepair since 2015. The City Restoration company and Sloten residents want to fix up, which is why they have set up some crowdfunding and as I write this, they have reached 88% of their 50,000 euro goal. Even though the deadline of 1 July has gone by according to the video, it could easily be a flexbile date.

Although the video is in Dutch, it’s about taking a virtual tour. The red fire brigade pole outside the station is said to be the only one left in the country. The goal would be to put a tourist office and shop there with local honey, slippers and what not. The flag of Sloten, which itself means ‘locks’, features golden ones and a cow or some say an ox, however not referring to neighbouring Osdorp (roughly Ox Town). In fact, Osdorp is actually derived from the name Oostdorp (East town) having to do with the fact that way back in the day Osdorp and possibly Sloten were culturally influenced by Haarlem, about 10 km further west, rather than Amsterdam.

(Links and photo: mijnstadsherstel.nl, Oud Osdorp)

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May 20, 2017

Policeman tracks ‘unsuspecting’ bike thief

Filed under: Automobiles,Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 8:34 pm

Recently a policeman in Leiden was tracking a stolen bicycle that appeared to be very close to where he was driving in his cop van. He followed it around because dispatch told him that the bicycle was nearby, tracking it using a GPS signal, as it was a bicycle cops use to lure bike thieves in order to catch them, a ‘bait bike’.

Then he spotted another van that possibly had the stolen bike in it, followed it, and stopped it. However, once the van pulled over, the policeman figured out that the stolen bike was in the back of the police van he was driving, and promptly became the joke of the day at the police station.

The policeman in question usually bikes on the job, but on this day, he decided to use a van. While he was driving, dispatch told him about the stolen bike, but then they didn’t seem to know it was in the back of the van in the first place.

(Link:rtlnieuws.nl, Photo by Facemepls, some rights reserved)

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January 15, 2017

Police uniforms delivered unsafely to employees

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 8:20 pm

In 2016, some 41 packages with police uniforms were delivered to the wrong people, possibly falling into the wrong hands as well. And Dutch police union APNV are calling this regular occurrence “the tip of the iceberg”.

A few days ago, a man who had quit the force came home to find a package on his doorstep from the police: parts of a police uniform, a package he was never supposed to have ‘received’ in the place. Received is a big word, because the package was left in front of the door in plain view.

Sloppy delivery, you say? For sure. And many of the uniforms are delivered to the neighbours instead or next to people’s dustbins.

Last November around Amsterdam there was a robbery involving criminals impersonating the police wearing actual police uniforms. Geez, I wonder how the baddies got their hands on the uniforms!

The police union wants to stop this type of unsafe delivery and get the police to pick up their uniforms at a police station, but the police claim say it’s too expensive in terms of logistics and personnel costs.

I had a casual talk with a criminologist yesterday who was worried about the police’s image in the media. I wonder if he realised how unbelievable ridiculous the police comes off in this country sometimes.

(Link: nhnieuws, Photo by Facemepls, some rights reserved)

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December 30, 2016

Branko’s favourite postings of 2016

Filed under: Bicycles,Food & Drink,General,History by Orangemaster @ 1:30 pm

It’s that time of year again where we look back and tell you about some of the things we wrote about, and this year we had one clear theme that stood out and that, sadly, was ‘tastelessness’.

First the weird junk food combos:

Spring: the discodel

Summer: frikandel ice cream

Winter: smoked sausage and kroket

Dear Dutch snack bars, please follow our neighbouring countries and sell halloumi, and stop mixing crap already.

Next up, we have a tasteless escape room with Anne Frank as a theme.

The entire year saw some tasteless bashing of Ukraine. What did Ukraine ever do to us? Oh yeah, they gave back stolen Dutch paintings to a museum to show how classy they are.

As well, we found out in 2016 that supermarkets sell fertilised eggs, chicks prove it, we saw a food bank snub the poor over a Facebook like and had a good laugh at this organic fries truck stuck at a junk food chain drive.

And then to move towards some more classy bits, here’s the bicycle tunnel built in a single weekend in Utrecht, police training eagles to attack drones and a woman as the world’s first ever Professor of Fatherhood.

To finish off, here’s a story that went from classy to tasteless, an elderly woman sews bags from abandoned umbrellas, but then a few months later is pushed off her mobility scooter and robbed of her gold chain.

We’ll leave it at that, thanks for all your comments, and a reminder that next year is our 10th year anniversary in February, so I guess we should think about doing something special.

Happy New Year!

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September 11, 2016

The eel riots of 1886 ended with 26 people and 1 eel dead

Filed under: Animals,History by Branko Collin @ 8:30 pm

In the wake of the 1886 Eel Riots in Amsterdam, Dutch newspapers filled their columns with reports about the event, but it was French magazine l’Illustration that came out with these drawings by M. de Haenen 10 days later.

eel-riots-1886-m-de-haenen

eel-riots-1886-2-m-de-haenen

Fait sur place, these illustrations tell the story of the Palingoproer (eel riots), the bloodiest case of Dutch police brutality in the 19th century.

On Sunday 25 July 1886 a great mass of people gathered on the Lindengracht in Amsterdam to watch a cruel spectacle. Fish sellers had tied a rope between numbers 184 and 119 across what was then still a canal and a live eel had been tied to that rope. Men in small boats had to try and pull the eel from the rope—the winner would get the princely sum of 6 guilders, almost a week’s wages. This sport was called palingtrekken (eel pulling) and by that time already outlawed.

Four officers from nearby police station Noordermarkt decided to put a halt to the spectacle. They entered one of the houses to which the rope was tied and used a pocket knife to cut down the rope. Apparently the rope hit one of the spectators who started thwacking the police with his umbrella as soon as they left the building. Fast forward a couple of hours and a full blown riot was going on with police using their sabres and rioters throwing pavers.

Nightfall came and a drizzle helped to cool tempers. The next day, however, rioters stormed the police station which led to the army getting out their guns. As soon as the smoke had cleared (smokeless powder had only been invented two years earlier and was being introduced slowly to European armies), 26 rioters lay dead and observers (reporters, essayists, historians) started to explain what it was that just had happened.

Right-wing rags Algemeen Handelsblad and NRC, and the mayor of Amsterdam, tried to blame the socialists for being the instigators, but the public prosecutor thought that conclusion was preposterous—royalist inhabitants of the nearby Willemsstraat had even thrown red and black flags into the canal that the socialists had quickly brought to the scene of the riots.

Two thousands rioters were given prison sentences, police officers were treated to cigars and in 1913 the eel that involuntarily started it all showed up at an auction where it was sold for 1,75 guilders and was never seen again.

(Images: VKTV.nl / M. de Haenen)

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August 28, 2016

Utrecht building’s warped design scares locals

Filed under: Architecture,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:03 pm

A new building in Utrecht, adjacent to the Hoog Catharijne shopping mall, is getting strange reactions from locals. Passers-by recently called the police claiming the building looked like it was about to crumble, and the police apparently cordoned off the area.

The cops then checked with the builders and found out the bulging front is part of the design, as shown in this slideshow or in this picture.

Residents were only able to see the cement parts of the building recently as some scaffolding was removed. Utrecht has one extra story to tell about their city centre now.

(Link: nos.nl, Photo of Hoog Catharijne by Jeroen Bosman, some rights reserved)

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