Inverted justice

The blogosphere has been pretty good covering the sentencing of Fortuyn's killer, who was condemned to a ridiculous 12-year sentence. Now the appeals are beginning to roll in both from the prosecutors as well as from the defense. There was a big outcry in the Netherlands over the light sentence handed out to Volkert van der Graaf, which even led to one of the judges receiving a bullet in the mail. The Dutch judiciary has never been known for handing out particularly tough sentences, as evidenced in recent cases. Moreover, the authorities are all but capitulating to criminals.

The appeal by the defense in this case is a real tear-jerker. The defense attorneys argue that the judges did not take into account the "harsh conditions" under which murderer van der Graaf had been kept initially. Moreover, they say, they disregarded the statements made by several politicians about murderer van der Graaf. Poor baby.

Meanwhile in the inverted world of Dutch justice, a jeweler is faced with a demand for a two-year prison sentence because he shot and killed one burglar, and wounded another. The public prosecutor claims it's a case of manslaughter, as the jeweler refused to help the scum who were trying to rob him after shooting them. And he also kicked one of them (hard, they add) in the head. And to make matters completely unbearable, the gun he committed his crime with was of course illegal.

It's outrageous that law-abiding citizens face jail time for protecting their property. If more burglars were faced with the threat of having their brains blown out, they might decide to take up a less risky profession. The only silver lining is that even if the jeweler is convicted to the full two years, he won't have to spend very long in prison. But every day that he does is an outrage in itself. Meanwhile real criminals, like Pim Fortuyn's murderer, are treated with preposterous lenience.

Mickey Kaus (no permalinks?) pointed out the following:

Among the lessons the twentieth century teaches us, one is surely that assassinations work -- maybe not in the long-term (centuries), but in the medium term (decades). You're not supposed to say this. It's a bit like admitting that most great popular music is made on drugs. But Oswald, Sirhan, Ray, Amir, van der Graaf -- name five other men who have done more to alter the course of history (for better or, in this case, worse) in their lifetimes. You'd think the Dutch judges would recognize this and adjust the punitive calculus accordingly. Instead, they've made an offer many ineffectual-yet-earnest activists may find hard to refuse.

This is exactly the point. If you do want to commit murder, do it in the Netherlands. If the reason is important enough for you, then spending 12 years in prison may not be such a bad deal. And if you can convince psychiatrists that you're actually nuts, you can get off even more easily. It's a ridiculous and dangerous position for a country to be in, but somehow I suspect it's not going to improve any time soon.

Crime and Dutch punishment

Having established that the price to pay for murder is relatively low in the Netherlands, we now get another example of how utterly ludicrous Dutch sentencing has become. Six men between the ages of 18 and 28 have been convicted of attempted murder, two others of public violence and causing premeditated grievous bodily harm. On the 10th of September 2002, the group of masked men attacked two other men with truncheons and a machete causing serious injuries. It was supposedly a revenge attack for their victims supposedly hitting one of the group, but they ended up attacking the wrong men. In any case, it's a pretty gruesome case of wanton violence, and they have been rightfully convicted of attempted murder.

So what's the punishment for attempted murder? If murder only gets you 8 to 12 years, what's an appropriate level of punishment for attempted murder? Hang on to your seats: 30 months, of which six months are on probation. So effectively the longest amount of time these thugs will serve in prison is 24 months, probably less on good behavior. They tried to KILL SOMEONE for crying out loud!

I think I'll go bang my head against a concrete wall for a while.

The price of murder

The way in which serious criminals are punished in the Netherlands verges on the absurd. This is not something new as there is a general failure, and indeed in some cases unwillingness of the criminal justice system to go after criminals. Even then they are caught, tried and convicted, the punishment meted out is ridiculous. One recent instance is the murder of a four year old child, known as the Girl from Nulde, named after the beach where her head was found. She was beaten to death by her stepfather while her mother looked on. They then cut her up into small pieces and tried to get rid of them at various places throughout the country. A morbid jig-saw puzzle finally allowed forensic experts to reconstruct what happened.

So what's the punishment for this crime? The mother is sentenced to eight years in prison, while the stepfather gets twelve. The prosecutor had demanded fifteen. Of course, this is only the nominal sentence. On good behavior, they're likely to leave prison after three-quarters of their term has been fulfilled. The reason why the sentence is so light is because of extensive psychological and psychiatric reports which established the various mental shortcomings of both murderers. The mother was very dependent, lacked emotional independence and was conflict averse. The stepfather suffers from a severe form of paranoia. In his case, the court also imposed on him what's known as "tbs," which is psychological treatment after the sentence has been served. If he can convince the therapists that he's sane enough, he'll be free after his jail sentence.

I will admit that people who beat a 4 year old girl to death are insane and indeed evil. But once you start giving shorter sentences to people because they commit acts which are intrinsically deranged, then virtually any murderer will be able to get a reduced sentence. And that's all too common here in the Netherlands. It does lead to an interesting calculation if you're sufficiently bloody-minded but capable of rational thought. If you want to commit murder, the Netherlands may not be such a bad place to do it. Make the murder as gruesome as possible, get yourself certified as insane and spend six to eight years in prison for it. If you hate someone enough to kill him, the logic becomes disquietingly compelling.

The death penalty would have been more appropriate in this case. Although there is absolutely no chance that the death penalty will be reintroduced here, public opinion polls show significant (though not majority) support for it. And cases where murderers get away with such light sentences are stoking the fires of discontent. There is a big gap between the views of the man on the street and the prevailing practices of the criminal justice system. And with sentences like these, the gap is only growing.

Street gangs of Amsterdam-West

The area known as Amsterdam-West is one of the parts of town where street crime is a big problem. The street gangs have an interminable history of both petty as well as more serious crime. The situation is not as bad as in some of the more notorious inner city areas of the US, but living in Amsterdam-West is not exactly a pleasant experience. The Dutch daily Parool has a summary of a report (pdf) on the issue, available only in Dutch at the moment. The author, Frank van Gemert, writes that he intends to publish articles in English as well on his research into one particular street gang, the Molenpleingroup, named after a square in that part of town.

It makes for extremely depressing reading. There's a hard core of 24 gang members and they're about 18 years old, and there's a secondary group of about 40 to 50 followers. The hard core members have been involved with the police on average 33 times per person, while one of them managed to chalk up no fewer than 202 brushes with the law. They spend their time hanging around on the streets, uneducated, unemployed and completely wrapped up in their group identity. The gang forms their only frame of reference, and any outside influences are met with hostility and suspicion. Not only do they commit many crimes on outsiders, they're also perfectly happy to turn on their own. One example is a policeman stopping two boys riding a moped without a helmet and license plate. Other gang members used to opportunity to steal the moped from under the nose of the policeman and the putative owner. The policeman only managed to detain the driver by threatening him with pepper spray.

The report goes also into the details of group identity and dynamics. The report describes the siege mentality of "us against them," groupthink, how they create their own reality and version of the "truth," their complete refusal to accept any responsbility for their acts: it's all somebody else's fault, and by blaming the authorities for not giving them something to do or aspire to they don't have to accept responsbility. The report also points out that they're incapable of even listening to opposing points of view, because they're used to winning arguments by shouting others down.

A recurring theme is the inability of the law enforcement authorities and the criminal justice system to deal with the gangs. The identities of the group members are well known, and many are arrested on a regular basis. The report states on page 60:

A boy who ends up at the police station for some infraction of the law almost always will know the names of the others who were involved. To name them however would be treason and the rule is that the boys keep their mouths shut at the policestation. They've learned that often they'll be back out on the streets in a few hours. No matter how clear the evidence may be against them, the boys deny their involvement and cooperate as little as possible with the interrogation.

There's also a description of how the gang targets the "supervisory teams," who are not police officers, but work with them to try to contain violence. They're local people from the neighborhood and part of the community. When one of them admonished a gang member for his behavior, he was head-butted. So he filed a report with the police. The next weekend he was going for a night out on the Leidseplein, which is at the heart of the entertainment district of Amsterdam. A reception committee of gang members awaited him; they beat him up and threw him into a canal. The police quickly arrived on the scene and arrested the gang members. The report says, "A short time later they were sent home, even though the charges against them were of attempted murder and the gang members were well known."

The report also tries to address how to deal effectively with such gangs, but it is very much from a perspective of trying to reform the gang members and make them useful members of society again. But this is not a societal problem, it is a clear failure of the criminal justice system. The authorities know who the gang members are, they arrest them frequently for various crimes, they have evidence against them and yet they're still out on the streets. Locking them up would seem an obvious idea, but it does not appear to be on the menu when searching for a solution. Throwing them into prison is not going to reform them, but at least it will prevent them from committing further crimes. Protecting society against these serial offenders would be the main benefit of incarcerating them. The laws that would allow this are mostly there, but they're not being applied. One change that would make locking them up more effective is to incarcerate offenders for longer periods of time as they commit more crimes. It's unreasonable to throw somebody in jail for years on account a small act of petty vandalism, but by the time he's arrested for the third, fourth or tenth time, I have no problem with removing him from circulation for exponentially increasing periods of time. It would keep society safe from these incorrigible deviants, allow law-abiding citizens to take back the streets and remove negative role models for new generations of youths to follow. Right now young kids in those neighborhoods grow up in an environment where they see how their elders get away with openly flouting the law. In their eyes, no ill consequences come of breaking the law and in some cases actually can bring in a lot of money. They do not perceive that a life of crime leads them to marginalize themselves in society.

There is one final twist to this story which I have not mentioned so far, because it is not strictly relevant to the above. The gang, like many others, consists of Moroccan immigrants or immigrants' children. This adds another explosive dimension to the problem of the street gangs, as their highly visible criminal profile reflects poorly on the entire immigrant community. Such gangs would exist even in the absence of immigration if law enforcement would be as broken as it is now. It's not so much an immigration problem, as it is a law enforcement problem. The relevance of the ethnic origin does come into play when you look at secondary effects. To maintain their group identity, they fall back on their imported culture. The enemy, the evil people responsible for their current disenfranchised state are the Jews. The gang members latch on to anything that puts them into as much conflict as possible with "respectable society," and thus the gangs become a hotbed of anti-semitic, anti-western Islamofascist sloganeering and proseletyzing. It's not a big jump for such violent and inveterate criminals to be recruited by a bit of clever manipulation into full violent Islamofascist mold of anti-western terrorism. And that's another reason why we need a good dose of Guiliani-style zero tolerance policing to stamp out these gangs, quite apart from the general issue of maintaining public safety.

Capitulating to criminals

After the defeatist comments of the Amsterdam police chief about crime, we now get a report from the Scientific Council for Government Policy on crime. Their shocking advice: serious crimes should always be prosecuted. Only if it is in the public interest not to prosecute, should prosecution be foregone. Of course, this means that right now, not all serious crime is prosecuted as a matter of course. The Council says that especially in serious violent crimes prosecution should always take place. Makes you wonder what the policy is right now.

The Council furthermore points out that the Dutch police is ineffective compared to the German police. No further Europe-wide comparison were given in the newspaper article, and the report itself is not online (yet?) at the Council's site. Other salient points: in the Netherlands, there is no reaction from the justice system to even serious crimes. "That raises questions about the internal efficacy of the police." The Council recommends hiring more judges and prosecutors.

But the Council shows the same defeatism as the Amsterdam police chief. Crime is "policy-resistant, the goal of stopping or reducing crime appears to be too ambitious." That's why the Council opposes tougher sentences. Holy legal mazes! Do you really have to be a social scientist to think that locking up people for long periods of time is not going to reduce crime? While they're in prison repeat offenders are not very likely to be committing crimes on the street, are they? Three strikes and you're out sounds like a good policy to me. But getting there is going to be hard; this is the country where a "life" sentence means you're out in 18 years (if not sooner; I'm trying to find hard data on that). Life sentences are rare though. Often murderers get "long" sentences of 10-15 years, which gets them out in 2/3rds of the time.

What would have happened to New York City if Rudy Giuliani had had the same mindset? Both the police and the policy makers have capitulated to crime. By shrugging their shoulders and saying it can't be affected by policy anyway, they shirk their responsibility and condemn the citizens to more crime.

New initiatives in law enforcement

I have blogged quite a bit about the sad state of law enforcement in the Netherlands, and here's another twist to add to it. The police chief of the Amsterdam-Amstelland region J. van Riessen has said that people should only be entitled to police assistance if they've demonstrably tried to prevent the crime they have become the victim of. He wonders, "does a citizen have a right to an investigation after a burglary if his house was insufficiently protected?" He answers his own question in the negative. "As a government, you can force people to protect their houses. For instance through building permits, so that all houses end up secure to a certain degree." He thinks the police should only start to track down criminals if towns, building corporations (usually pension funds who build aparments and then let them) or citizens have done everything possible to prevent crime.

So next time you're the vicitim of a crime, the police will first start to investigate you to see if you've done enough to prevent the crime. I find this disturbing. The main reason for giving the state as much power as it has is that it will act as the enforcer of the democratically enacted laws. That is the police's sole function, and it's failing miserably in that function over here. By saddling victims of crime with the burden of proof to show that they are entitled to police help it's making a mockery of contract between the people and the police. It's really scary that someone in as senior a position as this would entertain such notions and air them publicly.

For all that, I do feel that citizens do have a responsibility to protect themselves, and do all in their power to defend themselves. Outsourcing all responsibility for your own safety to the state is an abdication of your own duties as a citizen, yet the dependency culture of many European countries has driven many people to do just that. But even with that proviso, it's not acceptable for a police chief even to suggest what van Riessen did.

As a coda, van Riessen also proves defeatist. He also said that the impact of laws, the efforts of police and the judiciary on crime are "marginal, really marginal." More cops on the beat, more prisons or more money for judges will not lead to a substantial reduction in crime in the Netherlands. It's not clear what in his opinion will reduce crime. And he's chief of police in Amsterdam. Yikes.

Guns and crime in the Netherlands

Yesterday saw the publication of a report (PDF) by the Dutch Justice Department on guns and gun crime. (There's an English summary on page 173). It has been summarized in the newsmedia, with the key headlines being that it's easy for criminals to buy guns. For 250 euros you can get a basic gun. The most popular is the Browning Highpower while Glocks and Berettas are popular too. The more refined criminals pay 1500 euros for an honest-to-goodness Smith and Wesson. Machine guns start at 1900 euros, and hand grenades can be had for 7 euros a piece.

The total number of illegal firearms is estimated to be between 85,000 and 120,000 depending on various assumptions on circulation speed and extrapolations from the numbers of confiscated arms. It's also estimated that up to 20,000 firearms trade hands each year. Most weapons are single-use. The criminals get rid of the weapon once's it been fired. In some cases, they sell it on to clueless newbie criminals.

By European standards, it's easy to get a gun legally in the Netherlands. The requirements are that you have to have been a member of a shooting club for a year, be 18 years or older, prove that you can handle firearms safely, have enough shots to your name and you obviously can't have a criminal record. The actual procedure for buying a gun is arcane and requires approval from the shooting club and the police. You must keep the gun in a safe in your home (so it's no use for self-defense), you're only allowed to transport it to and from the shooting club, and the police will come inspect your home at least once a year to check on how you're storing the gun. There are about 80,000 people with a gun license in the Netherlands.

This report focuses almost exclusively on illegal gun ownership. It makes no mention of how many legal guns were used in committing crimes. The report does point out that going the legal route of obtaining a gun makes little sense for criminals, since it's long and cumbersome while they can get guns easily anyway in the illegal circuit. If there had been many legal guns used, I suspect it would have been mentioned.

The number of gun crimes has been relatively constant in the three years that the report covers (1998-2000). There have been 30 crimes with firearms committed per 100,000 inhabitants. There are huge regional variations. In Amsterdam the rate was 72 per 100,000 people, while in the rural provinces of Drenthe and Zeeland the rates were 14 and 13 respectively. The big cities have much higher crime rates than rural areas, so the higher incidence of gun crimes is no surprise.

How does this compare to America? The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports provide the answer. The UCR keeps track of gun use in three kinds of crime: murder, robbery and aggravated assault. There are 5.6 murders per 100,000 people in the US (page 19 of the linked PDF) with 63.4% involving firearms (table 2.9, page 23). Robberies run at 148.5 per 100,000 (p.32) with 42.0% involving guns (table 2.22, p.35). Aggravated assault occurs at a rate of 318.5 (p.36) with 18.3% gun use (table 2.24, p.38). This means that gun-related crime in the US runs at 124 per 100,000 people.

This is substantially higher than the 30 reported for the Netherlands, although the 72 rate in Amsterdam comes rather closer. But this is not the whole story. Does lower criminal gun ownership translate to lower crime rates overall? Looking at the FBI data in table 1 on page 64, the violent crime rate in the US was 504.4 per 100,000 inhabitants, while property crime ran at 3656.1 per 100,000 inhabitants. The Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics has crime numbers online, but not the crime rate. The table shows 101,143 violent crimes and 919,262 property crimes in 2001. With a population of 16,171,520 (September 2002), this works out as 625.4 violent crimes per 100,000 people and 5684.4 proprety crimes. Or, to put it differently, the violent crime rate in the Netherlands in 24% higher than in the US, and the property crime rate is 55% higher.

More guns, less crime. What a surprise.

The dangers of self-defense

Defending yourself can be a dangerous proposition in the Netherlands. The preferred way of dealing with crime is to leave it to the professionals. If they bother to show up, or even if they do show up eventually, they may decide that things like burglaries are just not worth investigating. But apparently investigating and prosecuting people who do defend themselves is something that is considered worthy of the state's time. The owner and the manager of a supermarket in Amsterdam chased a robber, who'd threatened the cashier with a knife and made off with 500 euros worth of loot. They finally caught him in a park, and subdued him. Forcefully. In the tussle, the robbered suffered a broken nose. And then he filed a report with the police (who had arrested him by then) about the abuse he'd been subjected to. The owner and the manager of the supermarket are each being charged with the Dutch equivalent of causing grievous bodily harm. The prosecutor's office says they used "excessive force" in subduing the criminal.

With the damage being limited to a broken nose on the part of the criminal, I am having a hard time seeing this as excessive force. Perhaps the broken nose may not have been necessary. I don't know, not having been there to witness it. I do worry about the chilling effect of coming down hard on self-defense in these matters. Defending oneself is not risk-free in the first place, but having the additional discouragement of being treated yourself as a criminal if you do manage to defend yourself successfully will serve to encourage criminals.

Oh, if you're wondering how murderers are treated here, read this.

Craven criminal-coddling catering

Sometimes I wonder whether the reality I see here in the Netherlands is distorted. I've tried to have my head examined to see if there's a giant distorting lens attached to my perceptive faculties. That came up negative, so I have to conclude that either the medical community in this country is part of the Conspiracy, or that this place is really utterly grotesque and surreal. Please step over here, and behold the Low Countries through the looking glass.

In recent news, we've heard that the police won't even bother to investigate burglaries anymore, but in order to maintain law and order, you will now be subject to compulsory searches for no other reason than being in a certain area at a certain time. And if you happen to be one of the car-owning class (which puts you in the Highly Suspect category), the government has plans to keep track of your whereabouts. No wonder 65% of the population is unhappy with the police.

But if you're wondering where the proceeds from the extortionate taxation are going, well, look no further than this: it's being used in part to make sure criminals are comfortable. Specifically, it's being used to make sure one particular criminal is comfortable, Volkert van der G., the man accused of murdering Pim Fortuyn. You see, he's a vegan vegetarian, and the food that's cooked in the slammer is just not up to snuff. I mean, at one point, there was even melted cheese on his cauliflower! The horror! Can you imagine what that does to this poor, abused man of such high principles? Obviously, it's more important to make sure he is comfortable than, say, actually investigate and prosecute crime. So now, the cooks at the prison are being instructed in vegan vegetarian cooking. I'm delighted, delighted! to see my tax euros spent so considerately. Brings tears to my eyes.

For those who've not been following the Volkert Story, he's been on hunger strike too for a while. One of his demands for ending his hunger strike was better catering. He also wanted more privacy when his girlfriend visited. The one demand that was not honored was the removal of the 24-hour a day video monitoring of his cell. At one point he was apparently not far away from being too weak to do much anymore and in danger of dying within a few weeks. This led to a debate on whether he should be forcibly fed or allowed to die. On the one hand, it would set a questionable precedent with regard to the amount of force the state can use on its detainees. On the other hand, being in prison (although not yet tried or convicted) by necessity is an abridgement of individual rights. The main reason I don't want to see him dead yet is because there is a possibility that he might have had accomplices, and I want to avoid a Timothy McVeigh situation. After we've got all the facts and nailed any possible accomplices, I'm all in favor of frying the bastard.

Oh wait, we don't have capital punishment here. There is a non-trivial proportion of population in favor according to polls; the last one I could find puts support at 43%. Of course, this is not reflected by political parties that constitute the ruling elite. Perhaps I should trade that distorting lens for blinkers. Might make life less complicated...

Open invitation to burglars

Introducing the new resort for professional criminals everywhere: the Netherlands! Come spend your vacation in this lovely country of polders, cows, cheese and easy to rob houses! Included in your vacation package is a weekend stay in a luxury hotel, your free "Burgle in Holland" guide and a complimentary crowbar. Reserve now and enjoy the vacation of a lifetime!

Yes, burgling has never been easier. Nor less dangerous. The chances of getting caught in Holland are low to begin with, but as of today, you need not fear investigation in the land of tulips and windmills. The new guidelines for the police state that only serious offenses will be investigated. Your standard burglary is not one of them. There are going to be "minimum requirements" for crime in order to be investigated; breaking the law is not enough (unless you're speeding, but that's different, of course). Now if a crime does not meet the criteria, the police won't even bother.

The Amsterdam police chief Jelle Kuiper crititized the plans, because of the emotional impact on the victims. But that was foreseen, in the words of J. L. de Wijkerslooth, the mandarin whose brainchild this is: "In other words, the police will only come into action if the victim complains. That can't ever be the basis for investigative policy or for victim prioritization." Yes, heaven forbid that victims of crime actually complain about the police's inaction!

But all is not lost, as the whole thing is scientifically underpinned. "In industry it's perfectly normal to do a market analysis before making an investment." Ah right, it's an investment now. Everything is an investment. Child care, education, welfare, health care, it's all investment. Now catching criminals is an investment too. Or not catching them. It's not neglect or dereliction of duty, it's just opportunity loss in terms of catching criminals.

But finally it is the minister of justice who's responsible. Says De Wijkerslooth:

The criteria fall under the political responsibility of the minister, which also legitimizes them politically. This puts the district attorneys on a firmer footing when they have to say 'no' to all the organizations and interest groups who want them to do 'a bit more' or a 'a bit less' than has been agreed upon."

Good to see that this is going to make the DA's lives easier then. I've been worried about their mental state quite a bit recently, and in terms of overall investment, it's more than reasonable to sacrifice the odd victim or two to relieve pressure elsewhere in the System.

So now it's official: don't count on the State to protect you or your property. Not that this is anything new. It's just blatantly out in the open now. Does this mean that citizens will be allowed to defend themselves? Of course not. Guns remain largely illegal, and besides, self-defense if frowned upon and harming burglars is not being ignored by the police. It's harming other human beings after all. And while they're robbing your house, perhaps you should ask yourself why they hate you so much. It's poverty, of course. And as a house-owning member of the bourgeousie you're part of the system them oppresses the poor criminals, leading them to rob your house. It's all your fault really. Defending your home and your family only escalates the cycle of violence.

Pfui.

The Bicycle Event Horizon

As an inveterate car driver, I hate bicycles. They're a damn nuisance, and are usually propelled by suicidal maniacs whose sole aim in life is to break as many traffic regulations as possible on a given stretch of road. Car drivers in Naples (Italy, not Florida) are more disciplined than cyclists in Holland. More on driving a car in southern Italy some other time.

Anyway, there are lots of bicycles in the Netherlands. Way too many. But I am beginning to understand the death wish of the cyclists themselves, as there seems to be something supernatural going on. It seem that about 900,000 bicycles are stolen every year in this country. Estimates for the total number of bicycles in the country vary from 16 to 20 million on a population of 16 million. So that means that between 4.5% and 5.6% of all bicylces get stolen in any given year. But that's not all: there's an additional 1 million bicylces sold every year. Does that mean we are adding a million new bicycles to the overall stock every year? The link above is not clear on whether it's a million new bicycles, or whether it includes used ones as well; given the rest of the page, it would seem to refer to new ones. And where do the 900,000 stolen bicycles go? There must be some regurgitation of these bicycles back into the overall stock, rather than just ending up in the blind alley of illegality. It still leaves us with a huge new supply of bicycles every year. Since there is little growth potential left (I would think the market is fairly saturated), there must be a large amount of bicycles disposals. Or the stolen bikes are exported, but I don't see the economics of this working too well.

Very puzzling. Back to the original story. It also refers to the futility of reporting a bicycle theft, and only 1 in 5 victims bother to go to the police. At police stations, there's a form for submitting a claim to the insurance company. (Hm, insurance fraud inflating the numbers?) But help is at hand: after three years of negotiations no less than three ministries and various organizations have come to an agreement on a concerted effort to combat bike theft. All new bikes will be fitted with a chip that can be scanned. Once a bike is stolen, its chip code will be entered into a national database, so that police can easily scan "suspicious" bikes and determine whether they're stolen or not. Of course, the police have also said they're not going to spend any time or manpower on this, as they're busy combating more serious crime. Except they're not doing too well on that either.

12-year old girl abducted, used for sex - repeatedly

Today's Telegraaf reports a horrifying tale of a 12-year old girl, who's been abducted by a group of men, and was then forced to work as a prostitute. Repeatedly. TWENTY times.

The rape gang, a group of young Moroccans, threatened her with knives and guns, and took her blindfolded to a bar. On the bed there, she was forced to have sex with dozens of men. The story only came out after the girl, Miranda, had fled to Amsterdam where she'd been roaming the streets for five days. During this time, her parents found her diaries with the details in her room.

The parents reported this to the police in May, who did not take them seriously. Only after the third attempt to report the case did the police deign to investigate. Meanwhile, Miranda's father had discovered the identities of the rape gang and gave them to the police.

So the situation now is that the family is fleeing their home in Assen, because they're being terrorized by the rape gang. They get harassed with phone calls in the middle of the night, get messages sent to their cell phones, and members of the rape gang strut prominently in front of their home. The father used to work as a sales clerk in a store, where the rape gang members started to harass him too. He's had a nervous breakdown and lost his job.

Police spokesman Martin Panman says: "This week or next, we'll set up a serious detective team of six people." The initial report was filed in May. Now it's middle of September. The suspects' identities were known. And still the police wouldn't act, and are now, under the pressure of publicity, setting up a team to investigate. Wasn't Holland pretending to be a civilized country?

Nor is Miranda the only victim of the Moroccan rape gang. One other victim is now in a psychiatric institute, the other is too scared to leave her home. Three lives scarred, perhaps permanently, by a gang of despicable violent thugs, while the police have to be shamed into action. Utterly disgusting. This is yet another, albeit particularly horrendous, example of the state of law enforcement in the Netherlands. Citizens are not supposed to defend themselves, since that is what the police is for. Yet the police are simply not up to the job, and this has not gone unnoticed.

One final question is whether the ethnic origin of the gang rapists is relevant here. They are all Arabs, mostly Moroccan, with the odd Iraqi and Kuwaiti thrown in. The relevance stems from the structural proclivity of Arab men in western countries to treat women as they had been taught to in their own dysfunctional culture, where women's rights are virtually non-existent and they are treated as property. This carries over into their behavior when they live in the West. This is not an isolated incident. In France, gang-rapes comitted by Arabs are so common, they have a name for them: tournantes. Australia recently saw a brutal gang-rape, resulting in a record 55-year jail sentence for the ringleader. In Denmark and Norway, well over half those convicted for rape are of Arab origin, while they form only a small minority in either country.

This is a problem. Putting a the Multicultural Blinkers of Political Correctness on is not going to change the underlying reality. Either the Arabs living in the West assimilate into our culture and bring themselves up to our level of civilization, or they should seek their abode elsewhere. Mark Steyn put it thus:

As one is always obliged to explain when tiptoeing around this territory, I'm not a racist, only a culturist. I support immigration, but with assimilation. Without it, like a Hindu widow, the West is slowly climbing on the funeral pyre of its lost empires. You see it in European foreign policy already: They're scared of their mysterious, swelling, unstoppable Muslim populations. Islam For All approvingly reported the other day that, at present demographic rates, in 20 years' time the majority of children (i.e., under 18) in Holland will be Muslim. It will be the first Islamic country in Western Europe since the loss of Spain. Europe is the colony now.

65% of Dutchmen unhappy with police

And this comes as a surprise?

Today's Telegraaf has a story (Dutch only) on the results of a survey by the Social and Cultural Planning Bureau (yet another institution in this country with a name that defies parody), that shows that 65% of Dutchmen are unhappy with the way the police to their job. People think the police should spend more time chasing criminals. Imagine that. And with just 14.6% of crimes (191,000 out of 1.3 million) being solved, it's not exactly surprising. And since most people only see the police when they get a speeding ticket, the misplaced priorities begin to register. Also of note: 90% of those interviewed thought that criminals should be punished more severely.

Holland must be one of the countries with the most lenient sentencing in the world. If you want to commit a murder, do it here. With some extenuating circumstances and a halfway decent lawyer, you'll likely get away with being sentenced to, say, 12 years. Throw some good behavior in the mix, and you could be out in 8. Even better, if you can claim to be an "activist" of some sort, you might get off even more lightly.

The new government, when it is not decending into farce, is planning to spend more money on the police. However, without realigning the police's priorities, it's going to be hard to make a dent in crime. One of the proposals that's come bubbling out of the new government is to be more lenient with people who exceed the speed limit by a small amount. Why not just increase the speed limit then? Current speed limits, especially on the highways, are ridiculously low (100 or 120 km/h, which is 60 or 70 mph), and are widely ignored. Having laws that are ignored on such a wide scale undermines respect for the law in general. When reality and the written law diverge by this much (and no harm comes of it), then surely the wise thing to do is to amend the law.

To round it all off, we also have the news that due to a "cell-shortage" many people who are arrested end up on the street again immediately. In the first six months of this year, 832 arrests ended up in the immediate relase of the suspects. In many more cases, the police don't even bother to act, since they know it's going to be futile. Now, isn't a "cell-shortage" an oxymoron? We have a number of cells. We have a number of criminals. Divide the latter by the former, and you get the average occupancy rate per cell. What's so horrible if this number is greater than one?