Not Fine, but Fined
Two feet on the ground. Someone’s grabbing onto my shoulder. I’m holding my friend’s wrist with one hand, keeping the other free to balance myself. They push us forward. I’m on my toes. One foot dangling in mid-air like a flamingo. But I’m not stately, nor elegant, and I’m definitely not calm. I’m having a full-on panic attack in the middle of the Thursday night Tivoli queue.
We never got into Tivoli that night. We’d survived two hours of dense crowds shoving and pulling only to arrive at a closed door. Two horrible hours of trying to stand upright and get air. And all that under the indifferent eye of the police.
When I first started writing this article I wanted to discuss crowd control. After all, this wasn’t my first time drowning in a sea of people. Yet in the Tivoli line, my frustration was not with the organizers or the crowd itself but the onlooking police officers who refused to intervene.
When asked afterward why they hadn’t stepped in, the police answered that it wasn’t their job. Our safety, standing on the sidewalk mere meters away from them, was none of their concern.
“It’s Tivoli’s responsibility,” one policeman responded with a grin.
But then what is the police’s job, if not guarding the public order or providing help to those in need?
One night last winter, a friend was pulled over and asked to follow a police car onto a dark parking lot. Three policemen got out, pointing a flashlight at her face, and asked her if she’d been drinking. She replied no, but they continued their questioning.
“Now we’re gonna find out whether you’ve been a good girl,” an officer said when they finally let her take the breathalyzer test.
She had no alcohol in her system, but the police still lingered around the car, shining their flashlights at her friends on the back bench, who were all of color. “It felt like they were looking for something that just wasn’t there,” she described.
Another friend has had similar experiences with the Dutch police. Even when cycling in a crowd, the police always pick him out to ask for his bicycle reference number—a number most white people don’t even know exists, but that people of color need daily to prove they didn’t steal their own bikes.
He has also been stopped and searched numerous times. Once, late at night, the police requested to see the contents of his bag and went on to throw his stuff on the ground. When finding nothing they warned him not to be out late and left him to pick up his belongings.
Besides the racial and sexual prejudice that characterizes these encounters, policemen often seem to focus on things that may generate an income of sorts, be it through fines or confiscations.
While the police had the time to harass my friend in a dark parking lot, they weren’t there that night when she was being followed home by a stranger.
While the police had the time to check my friend’s bike reference number, they weren’t there that afternoon when he was knifed.
And while the police had the time to check bike lights every night at Wilhemina Park, one girl was found raped and lit on fire, another was sexually harassed on a train for almost an hour, and a third was shot by her stalker who she had already reported.
These things happened and will continue to happen if police priorities don’t change. Ensuring the safety of women and people of color means taking their complaints seriously. And while drunk driving or cycling without lights on is obviously dangerous, racism and sexism can just as easily have tragic outcomes.
Appeared in The Boomerang, June 2022
