NRC Handelsblad, 6 June 2016
As a schoolboy, the last thing I could have predicted was that I’d end up working for the police, that I’d do research there, that I’d become ‘one of them’. Not that I was such a rebel or behaved in a criminal way. After playing football on our little square, I was often to be found in the library, then trudging home, bent under the weight of my rucksack. But all too often, our little games of football attracted the attention of the police–though I doubt it was because the officers were impressed by our talent. As a Dutchman-in-limbo, it’s hard to embrace the idea that ‘the police are your best friends’. I can see why ethnic minority youths think ‘the police are always out to get us’—the police were always out to get us.
When I was nineteen, I left Nijmegen to study cultural anthropology in Utrecht, where my parents could no longer keep an eye on me. Partying, drinking, smoking: at last, I could do it all.
‘The Other’—that’s also me in my own country, I often thought during lectures. The idea of studying tribes in Africa, Asia, or South America didn’t appeal to me. I was much keener to scrutinise entrenched ideas and unspoken ways of thinking in the Netherlands. In the end, my tribe was the police force.
I still remember my job interview vividly. Opposite me, at an oval table, sat two big, uniformed police officers flanked by two women in plain clothes who worked in recruitment. The men no doubt explained their role in the project at some point, but I couldn’t stop wondering why the interview wasn’t just with the people from HR. What I also noticed—eager as I was to have my prejudices confirmed—was that the tall, big-bellied policeman on the right had a moustache.
It was the longest conversation I’d ever had with a uniform. That was all I saw: two blue uniforms. The question of whether I really wanted to work for the police kept buzzing through my head. It hadn’t exactly been a childhood dream—though strangely enough it had been the dream of my twin brother. I wanted to be a pilot, until a neighbourhood kid gravely informed me that, as a specky four-eyes, that profession was closed to me. I felt this was an unfair criterion for exclusion, but resigned myself to the situation. It turned out, though, that I was allowed to work for the police. I was taken on as researcher in the Juxta Project, set up in the wake of the murder of a child in a park in Schiedam. A man had been wrongfully imprisoned, and an investigation showed that a blinkered attitude on the part of police and criminal justice authorities had been a contributing factor.
My job involved accompanying officers on patrol. On these car journeys, I found myself putting my uncuffed hands on show at the window. Sometimes I’d wave a ballpoint pen nonchalantly, particularly when we stopped at traffic lights.
Bursts of action, lots of sitting about, classic patrol stuff. One day we were called to a scene where a car had plunged into a canal. The fire brigade was already there, along with four other police cars.
Both officers got out. I had to wait until someone opened the door for me, because you couldn’t do that from the back seat—it was where the suspects usually sat.
Some of the other officers looked surprised. ‘Why are they opening the door for some bearded arrestee?’ their expressions seemed to say. As we walked towards the group, who were rubbing their hands against the cold, the officer walking alongside me also noticed his colleagues’ confused, suspicious looks.
‘He’s one of us’, he said. So, I’m one of them, I thought to myself.
Sometimes I ‘belonged’ with the police, more often I didn’t. Within this predominantly white, heterosexual male bastion, I stood out. My being male and heterosexual blended with the institutional wallpaper and worked in my favour. Yet in the police, racial frameworks seemed to matter too. My research involved identifying the moments when ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘gender’ played a role. Where the lines lay, exactly, when it came to ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Quite soon I was being reproached that my report was too critical, that I was out to attack the police. When I pitched my proposal, I sensed the discomfort. Yet the whole point of the Juxta Project had been to take a critical look at how the organisation operated. Indeed, the police had jumped on this opportunity to boost their image in the media. Internally, it was a different matter. The message was clear: be critical, but not too critical.
Nowhere else have I encountered such doubts about my character, integrity, and loyalty as in the police force. I was also often assumed to have a lower status, taken for a cleaner or the boy who refilled the drinks in the vending machine. The fact I looked like I should be pushing a mop but was actually highly educated blew people’s minds. I regularly had to show local police units my ID; officers would ask me if I’d been screened.
A Moroccan-Dutch police officer once perfectly expressed what my doctoral thesis showed: ‘I don’t just have to show I’m a good policeman. I have to show I’m a good Moroccan, that I’m OK, despite being Moroccan. That I’m not like the rest.’ Members of ethnic minorities working for the police constantly had their loyalty and trustworthiness tested. It felt familiar.
The piercing, suspicious gaze of police officers, scouring their surroundings for anything suspect, fell not just on the public at large, but also on colleagues of non-Dutch heritage. White police officers are exempt: they remain the ‘neutral’ frame of reference. They are the norm. The assumption is that white officers are ‘neutral’, ‘objective’, and ‘loyal to the force’. Officers from ethnic minority groups, by contrast, have to prove themselves.
It was during a meeting about ‘Dealing with Diversity’ within the police that I had my expectations confirmed for the first time, in no uncertain terms. We were doing an exercise that involved participants talking about their experiences as a minority in a group.
I lurked at the back, trying to hide behind the others. The workshop leader peered around, stood on tiptoe and then pointed at me—he seemed to have been looking for me—then asked, ‘Would you like to share your experiences?’ No, I had absolutely no desire to do so, surely that was clear? Having become the unwilling focus of attention, I mumbled something and repeated what others had said before me. Before I’d even finished speaking, one of the unit managers butted in: ‘The first few times I saw you in the corridor, I thought, what a dodgy-looking guy! It was just instinctive, a gut feeling. I saw you walking along the corridor and thought: hey, what’s that guy doing there! Don’t get me wrong. But the way you dress, your beard . . . ’
The workshop leader complimented him and patted him on the shoulder. ‘It must be a relief to get that off your chest, right?’ he said, sounding oddly chirpy. I really didn’t know what to say, just gave him a thumbs-up.
Later, the manager apologised to me for his remark. I told him that in a way I was relieved, because it proved that the way he looked me up and down, scanning for my police ID as I walked along the corridor, wasn’t me overreacting or imagining things.
When I started out in the job, I visited various police stations. These were never straightforward occasions and I found them exhausting. Over and over again I had to explain who I was and what I was doing there. On one particular day I’d announced my visit well in advance. We’d agreed that I’d talk about my research during a briefing for all the officers from that unit.
The planner hooked me up with two officers I’d be accompanying on patrol. As we walked down the corridor, I introduced myself to them. In those early days I was still childishly impressed by police uniforms and the guns dangling from their belts. One of the men couldn’t pronounce my last name correctly.
‘No, it’s c with a cedilla. Chankaya,’ I said.
‘Kankaya?’
‘No, Chankaya. Like “Churchill”, get it?’
‘Oh, right.’ The officer laughed. Suddenly, another officer screeched to a halt beside us, breaking in on our conversation. In thundering tones he fired his shot. ‘Have you been screened, young man?’
Wordlessly, I looked at the puffs of smoke coming out of his mouth. So even the lengthy briefing hadn’t helped, I thought. The briefing in which I’d explained I was working for the police. A feeling of despair overwhelmed me: none of it makes any difference.
‘We’ve got a jumper,’ said the policeman at the wheel of the car I was in, sounding rather too cheerful. We whizzed along tram tracks at speeds nearing 100 kph, slaloming between cars, cyclists, and pedestrians. When we arrived at the scene, I saw there was already a large police presence. The body of the ‘jumper’ lay about ten metres from a group of officers, whom we joined. ‘Looks peaceful, doesn’t he?’ a policeman joked, as if he were watching his slumbering child. A few of his colleagues laughed. Before I could take everything in, an ambulance crew laid a white sheet over the body.
Marije, the woman police officer I was shadowing that day, began the forensic investigation. We took the lift up to the top storey of the apartment building and walked along a balcony with the flats on one side and the railing on the other. At the far end, we came to the spot the man had presumably jumped from. I leant over the edge and looked down. The realisation that someone had just jumped from this exact spot sent shivers down my spine.
‘Come on,’ Marije said. ‘Let’s go back to the lift and ring the first flat’s doorbell. Then we’ll work our way up to this end.’
So that’s what we did. She rang the doorbell. I was in plain clothes, and my job was just to listen and observe.
A middle-aged man opened the door, holding a cigarette. He blew out so much smoke that he looked like a walking shisha bar.
‘Not to alarm you, meneer, but I’m afraid we have some bad news. Someone just took his own life by jumping from this floor.’
‘Gosh,’ the man said. He took a long drag on his cigarette.
‘Did you notice anything odd or unusual in the past hour?’
The man looked thoughtful and scratched his chin.
‘No, nothing. Nope.’
‘OK. Well, if anything occurs to you, here’s our card. You can always reach us at this number.’
We proceeded along the balcony in this way, ringing the doorbell of the next four flats.
At the fifth flat, Marije said her piece again. Not to alarm you, bad news, did you notice anything?
This time it was a middle-aged woman who’d opened the door. She was shocked by the news. No, no she hadn’t seen a thing. Although . . .
‘Come to think of it, ten minutes ago I did notice a man walking past the window. I’d never seen him before. He had black hair and a beard. I’m quite sure of that.’
‘How tall was he?’ Marije asked with a smile.
‘About this tall.’ The woman held her hand at the height where I more or less stopped growing.
Marije burst out laughing. I smiled awkwardly.
‘You’re not describing my colleague here, are you, mevrouw?’
The woman peered at me and dug in her memory. ‘Well, yes, I guess that’s possible.’
She too was given a card.
The accounts I gather are a kind of long witness statement: there’s a risk I’m kidding myself, that my memory’s letting me down. There’s also an element of autoethnography—anthropological self-description. I’m well aware of the pitfalls of autoethnography. It can be written off as a collection of self-absorbed anecdotes, dismissed as hollow assertions and unfounded claims, like the drunken ramblings of a man propping up a bar. Critics can be unsparing, bandying phrases like: ‘intellectual poverty’, ‘smug complacency’, and ‘academic masturbation’.
Our experience changes as soon as we speak of it, the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote. My most individual experiences are not sacrosanct. They’re not inviolable dogmas that no one may challenge, fiddle with, or doubt. In the boxing ring where truths clash, spread out, and try to oust one another, just like memory, this story, too, is fighting for space. I’m not telling The Truth, but believe me because I’m telling a truth.
Examples abound. A Moroccan inspector in Arnhem asked his chief to do something to enhance his colleagues’ ‘cultural sensitivity’. The chief thought this was a good idea. He invited the entire force to attend a show by Najib Amhali, a Moroccan-born Dutch stand-up comedian.
‘Guys, you can go for free, on one condition. You have to take someone from an ethnic minority with you,’ the chief had said. He saw this as a way of making his officers more culturally aware; what he had in mind was friends, acquaintances, neighbours, former colleagues.
It seems the running gag at the time was: ‘Is it OK to take someone from the cells?’
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. I remember spending time chatting with a couple of officers called Sander and Thijs as we drove around in their patrol car. We’d joke around. The men would josh me about my Turkish origins (my retort that I hailed from Nijmegen didn’t exactly impress Sander, an Amsterdammer) and my supposed religious fanaticism (because of my beard), to which I replied that I was a fundamentalist agnostic and that my mother prayed for me (before having to explain what I meant by that). We also talked about my research.
‘You’re not going to check whether we’re doing our jobs properly, are you?’ Sander said, as we sat in the briefing room at the station.
About half an hour later we got called to a neighbour dispute. When we arrived, a woman—white, Dutch, middle-aged—opened the door and immediately started sounding off about her neighbour.
Thijs told the woman to calm down. ‘Take it easy, mevrouw. Let’s go inside and then you can tell us all about it.’
As we made a move to enter, the woman pointed at me and started yelling hysterically: ‘Noooo, he’s not coming in here! I don’t let his sort into my house. No way!’
The world stood still for a moment. For me, at least. I wasn’t angry or upset. I was just baffled.
‘Mevrouw, this gentleman works for the police too, and either all three of us come inside, or all three of us are going to leave right now,’ Sander thundered. Sander, the very guy who’d just been cracking inappropriate jokes. I was touched by his words, a warm glow shot through me and I was overcome by a strange feeling of affection: he was there for me. I felt loyal to him, to the police. So that’s how that works, I thought, that gradual process of willing submission.
Without waiting for an answer, Sander walked past the woman, as did Thijs. I twinkled at the woman, slipped past her into the house and thought: what are you going to do, call the police?
*
My thesis about discrimination within the police caused something of an internal stir. I got a rocket from someone in the communications department, who rang me at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night.
‘Why did nobody clock this?’
I replied that I’d been working on it for a full three years.
‘Did anyone look at the text and give you permission?’
I was dumbstruck. Permission for what?
‘It’s a thesis, so it’s in the public domain. The only people I’m answerable to are the doctoral committee.’ After this phone call, I gather that various advisers and chiefs were given an earful.
We agreed that, in future, I’d run every media contact past communications. Sometimes a sentence would have a comment scribbled next to it in the margin: ‘This strikes me as very unnuanced.’ I would reply that it was a factual conclusion.
My thesis led to questions being asked in the municipal council and the Dutch House of Representatives. But by now I was busy studying something that was, if possible, even more controversial: racial profiling.
After the dust of my thesis had settled, I wanted to talk to some police managers about my research. We’d reached a clear oral agreement that its findings ‘would be made public’.
At the very next meeting of the supervision team, someone from communications turned up unexpectedly.
‘From the point of view of communications, and because of what happened regarding your thesis, it seemed a good idea for us to get involved early on.’
The meeting had only been going for five minutes when the lady from communications said, ‘As I understand it, this study is being conducted for internal use only, and it won’t be made public.’ What? Shocked, I looked at my line manager, sitting on my left. She kept her lips tightly shut.
‘Hang on a sec,’ I said, ‘that’s news to me. The agreement has always been that the study would be made public.’
With maddening obstinacy she continued, ‘Yes, well, from a communications point of view we feel it wouldn’t be wise to go public with such a loaded subject. We’re already being attacked on all sides—it makes no sense for us as an organisation to attack ourselves. So as far as I’m concerned, the study’s staying under wraps.’
It was maddening, but I got where she was coming from: she was doing her job, and she was very good at it.
I was young and keen, but still patently wet behind the ears. ‘The police force needs to be a transparent organisation,’ I pontificated. ‘As one of the pillars of the rule of law, it has to show accountability for the policies it pursues on the streets.’
‘As a philosophical maxim that’s all very well and good, but we’re dealing with an organisation here, and an organisation has other interests.’ I’d been admitted to a circle that had previously been closed to me, and was running up against hard-nosed institutional culture. Independent research—what a naïve idealist, they seemed to be thinking.
It looked as if there was nothing I could do about it. The manuscript would disappear in a drawer, like many other unread studies I’d been hearing about at the time.
When I told my family what had happened, they were very concerned. They told me to let the matter drop, and not be so ungrateful. Hadn’t the police given me every opportunity to do my research?
‘That’s true, and I’m grateful. But I can’t let this go.’
‘He who pays the piper calls the tune,’ my twin brother said.
‘This isn’t some corporation, it’s the government!’
‘Exactly, it’s the government. And if you go on like this, they’ll give you grief,’ my father said. ‘Just let it go. They won’t take this lying down.’
‘We’re not in Turkey now.’
‘And what if it reflects on us? Just leave it,’ my eldest sister said.
‘The matter’s too important for that,’ I retorted.
‘They’ve been paying your salary on the dot all these years, haven’t they?’ my mother remarked. That made me laugh, and at the same time feel horribly alone.
But I was going to have to do this alone, speak truth to power, something like that.
After I got my Ph.D.—and left the police—I suddenly found myself in a dark place: at home and out of a job. I had to write columns to pay the bills. For now, I’d been side-tracked. Meanwhile, though, progressive forces within the police were creating momentum, and senior officers were sticking their necks out. But I had to wait until a new chief commissioner was appointed, one who was open to the issue of racial profiling and saw its social relevance. After spending several months in this limbo, I was invited to go and see a new adviser.
I went to the Amsterdam police headquarters on Elandsgracht and got a firm handshake from a small man with intelligent eyes. My manuscript lay on his desk: bits of paper and coloured post-it notes stuck out of every page. He’d clearly read it with great attention.
I must confess I was very much on my guard. I no longer knew who I could trust, who was passing on information, who was spreading rumours about me. From inside, I’d seen an unexpected side of the organisation: how it could abruptly turn against you, how you could be labelled a black sheep and banished from the family. It was a lonely place to be.
The adviser was impressed by my work. ‘A thorough piece of research, and I think that many officers will recognise its validity.’ That was true: wherever I came and talked about the study everyone agreed with its findings, weirdly enough. I just wasn’t supposed to air the dirty laundry.
After he’d dished out a few more compliments and repeatedly stressed that the matter was much too important to ignore, he said he wanted to discuss certain passages of the manuscript with me. Could I turn to a certain page and take a look at the last paragraph?
I turned to the page in question and carefully read the last paragraph, making the silence last a bit longer than strictly necessary.
‘Well written,’ I joked.
He smiled. I knew very well why he’d had me read that paragraph. It was one of only three passages in which the word ‘discrimination’ appeared. After a researcher has been working for the police for four years, an element of self-censorship creeps in. It’s part of that process of willing submission.
‘Do you really think that?’ the adviser asked.
The question surprised me.
‘It’s a conclusion you can draw on the basis of that case. And in the light of the officer’s comments.’
‘Hmmm,’ the adviser said, as he leafed through my manuscript.
Could I perhaps look at another passage, he wanted to know.
‘Does this paragraph tie in with what you want to convey?’
That paragraph, too, featured the word ‘discrimination’.
‘Well, yes. It does, actually,’ I said, beginning to falter. ‘I’d say those conclusions are plausible,’ I added hesitantly.
‘Hmmm.’
After we’d done this twice more, and I was growing uneasy, my doubt turned to annoyance. My patience had run out, not because of this conversation, but because of the waiting room, the limbo I’d been in for months—the dark place. And I didn’t really know what the point of this exercise was. Were we redoing the work of the supervisory committee? I realised I no longer had any personal interest at stake. Should I take a risk? Should I push back? If so, this was the moment. If an officer rocks the boat, their name is mud. They’re keelhauled and kicked out of the force—I was well aware of that. As thoughts like these raced through my mind, faster and faster, making me dizzy, but also agitated and angry, it was as if the little Lego figures in my head were writing me a script. A text with one-liners. It must have been them, because the words didn’t feel like my own. That was how it seemed to me.
‘I’d rather join ranks with the police on this. I’d rather we do this together. But if we can’t do it together, I’ll do it alone,’ I said.
The longest silence of the afternoon struck between us like lightning, filling the room. I began to blush, incredulous as to where I’d summoned up this courage. I had no idea what he’d say; was he going to yell at me?
‘Hmm.’
‘Yes . . . ’ I looked down.
‘I think I understand,’ he said.
I got up and received another firm handshake. In the tram on the way home I mentally replayed the conversation, something I would do hundreds of times.
Nearly a year later, in 2012, my study of racial profiling was published. I joined ranks with the police when dealing with the ensuing press attention. My research caused a stir. A year later, in 2013, the topic was placed squarely on the political agenda after Amnesty International wrote a report about it. A few years later, thanks in part to the tireless efforts of Controle Alt Delete, an organisation that lobbies for fair police checks, possibly the biggest media punch was delivered by the Dutch rapper Typhoon—a sobering event that put things in perspective because his symbolic capital proved so much greater. He was pulled over by a police officer. Why, he wanted to know? Because his profile, that’s to say the colour of his skin, did not match the car he was driving, the officer had said.
*
For four years I would oscillate between ‘one of them’ and ‘one of us’. The police force is like a family, I was constantly told.
‘We’ve warned them time and time again,’ the police officer confided in me, as she wrote tickets with whirlwind speed. We were in the Bos en Lommer neighbourhood, in Amsterdam-West. The two officers told me that a ‘Moroccan’ garage kept illegally parking repaired cars in this street. I nodded. Issuing tickets sounded logical. Reasonable, too.
A few minutes later, three youths came out of the garage.
‘Hey, hey, what the fuck?’ one of them yelled.
‘Mind your language!’ the policewoman chided him. ‘You’ve been warned umpteen times. But you just won’t listen. It’s illegal to park here!’ She was yelling and waving her arms about. Then she turned on her heel, ignoring the youths, and doggedly went on writing tickets. It didn’t exactly strike me as a de-escalating strategy.
The youths were getting wound up, and more and more men kept emerging from the garage. They started yelling and jeering. The mood got grim. Then everything happened very quickly. The two police officers got in the car and drove away.
Without me.
Open-mouthed, I watched the police car as it drove off. The men were as dumbstruck as I was. They turned to look at me. Some made a ‘who are you?’ gesture with their hands. I was in shock, looking from the disappearing police car to the men and back again.
In the distance, brakes were slammed: the car stopped. Then came the shrill sound of its back-up beeper as it reversed fifty metres towards us. I waved to the youths and got into the back passenger seat. The policewoman turned around to face me.
‘I’m terribly sorry about that! I thought you were one of them.’
