June 5, 2019

Police app helps people help the police

Filed under: Dutch first,Technology by Orangemaster @ 7:18 pm

Dutch police and Public Prosecution Service have launch an app, allowing civilians victims of theft to help the police with their investigation. It is currently being tested for two months in four police regions: Rotterdam, East Netherlands, Northern Netherlands and East Brabant.

Although there are apps that people can use like Find My Phone after a theft or using WhatsApp for neighbourhood watch, this is the first time Dutch police are letting civilians help them solve crimes. Another good reason to open this door is that many civilians take action themselves if they fall victim to a crime, which can hinder investigations. Then again, many people feel that the police is not doing anything when they don’t get the results they want, so using this app can keep them busy in a productive way.

It is important to note that this app is in no way meant for people doing the police’s work. A spokesperson for the police, Oscar Dros, said “We genuinely see it as a form of cooperation.”

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

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March 30, 2019

Dutch art detective retrieves stolen Picasso after 20 years

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 11:36 pm

A Dutch “art detective” from Amsterdam called Arthur Brand has managed to lay his hands on Buste de Femme (Dora Maar), a painting that had been lost since 1999, The Guardian reported yesterday.

On 14 March 2019, two men “with contacts in the underworld” handed Brand the stolen Picasso in his apartment in the east of Amsterdam. According to Brand, stolen art can often be a hot potato. It is difficult to sell and in the meantime the thief or fence is stuck with a stolen item that, if found in their possession, can lead to awkward questions from the authorities.

Having gotten wind of the Picasso, Brand let it be known that he was interested in the painting, worth an estimated 25 million euro.

Brand, whose motto is “if they start to threaten you, you know you are on the right trail”, recovered a pair of bronze horses by Josef Thorak in 2015. The year after he negotiated the return of five stolen painting held by a Ukranian militia.

A day after receiving the painting, he handed it over to representatives of the insurance company.

Pablo Picasso painted the work in 1938.

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso)

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March 3, 2019

Crime is down, but a lot of it is in Limburg

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 4:29 pm

While I was in a tram this morning riding along a crime scene today in East Amsterdam, I started thinking about crime. Apparently, the top 10 cities with the most crime in the Netherlands includes four municipalities from the province of Limburg: Heerlen (4th place), Maastricht (5th place), Sittard-Geleen (7th place) and Roermond (9th place).

Amsterdam remains the city with the most crime, followed by Eindhoven and Rotterdam. A city next to Amsterdam, Diemen, has gone from 26th place to number 8, as some gang was quite busy with break-ins, but finally got rolled up.

Rounding off the top 10, there’s The Hague in 6th place and Schiedam in 10th place, both together with Rotterdam representing the province of South Holland. Amsterdam and Diemen are in North Holland, with Eindhoven in Noord-Brabant.

All in all crime is down, including pickpocketing, a classic in cities with a lot of tourists.

(Links: binnenlandsbestuur.nl, ad.nl, Photo: Dutch police officers politie.nl)

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January 4, 2019

Criminal tries trump card to stay out of jail

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:31 am

Police in Rotterdam arrested a man for threatening his ex and possessing weapons and possibly guns while entering her home. This information was not completely correct, but the man did violate his parole and had to go to prison.

Once arrested, the man showed the cops a ‘get out of jail free’ card that comes with the world-famous Monopoly game and the cops had a good belly laugh.

“We gave the man credit for his originality and laughed really hard together, but unfortunately we’re putting him in jail.” And in jail the man will stay for 84 days.

(Link: waarmaarraar.nl)

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December 20, 2018

Criminal mistakes cop for partner, cops score big

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:37 pm

politie-uniform-2016

Last weekend, a criminal in Rotterdam was leaving a flat with hundreds of thousands of euro in a bag and mistook a plain clothes policeman in a car for his partner in crime. Oops.

When he realised he had messed up, he ran, tossing the bag full of cash and throwing the key to the flat in a ditch. Both were retrieved by the cops, one easily and one with a bit of fishing.

The cops checked out the flat in question, which was like hitting the jackpot. It had even more money in it, hard drugs, guns, a sealer for drugs and all kinds of gear to build an illegal cannabis plantation. There was also a big safe that was hoisted out of the flat with a crane – who knows what kind of goodies were in there, I’m guessing falsified documents.

The plain clothes cop was staking out the area, having seen the driver waiting on his friend drive quite poorly on the way there. Then, the driver got out of his car to make way for the stash in the boot and that’s when the ‘bagman’ knocked on the wrong car window.

This reads like the third act of a stupid television show.

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

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August 17, 2018

Crime still pays for many Dutch fugitives

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 3:52 pm

According to RTL Nieuws, dozens of criminals in the Netherlands with an outstanding prison sentence wrongly continue to receive benefits. Although the justice department and police cannot find them, the UWV (Employee Insurance Agency), responsible for handing out benefits, doesn’t seem to have any problem finding baddies at all, much to the irritation of the Dutch government trying to put the kibosh on this absurd practice since 2011.

It can takes month before benefits are stopped owing to bureaucracy, but what really grates is that as many as 13 judges have still ruled in favour of these criminals, citing that ‘not serving one’s sentence is not a good enough reason to stop benefits’. They first need to see if the person is ‘purposely avoiding incarceration’ and then more pressure is put on the police to catch this person.

There’s even a case where a man took off to Australia with permission from the UWV and in doing so avoided his sentence. His sentence was then set at 10 weeks. However, Australia won’t extradite a Dutch person for any sentence of less than six month, so the man can chill down under while receiving money from the Netherlands and not go to prison.

Every time you hear that the Dutch are soft on crime, well, yes they are.

(Link: rtlnieuws.nl, Photo by Ken Mayer, 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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May 20, 2016

Wanted mafia boss ran top pizza joint

Filed under: Food & Drink,Health by Orangemaster @ 10:51 am
pizza

For years in Scheveningen Rocco Gasperoni of the ‘Ndrangheta’ or Calabrian mafia was happily making the best pizzas the neighbourhood had even eaten until his arrest about a week ago.

And his story reads like a movie. His criminal activities date back to 1997 where he was arrested in Spain, then sentenced to 14 years of hard time for smuggling drugs between Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. He was eventually placed in house arrest and managed to flee to the Netherlands.

The Italian government tried to have Gasperoni extradited, but apparently messed up the paperwork and he was free again. Then he opened up a few shops, but the pizza shop is the one that made him popular, although neighbours claimed that shady characters would visit the joint and sit in dark corners. And then the Italians tried to extradite Gasperoni again, but since he had been in the Netherlands for so long, it didn’t stick and more pizzas were made.

As of a week ago Gasperoni will be doing 12 years of a 14-year sentence in a Dutch prison. Dutch authorities blame the differences between Italian and Dutch laws for why it took so much time to put him away.

(Links: www.ad.nl, 20min.ch, Photo of Pizza pie by Adam Kuban, some rights reserved)

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April 16, 2015

Rabobank kills book containing accusations of art theft

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 2:05 pm

rabobank-ben-kraan-architectenThe court of The Hague has rushed to the aid of Dutch bank Rabobank when it censored the book ‘De Verpanding’ (The Pawning) last Friday.

The book, subtitled ‘Art Disappears Where Rabo Appears’, describes the dealings of two ‘art entrepreneurs’ (as Volkskrant calls them) with the Special Cases department of Rabobank.

The authors claim Rabobank stole art works and chased the art collections of art traders, says NRC. Interestingly, the book was published in March with almost no publicity (at least none that I could find), but Rabobank thought it important to sue the publishers nevertheless. The court of The Hague ordered the book to be taken off the market with the goal of protecting the privacy of Rabobank employees who were named in the book. An anonymised reprint may be in the works. The publishers have asked buyers to return the book for a refund.

Meanwhile De Verpanding has been scanned and made widely available through the Internet. In an age where bankers are considered unconvicted criminals by many, such a response should have been foreseen by the bank.

The court of The Hague told 24 Oranges it expects the written verdict to be available from rechtspraak.nl somewhere in the course of next week.

(Photo by Ben Kraan Architecten, some rights reserved)

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October 14, 2014

Crazy verdict: Dutch Rail may abolish paper tickets

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 8:44 am

lady-justice-chaoukiThe business court of The Hague has determined that Dutch Rail can abolish paper train tickets even though the law says a traveller has a right to an objective proof of the right to travel.

The court felt that the new electronic travel card system (OV Chipkaart) suffices because there are five places where you can confirm you have the right to travel. Arnoud Engelfriet lists them all:

  1. The display of the electronic gate at the time of checking in.
  2. The display of the vending machine.
  3. A paper print-out at the service desk.
  4. A transaction data listing on the Dutch Rail website.
  5. The display of the train conductor’s travel card reader.

Engelfriet and his commenters point out that there are numerous problems with this verdict.

  1. The electronic display only shows that you’ve checked in for a very short time, especially if somebody checks in a fraction of a second later (this happens a lot during rush hour).
  2. If you are in a rush, you are not going to stand in line at the vending machine or service desk.
  3. The Internet listings are only updated after a significant delay.
  4. Train conductors are “masters at being impossible to find”, according to Rikus Spithorst of travellers association ‘Voor Beter OV’ (‘for better public transport’). (Doesn’t that make train conductors hobbits?)

Basically this means that you either show up five minutes early for your daily commute to double check you are actually checked in or you pay a tax in the form of fines every time you fail to check in for whatever reason.

What bothers me is that in the case of a conflict between a traveller and Dutch Rail (and only the OV Chipkaart in place) travellers now have to rely completely on the antagonistic party to provide them with the proof that they have in fact travelled legally. Travelling without a valid ticket is a criminal offence, so why would the state make rules that make it practically impossible for a suspect to defend their innocence?

See also:

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