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You sound frustrated, like you think it’s a bad thing that the police has time to respond to these types of incidents. When you’re not in one of the big cities,
by stingraycharles 8y ago
You sound frustrated, like you think it’s a bad thing that the police has time to respond to these types of incidents. When you’re not in one of the big cities, it is in fact common that police has time for this type of stuff (I live in Zeist myself and could see this type of thing happening here).
I think this is rather a signal that the police in Amsterdam is underfunded, and/or the types of crimes they deal with are much more severe.
Also keep in mind that it’s not a “search a whole neighborhood” situation, they got the exact GPS coordinates.
- avar 8y agoI think it's great that they have time to do that. I'm happy that somebody in this country has working public services. I'm just honestly surprised. I've only lived in Amsterdam inside The Netherlands and wouldn't expect the police to respond to something like that. > it’s not a “search a whole neighborhood” situation In retrospect I may have misread this: > They gave the police the exact > coordinates of my car and it only > took the surveilling car 5 minutes > to get to the car I thought they had somewhat correct coordinates, but took 5 minutes to drive around the area to locate the car, as opposed to 5 minutes from wherever they were located before. In any case, it doesn't make much difference. I think if someone called the police here in Amsterdam with the exact location of a broken-in car they'd say tough titty and have the owner show up at the closest station and file a police report.
- ARCarr 8y agoWell the call center said it was a break-in or an accident. I'm sure the Amsterdam police would come if it was an accident and someone could have been injured.
- avar 8y agoSo all I need to do to get Amsterdam police to care about bicycle theft is to install some sort of ribbon that'll get torn off if the lock gets broken, which'll be indistinguishable from the frame getting broken in half ("an accident"). Hook that all up to a GSM modem and a call center and suddenly my local cops will care about crime.
- Dayshine 8y agoAlso known as crying wolf. Don't you have insurance for theft? Kind mandatory in Amsterdam.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoPushing the problem to insure is blaming the victims, making the pay for crime.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoGiven that there's hundreds of thousands of bikes stolen a year and the chance of the theft being solved is very, very low, it's very much a "prepare for the worst and hope for the best" thing. Also, in Amsterdam, don't get a fancy bike.
- lucb1e 8y ago> When you’re not in one of the big cities, it is in fact common that police has time for this type of stuff I didn't do a nationwide survey, but you can add two places in Limburg (Maastricht and a small town near Echt) to the list of understaffed places since they also wouldn't respond to anything that was not life-threatening (literally asked whether we were threatened with our life). For added fun, you should try calling the local police on a public holiday. Better have a good reason for bothering these busy bees when they're all out on parking meter patrol!
- seriousaccount1 8y agoYou sound frustrated, but you clearly don’t know anything about how the police works. Parking fines are not issued by police, that’s a job for the municipality.
- donkeyd 8y ago> the types of crimes they deal with are much more severe. Not just that, because of tourists misbehaving everywhere, there are also just way more crimes/disturbances than in normal city/town.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoPlus the fact that the number of policemen available is set according to the number of inhabitants, not the number of actual people (e.g. tourists).