More and more accidents with confused people, why aren’t they decreasing?

• Remco Andringa

  Police and Justice publisher

• Bass deVries

  Research Editor

The number of reports of accidents involving confused people continues to grow. According to a new analysis by researchers at the Ministry of Justice and Security, the police recorded 886,000 cases of this type of disorder from 2017 to 2021.

This year the number is gone according to CBS data further up, at just under 12,000 a month. Most of the accidents occur in the summer months.

As already previously detected a relatively small group is overrepresented in nuisance reports. Of the 187,000 people attributable to an incident in the five years studied, 9,700 came into contact with the police more than ten times due to confused behavior. This happens more often in large cities.

It is not for nothing that ministers Yesilgöz and Helder speak today of a “hard and complex social issue” in a letter to the House of Representatives. The cabinet has earmarked another €59 million for local initiatives to improve the situation. Funding will also be given, among other things, for the placement of mental health nurses in some control rooms, who will help the police to correctly assess the situation in the event of an accident.

Does the continuous increase in the number of reports mean that the number of confused people is increasing? And who are those nearly 10,000 who keep popping up? According to expert Bauke Koekkoek, this is not a unique group. Koekkoek is a researcher at the Police Academy and Hogeschool Arnhem en Nijmegen (HAN), and also a nurse in the crisis service and author of the book The question confused people.

Koekkoek: “To begin with, there are people without proper adjustment in life who are teetering on the lines of justice and care, who feel thrown out and thrown up all over the place, and who exhibit really annoying behavior. Destruction, severe annoyance, harassment, threats. I estimate the size of that group does not exceed a few thousand, but they represent a serious burden on the environment”.

According to him, some are entitled to compulsory admission to a mental health institution. “Others should actually go to jail, whether or not combined with treatment. The only point is that the police and the judiciary often don’t consider the crimes committed serious enough to be prosecuted.”

According to researcher Koekkoek, most of the returning group are very different people: vulnerable people, whom the police receive reports of as temporarily off the rails. For example, because they lost their homes, got into financial difficulties, stopped taking their own medicines. “They can cause such a nuisance fifteen times a month that the police have to come.”

The classic fear image of the psychotic man attacking people on the street is much less common than we think, says Koekkoek.

Instead, agents experience all kinds of complicated situations that they often don’t know what to do about. “Like that woman who reports men roaming in her garden. Upon arrival, it turns out they are not there. Officers notice that the woman is imagining it and is very suspicious. Maybe it is temporary and the police just need to this time, but it could also be part of a pattern. The arrival of the police is therefore justified, albeit for a different reason than initially thought, and it’s not so clear what needs to be done now.”

All of these incidents enter police systems as “E33,” the code for “person with confused behavior.” Koekkoek: “These numbers don’t give a good picture of the success or failure of agency efforts.” According to Koekkoek, this “fluency” makes it difficult to deal with problems with confused people, who, according to previous estimates, require at least 20% of police capacity.

The researcher finds it “very annoying” that the ratios keep increasing. “At the same time: when I walk down the street, I don’t think I see people that are much more confused.”

“What is striking is that it is new more homeless to be. There also seems to be a growing group of people who are struggling to hook up and feeling frustrated. Because they are unable to keep up with the ever-increasing pace of society due to mild intellectual disability or social and psychological problems, they lack the digital skills to keep up and find it difficult to claim and maintain social benefits. These people may also eventually come into contact with the police, but this happens more silently. I’m definitely concerned about that.”