January 29th, 2026
Politiesocioloog Jaap Timmer van de Vrije Universiteit bekeek de beelden en vindt het moeilijk te beoordelen hoe (dis)proportioneel de klappen en trappen van de agent waren. “Het ziet er natuurlijk niet fraai uit, maar we weten niet wat de omstandigheden waren en wat die agent voorafgaand voor zijn kiezen heeft gehad.” — Op de beelden is duidelijk te zien dat de vrouw die een trap krijgt, de agent filmt. Maar filmen is “zeker geen reden” voor politiegeweld, stelt Timmer. Dat vindt ook Boumanjal: “Dat heb je te dulden als agent. Het betekent niet dat het niet irritant is, maar het mag.” — Wél mogen agenten in bepaalde situaties geweld gebruiken als iemand zich wil onttrekken aan een aanhouding. De vraag is in hoeverre dat gebeurt bij de vrouw die klappen krijgt met een wapenstok. Zij lijkt weg te lopen van de agent, maar Timmer kan niet goed beoordelen of dat een poging was haar aanhouding te voorkomen.
NOS, January 28, 2026
A “sociologist of policing” working at a university is interviewed by the Dutch State News Agency. He’s asked to comment on videos taken by bystanders of an incident about possible police violence. In the video itself that starts shooting from the moment a policeman’s holding the arm of one of two young women, evidently moslim, and holding his baton in his other hand just as he uses the same hand to press in on his portophone botton. He’s walking away with one lady, presumably towards the police car. The young woman being taken away is unserious, laughing. Her friend, with her camera in her hand, seems more receptive of the situation’s gravity. She’s been filming already and now walks behind the policeman and her friend. She’s not filming as she walk, holding her phone as if she’s apping, or as if she’s asking something from the policeman while taking notes. The policeman has already looked back and now when he turns the lady behind him is just more than a leg distance away; he has to extend his to kick the lady somewhere between her knee and hips. She falls to the ground. Her arrested friend now panics, no longer laughing. His grip seems loosened and she moves in the direction of the fallen friend. This quickly ends up in an altercation between her and the policeman who hits her with the baton. Bystanders’ dismay can be heard. Other policemen, who were apparently around, now are seen in the frame, intervening. The woman (we read that she’s 23 years old) is caught again and receives some more beating as she obviously made the policeman mad.
There are other shots of overlapping moments and later instances, but us stay with this bit about which the university sociologist is requested to comment. Specifically, he is quoted as commenting on two smaller fragments of the main video. The first comment is about the policeman kicking the person who’s walking freely and chooses to follow the police. Our expert says that judging the kick (is it “abuse”, is it “racism”?) depends on the possible things the policeman might “endured before this.” We can ask what kind of a thing to endure would be relevant? This question is rhetorical indeed and defeats the sociologist’s comment at face value: whatever he might have endured must have either warranted an arrest or not an arrest. The woman who walks is obviously not arrested. Nothing warrants the kicking of a free young woman who is looking down at her phone and at that moment is not posing any threat. If she had scolded him before, will that justify physical violation later? If anything earlier would justify the kick later, when the threat or harm was over, then could he go back to her at any time, let’s in two weeks, and kick her to the ground? The kick is not, in any possible way, a later defense against a previous act, which we must conclude from the the policeman’s own act of arresting one and not the other did not legitimate arresting her in the first place. Is there any other way we should understand the way our experts is commenting and querying this incidence and the material?
The second comment given by the sociolost is on the policeman hitting the arrested 23-year old with his baton. He cannot judge, he is quoted as saying, from the video. This would depends on knowing whether she was walking away or was resisting of arrest. The woman is not running but walking and engaging with the police in solidarity with her friend. The scene is, we see some seconds later, full of policemen on bikes, and her clothes would not allow her to get very far also. But alas. We want to see what the sociologist does who is consulted as an expert and the party that holds knowledge and help us see what we see. He does not ask the question about the arrested woman, the question that he just asked about the policeman: what might she have endured before this? Is this because he’s a sociologist of policing, or what the news agency calls politiesocioloog, and not a sociologist of (moslim) arrestees? Does this mean he is uniquely specialized in inquiring what the police “endures” which apparently has to epistemic implication with regard to what other actors endure?
It is, for one part, and I’m convinced an obviously and consequential part, in the image what the arrested lady has endured before she “walks away”. At first, she’s laughing. (Is this really happening? Am I caught up in an online image now suddenly? Am I framed, now for real, by an image that always had a veneer of fiction and artificiality? Is this real?) Then her friend is kicked to the ground. Her friend is kicked and falls to the ground, by the police who’s taking her away. Let me ask you, the reader, how would you feel? Do you feel blood surging towards your head just as you read this? And what would your gut feeling tell you to do?
What the policeman might have “endured” (which, as we said, does not warrant a violent act later) must obviously remain a question limited to what he might have endured at the hands of the second woman. It is not a question of what he might have endured during his childhood or adolescence; what he might have thought of the many images that we can assume most people have seen, the most recent ones being of American police brutality; what he might have endured seeing the twin towers fall, seeing burnt and mutilated children in Gaza, or drone images of men of color “of military age” being exploded remotely; What might he have thought when the Dutch military went to war in Afghanistan to “liberate” their women and what might he have felt when the face cover some of them (who ended up in his country) was banned by law, barring them from public offices “to liberate them”, and when a prominent politician of his country published a campaign image of an old wrinkly grimacing woman in hijab, the same woman who now, still not liberated, had become the ugly enemy?
Well, the policeman cannot be seen in such these relations! Just as there is no racism in the sociologist’s society (it needs to be made plausible by the judiciary every single instance) there is also no other things that make relations between skin colors, discourses, images, fears and other affects. The question of endurance is applied only to the presumably generic situation, the few minutes of interaction between two “women” with shopping bags and smartphones in their hands and a policeman whose persona now only exists as what the women might have elicited in him to put him on the edge of his professional persona. Outside this image, now happen to be videographed, the policeman is the generic typical policeman, and the moslim veiled women are the moslim veiled women. Where is there is no image there is the stereotypical image. (Otherwise how can we judge?) You just insert your own preferred image. We do that. And the sociologists does that too. He is not presumptuous, well, no, he’s minimal. Because we can see in whose “endurance” he is interested. Now we have the stereotypical image of the kind of academic that he is!
Do we ask what the women might have endured? If we do, do we constitute isolated individuals of them just as we did with the policeman? Do we say that “no way will the violence of a policeman against your friend give you a reason, let alone legal reason, to question his authority”? (Lets be clear that in common Dutch parlance, as drawn from the law, the police may use “proportional violence”.)
The great weakness of civil conversation of citizens of any status in the modern societies that I know is that they will never go any further than contradicting each others’ argument. Perhaps we can count on one hand the number of people in this civilization who can climb up the second half of Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement. But the Graham himself has been blind to the mountain to which Gilles Deleuze pointed, the image of thought that has stupefied us all, holding us from thinking in terms of anything (whether we use the terms to confirms, rejects or refute) but those terms that bring us back to our failure.
Let us cut out the question that is relevant for us. Legal parties are negotiating evidence. What can we expect of the university sociologist of policing, that is, of the expert who is brought in to help the public form an opinion/judgment about an incidence? The journalist’s interest is first all, not a question like that of “what can we learn from this?” or “what does this say about our current society”? No such interesting questions. The question is “can we recognize this as the same in the series over which two different group never will agree and of which we know what every party will say?”
The sociologist is asked a question that is usually posed to legal experts. It is a question of guilt and everyone is well-trained in roleplaying in it, with a tv remote or smartphone in hand. He neither rejects nor repurposes the question in accordance to his discipline. His overall answer is this: when “all” the evidence is there, one can judge. What constitutes “all” itself becomes an enigma, remains unexplicated. The answer further propagates the common confusion about who judges, about the institutional of judgement. He does not defend his expertise, which is not law but sociology. A sociology which we might, naively but tellingly, expect to be a study of ‘police society’ whose relationship to the judiciary institution, for example, would be more or less interesting one. We can guess why everyone wants to play the judge here (the journalist asks the judiciary question, expects the “public” to be wanting of judgement, the sociologist plays along in confidently filling in the journalist about what is needed to judge. The image of science that most of us inherit is the Kantian figure of the scientist as judge, and the figure of the emancipated citizen as the person who is able to pronounce rational judgment is welded to this same Kantian image. Anyway, to imagine ourselves as judges, and in order to be able to move on already before the real judge’s indictment and read/judge the next incident, we have entertain a confusion about the who-ness of the judge (in technical terms the enunciative properties of the legal utterance).
At the same time, the following is obvious: there is a sociology that is mobilized in the sociologists’ commentary that enables the expert to produce either the judgement or the qualification of what is required for judgment (what did the policeman endure at the hands of the women?). The kind of society of judges that is propagated here is that, to the surprise of no one, an isolate-individual society without history, without confluence of actions from one scene to another, of sovereignty of individual types and independence of occurrences. The scenes are as generic as the individuals acting on its stage. Generic and yet the question that might explain their actions is somehow posed asymmetrically. Everyone plays along: the journalist receives the question of endurance, the epistemological sympathy of the sociologist for the policeman, notes it down and reports it. The journalist, just like the sociologist evinces no surprise when the latter suggests that there could be something that might justify the policeman kicking the woman, which however would not have warranted arresting her. Here, relationship between the journalist and the expert must also not be questioned. They are independent. In several sense: one expert is any expert to ask that and there is no question of explaining or justifying why this expert was approached. Fill in your stereotype of the generic expert. The journalist does not scrutinize the expert’s answers. That is not part of the relationship between one who asks to report and the one who knows. Everything is as if one is filling a form. There is no surprise, which is why we can already judge and place the incidence and what we know of in the same old series. Both the presumptions of the sociologist that enable him to comment and the relationship between the journalist and the sociologist as the text exudes are consistent: we live in the image of thought, we recognize everything. Everything remains fictional (until one day it happens to us).
Let us anticipate the retort that such a serious and critical reply to one article written for the lowest denominator reader is not warranted. The expert surely couldn’t have taken this as seriously as his research paper that he needs to finish. Well, if a motorcyclist crashes his motorcycle sliding out the garage, should he be permitted to drive on the street and the highway? The low level of seriousness with which would be asked to take such news adds to the fiction and the incivility. Those young women themselves underestimated the power of racism just as we underestimate how our media ecology polluted with more-or-less formulations has become a pillar of a negligent and destructive society.
Let us then sympathize with the inconsistency of journalistic and expert discourse for a moment. After all, the want to hold a balanced view and both the sociologist and the journalist are deferring judgement rather than judging! This itself amounts to a misreading of their discourse, itself based on the view that we should have a balanced view of their what they say (and “fair” also, for God almighty’s sake!). But surely, here the will for a balanced view is prioritized over what is seen in the image and the criterion of consistency. The balanced view is not balanced. It is asymmetrical. One party (should I really name this one party?) almost never misses out of receiving the “benefit of the doubt.” But the norm of balanced view, even if more consistently applied, is dogmatic when it has to deny both what is one seeing (the second woman poses no threat) and the things that one can very safely assume bind persons in a society (the women are friends and feel solidarity at forcible separation, first go along, then, when kicked have reason for distrust).
An big older man carries away a young woman with force in bright daylight! The law allows him to “proportionally” violate them physically. The reality in which we live is not balanced and is not civilized. A civilized image of violation does not contribute to civilization but is an element of incivility.
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But now again, and more generally, what can we expect of our universities and epistemic authorities? These institutions have been subject to a hollowing out now for a few decades.