When discussing the little differences between the US and Europe in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Vincent Vega (John Travolta) tells fellow gangster Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) that ‘if you get stopped by a cop in Amsterdam, it’s illegal for them to search you. I mean, that’s a right the cops in Amsterdam don’t have.’ Tarantino, who briefly lived in Amsterdam in 1992, was evidently well acquainted with one of the city’s attractions to those interested in buying or selling things that remained illegal elsewhere.
A small and increasingly troublesome group appears to be becoming more heavily armed – and younger
In an influential 1977 Dutch court case known as the ‘Hollende kleurling’ (‘running black man’), two police officers stopped and searched a black man they had seen running from an Amsterdam café known to them as a meeting place for drug users and dealers. He kept one hand in his pocket. Although the man resisted and even bit one of the officers, their suspicion was correct: he was found to be carrying heroin. But the court ruled that his race, his running, the location and the hand in his pocket did not provide sufficient grounds for a search. The search was consequently ruled unlawful, the evidence – the heroin – excluded and the man acquitted.
Tarantino’s Vincent Vega, back in those good old 1990s, was talking about drugs. Today Dutch police have something rather more troublesome on their minds: guns. And, more specifically, when and whom they may stop and search for them.
Last week Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema of the Green-left/Labour alliance, designated two neighbourhoods in the sprawling south-eastern district of Zuidoost as a security-risk area.
This gives police temporary powers to stop and search anybody present for weapons, a practice that has been a recurring feature of law enforcement in some Dutch cities for some time, whenever things seem out of control. The decision followed 18 firearm-related incidents in roughly two months – an ‘above-average’ number, according to police.
Until midnight on 27 August, H- and K-neighbourhoods, together with Nelson Mandela Park, will be subject to preventive searches intended, in the words of the city, to ‘prevent confrontations and incidents and ensure the safety of those present as well as local residents’. Schools, youth workers and neighbourhood organisations are also being brought in to warn young people about the dangers of carrying weapons.
The city says a ‘significant proportion’ of the victims are children. The suspects appear to be barely older, although Amsterdam has not published a breakdown of the ages or backgrounds of those involved.
The Amsterdam prosecutors’ office has been sounding the alarm for some time. John Lucas, a Dutch top prosecutor, has warned of the ease with which some young people turn to knives and guns since at least 2019. At the time he pointed to the fatal stabbing of an 18-year-old rapper in Zuidoost, where a machete was used. The victim and the two suspects, aged 18 and 20, belonged to rival rap groups which had threatened one another in social media videos. They had then bumped into each other on the street by coincidence. Alexio F., who was 18 at the time of the incident, was convicted of manslaughter in 2021, while Yamanney A., then 20, was acquitted after the court ruled that his actions were defensive in nature.
At the time, the prosecutor’s concern was clear: young people were shooting and stabbing one another, and making rap videos about it. Breaking that culture of violence, he argued, must begin with parents and within communities themselves. Criminal justice can punish the worst cases; it cannot fix the culture that produces them.
Designating entire neighbourhoods as security-risk areas may make life considerably easier for Amsterdam police, who have been under political pressure from the city’s ruling leftwing coalition to avoid anything remotely resembling ethnic profiling. In the H- and K- neighbourhoods, the question is particularly sensitive. Around three-quarters of their combined population of roughly 15,000 has a non-European background. There are, among others, large Surinamese, Dutch-Caribbean and Ghanaian communities. The area is characterised by the sort of high-rise estates that have given parts of Zuidoost a distinctly banlieue-like appearance. Residents have long known which streets are best avoided – and which are safe enough.
Earlier this year, in a perfect show of virtue-signalling, Amsterdam police were forced to strictly limit random stop and searches – in a different location – and had to use a ‘selection pole’ that passers-by would tap. A light would flash at random, giving officers an ‘alibi’ to search the unfortunate person selected by the pole. The experiment has since been abandoned, following pressure from local and national politicians including justice and security minister David van Weel, a former naval officer and Nato assistant secretary-general. Critics argued that a highly professional police force like the one in Amsterdam is perfectly capable of using its intelligence and experience to identify people to search, rather than outsourcing the decision to a lottery.
All this is happening against a broader Dutch trend in which juvenile crime seems in fact to be declining. Yet a small and increasingly troublesome group appears to be becoming more heavily armed – and younger. This trend of rising firearm possession and serious violence among a section of very young people appears particularly centred around certain urban communities.
Though it would be wrong to describe the Netherlands as a whole as experiencing a general ‘wave of gun violence among youths’, Amsterdam is different. Police-recorded shooting incidents rose from 54 in 2023 to 69 in 2024 and 72 in 2025. Last year 25 people were injured and one was killed.
Whether a week of preventive searches will make much difference remains to be seen. The young men carrying the guns may simply put them away for a few days and lie low. The harder question is whether Amsterdam can persuade them to drop the guns permanently – or, better still, never pick them up in the first place.
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