Under pressure from top officials from the Ministry of Justice and Security, the Justice and Security Inspectorate withdrew a critical report in September 2020 about the inadequate control of weapons licenses. As a result, the minister and the House of Representatives were not informed at the time about problems and staff shortages at the police departments that issue the permits.
This is the conclusion of the Court of Audit in its investigation published last week ‘Look at inspection reports‘. The inspectorate is independent of the ministry on paper, but in this case a department of the ministry managed to get an almost completed investigation off the table.
Also read: The critical report on the weapons licenses that did not come
The Inspectorate announced on 2 March 2020 that it would for the fourth time since 2002 investigate the so-called Chief of Police, the checks that the police perform on the issue of firearms licences. That is a politically sensitive file since the massacre that Tristan van der Vlis caused in 2011 in Alphen aan de Rijn. He had wrongly received a firearms license, it turned out later.
The recent investigation was almost ready by the end of the summer of 2020 and described the stitches that “police and the responsible organizational units of the Ministry of Justice and Security” had dropped in increasing the “personnel capacity” of the responsible police teams.
After criticism from the ministry that the inspectorate should not have carried out the investigation, the report was not published. “The draft report has never reached the minister,” writes the Court of Audit, even though former minister Ferd Grapperhaus (Justice and Security, CDA) promised to send the report to the House at the beginning of 2020 as soon as it was ready.
The Court of Auditors calls it ‘problematic’ that just before the publication of the inspection report there could be a discussion ‘about whether the Inspectorate was allowed to investigate this’ and that the Inspectorate subsequently decided not to ‘publish the investigation’. An additional problem is that the report also dealt with ‘efforts from the core department’ – the official top of Justice and Security.
The course of events surrounding the report shows similarities with the so-called WODC affair at the end of 2017, in which policy officials from the department adjusted the results of investigations with conclusions that were unwelcome to them.
A spokesman for the inspectorate said it was an internal decision not to publish the report. According to her, the independence of the supervision is not in question, and it was ‘stupid’ to conduct an investigation into the staffing capacity of the police, when the inspectorate had ‘no authority’ to do so. “Unfortunately, that only became clear in an official conversation with the police and security regions directorate,” said the spokesperson.
The ministry agrees. “There has been no pressure whatsoever on the inspectorate to resume the report. That was the decision of the inspectorate itself,” said a spokesperson for justice.
In the end, it was the Court of Auditors that publicly drew attention to the ongoing problems with the weapons licensing teams. These are still structurally understaffed, the Court of Audit concludes. There are fifty full-time police inspectors short, ‘the majority of police personnel are still insufficiently and demonstrably trained’ and paper files are still being used.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of January 31, 2022
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