‘Impunity for police brutality must end’

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The case of Pieter Aerts, the young Antwerp man who died after a police intervention gone wrong, is being reported sparsely these days. But there are many stories of verbal and physical police violence that never make it to the media. They remain invisible and are not recorded anywhere.

‘Yet you shouldn’t ask young people from the working-class neighbourhoods of Brussels about it’, says Ayoub Ben Abdeslam, youth worker at Foyer vzw in Molenbeek. He experienced gratuitous verbal abuse himself when he was 17. ‘You only have to have experienced it once or twice to develop an aversion to the police.’

It is also difficult for victims and their families to speak out about it. In public, but also within the family. For years, Kalthoem (a pseudonym to protect her identity and that of her son. Her real name is known to the editor.) could not utter the word ‘police’ in front of her son, afraid he would erupt in anger again.

‘You know well enough that I cannot listen to that word!’ he said the few times she brought it up in an unguarded moment. He was barely 14 when he was harshly interrogated by the police. Meanwhile, he is 30, but the subject is still taboo.

On a beautiful spring day in 2009, the son and three schoolmates decided to walk together to a Brussels park instead of going straight home. ‘My son walked in front with a friend, followed by the other two friends. He was wearing earphones. Suddenly he saw people walking behind one of the friends. The latter had just smashed a car window. The police were called in and he was arrested.’

‘During interrogation, he told them who he was with. The three other friends, including my son, were all arrested’, says Kalthoem.

Naked search

‘The police came to our house and turned his room upside down. They found nothing, no stolen items or drugs. They took him for questioning. The police officer I saw when we came to pick him up was very friendly. He advised my son to focus on his studies and his future.’

‘But when we got home, my son told me that he had been slapped in the face with every question, and before he had a chance to answer. He also said he was taken to a very dirty room. "This is where you will end up if you commit stupidity," the officer warned. The other friends were also slapped in the face during their interrogation. They told how hard those slaps were and laughed about it. They were teenagers.’

That same year, the son encountered two more crackdowns with the police. Kalthoem tells it with a mixture of shame, fear, anger and guilt. ‘We live in the city centre. He was 14 and I thought there was no need to take him to school and pick him up again. He could take the bus, I thought.’

‘Years after the incident, he told me that he was also searched naked that day’, she continues. That he was beaten and searched naked is something she finds disproportionate and unacceptable. She does not have a good word to say about the security forces. Of course, there was not a thought in her mind to protest or complain. Nor would she know where or to whom she could do so. Ideally, she would like to erase the whole event from her memory.

Victims of police brutality can complain... to the police. ‘That is not easy’, says Joke Blockx, director of the Human Rights League.

‘Moreover, it is a complicated system about which little information is provided. On the television news, there is no mention of the number you can call to make a complaint. You can do that at the Committee P, which oversees, among other things, the functioning of police forces. But the problem in that complaint system is the lack of independence. In the end it is fellow officers who investigate complaints against police officers.’

His annual report shows that the Committee P investigates only a limited number of complaints. The remaining complaints go to the internal monitoring department at the police zone concerned. ‘What we need is an independent body that assesses the police and not a body of the police itself’, Blockx explains, ‘AND we need judges who test complaints against our rule of law, human rights and democracy.’

Non-prosecution is impunity

The cases that do reach the media are usually those with a fatal outcome. Consider the case of Mawda, the two-year-old girl who died in 2018 after police officers chased and shot at the van she was in, along with her parents and other refugees. Or Lamine Bangoura, the 27-year-old man who died during an eviction. Or Adil (19), who died after a police car collided with his moped during a pursuit following a coronagraph compliance check. The list of victims with fatalities during or after police intervention is getting longer and longer.

The latest story on that list is that of Sourour Abouda, a 46-year-old woman who died in a police cell on 12 January 2023. According to the police, Sourour took her own life, but her family does not believe this version and has filed a complaint. In early April, the police district concerned was referred to the correctional court. A first in dealing with complaints of police brutality, and it is seen as a first but insufficient step in the fight for justice for the victims. None of the individual officers involved at the time are prosecuted.

In such cases, they often do not even make it to trial. ‘We see a pattern here’, says Joke Blockx. ‘In 99 per cent of the cases of indictment, the chambers refer the case to the correctional or other competent court, unless they involve police officers. Then the council chamber rules in favour of dismissing the procecution. This is a structural problem.’

It is this issue of systematic non-prosecution, and hence impunity, that prompted the League to take a civil action in two cases: Mehdi Bouda’s and Pieter Aerts’. In both cases, police intervention ended in the deaths of those involved.

‘It is quite unusual for us to act as a civil party’, Joke Blockx stressed. ‘In our democracy, the police have a monopoly on the use of force, and we do not underestimate the work of the police at all. They have to take very quick decisions at crucial moments. But there are protocols that the police must follow before proceeding to the use of force.’

‘In the Mehdi case, they waited 11 hours before informing the family, even though they knew very quickly that the boy had died. A search took place in the first five minutes after the collision, but no first aid was given. Searching is not something you do just like that. A security search must also comply with the principles of legality, necessity and proportionality.’

‘When illegitimate police behaviour is not prosecuted or punished, we speak of norm blurring’, Blockx continued. ‘We have therefore appealed against the council chamber’s decision to exclude the officers from prosecution. We hope the indictment chamber will refer them to the court and realise the importance of prosecution and conviction. Because if a trial comes of it, the debate, à charge and à décharge, will be conducted publicly. This strengthens the public’s feeling that victims are being listened to and that there is such a thing as justice and impartiality. Moreover, the media can report on it and we can educate the public.’

Different kind of police

The fight against police brutality is mainly waged by victims’ families and activists. Moreover, it is not a popular struggle that garners much public acclaim. Both spokespersons of organisations standing up for victims of police violence and activists are therefore very cautious and nuanced. ‘It is some within the police who are guilty of excessive and gratuitous violence’, Ayoub Ben Abdeslam stresses.

‘Often the fight against police violence is seen as a fight against the police, while this is not true’, Joke Blockx adds. ‘It is important that we guard human rights in our democracy.’

‘We are not against the police’, also stresses Latifa Elmcabeni, co-founder of the Collectif des Madrés, an organisation that originated in Saint-Gilles to denounce invisible police violence. ‘On the contrary, we need the police’.

Numerous initiatives have been launched in recent years to ‘improve the relationship between young people and the police’, but the problem is bigger than that. Child Focus, which occasionally receives complaints when victims are minors, believes that police training needs to be reformed. The League for Human Rights also sees shortcomings in training, and equal opportunities centre Unia points to the need for more diversity within police forces.

But the prevailing political discourse does not help. The emphasis is on more security and more police. Yet people in working-class neighbourhoods also want more police, but of a different kind. But that requires political will. ‘Racism exists at the highest level of power’, says Elmcabeni, ‘it is there that it has to change.’

‘There are neighbourhoods that are left to their own devices and have become unsafe’, says Ayoub Ben Abdeslam. ‘There is delinquency and drugs are openly dealt. The rich from other neighbourhoods come here to get supplies, but it is the residents of our neighbourhoods who pay the price.’

‘People need to understand that socio-economic and cultural exclusion create vulnerability and lead to delinquency. That exclusion starts from kindergarten. And police violence increases vulnerability’, Elmcabeni concludes. ‘That has to change.’

(Originally published in Dutch on April 25, 2025)