The team of Controle Alt Delete advocates for fair and effective law enforcement and against racial profiling and excessive use of force by law enforcement officials in the Netherlands.
Controle Alt Delete (CAD) is an initiative of IZI Solutions. Our team consists of full time professionals, volunteers and people who are our eyes and ears. One of our main partners is Amnesty International the Netherlands. We closely cooperate with other human rights organizations and grassroots movements.
We are independent and have full autonomy in choosing who to cooperate with. This means no entity tells CAD what to do. The boundaries are set by the law and by what we consider to be decent. With regards to institutional actors such as the police and the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, we serve as a critical interlocutor that sets policy agendas and provides solutions. Anyone who embraces our mission is our ally.
Our mission is to stop racial profiling by law enforcement, to secure transparent government accountability on its use of force, and to limit its use of force overall.
We provide critical, constructive and honest reflections on social developments within law enforcement organisations. We organise meetings, (co)produce critical films, hold lectures, give trainings, write blogs, offer constructive solutions to facilitate policy change and assist victims wherever possible.
Our approach is bottom-up, we take citizens' experiences as a starting point. They come to us through our hotline with experiences of police brutality and racial profiling. We embark on advocacy: we focus on changing the policies and structures in which officers work. We organize campaigns: we carry out campaigns in collaboration with citizens, NGO’s and journalists to build up maximum pressure on politicians and law enforcement.
Together with our partners and many Dutch citizens, we got law enforcement to formally recognize that racial profiling occurs more than incidentally. This resulted in police drafting policy stating overrepresentation in crime statistics cannot be a cause for police stops. Additionally, our concerns regarding officer awareness resulted in the Police Academy performing a study on how many officers are aware of the new policy.
Pressure by Controle Alt Delete has also resulted in Police and Ministry of Justice keeping track of the number of civilians that yearly die during police actions. Currently an investigation is ongoing into the number of fatalities that occurred as a result of stops by police. We also convinced police to monitor the number of officers being persecuted for violent crime offenses. These measures all contribute to transparent accountability on the use of force.
Other accomplishments include our initiative to have nearly every Dutch political party (including governing parties) to commit to stop the use of race as an indicator for fraud prevention. We were also able to improve the legal position of people who file complaints regarding racial profiling. The National Ombudsman has shifted the burden of proof to law enforcement: they will have to prove there was no racial profiling, rather than the other way around.
Contact
You can contact Controle Alt Delete through e-mail via info@controlealtdelete.nl or by phone via: 0031(0)85-4898985 (Monday – Friday between 10.00 – 18.00).
