Street Encounters

Abstract

Research in American cities conveys a picture of police-citizen contacts as being largely generated by citizens rather than the police, as concerning a high proportion of transactions unrelated to crime, and as being most usually handled in a routine and businesslike manner (Reiss, 1971). In order to see if these conclusions were also valid in Amsterdam I kept a record over a period of four months (August 1974 and January–March 1975) of ‘significant’ encounters observed between uniformed policemen and members of ‘the public’ in the centre of Amsterdam. Two basic categories were not recorded: the numerous people who asked the policemen for information, and passing admonitions to cyclists and pedestrians. The former category was so frequent on foot-patrol in the summer period that it would have enormously inflated the number of contacts and enhanced the picture of the policeman’s ‘social’ role. This sort of tourist information, which was always given politely and most often in English or German, might be sought fifteen to twenty times in a two-hour patrol along the Damrak and surrounding area. I did not consider such contacts significant and left out these short, trivial and basically information-giving encounters (similarly for people who asked the time, or for the nearest toilet, etc.). An almost universal phenomenon in Amsterdam is the contempt that cyclists have for the law, and many young people cycle without lights or consider themselves exempt from observing traffic-lights.