‘You don’t belong in this country’: Police kick, use racist slurs against Muslim women in Netherlands

A video circulating on social media shows two Muslim women being kicked and hit by a police officer in the Netherlands’ Utrecht. According to the Dutch News, the women later made a formal complaint about their treatment, their lawyer told the television current affairs programme Nieuwsuur on Wednesday evening.Footage circulating on social media showed one of the women, wearing a black hijab, laughing as she was led away by a police officer while another woman filmed the incident. The officer then turned and kicked the woman holding the phone and hit the woman he was leading several times with his truncheon as she apparently tried to get away. She was eventually dragged to a police car as the women’s shopping was scattered around amid overturned police bikes.The two women also accused the police officer of using racist language by telling them “you don’t belong in this country”, lawyer Anis Boumanjal told Nieuwsuur. Both women received medical treatment, he said.The incident happened on Monday in the Hoog Catharijne shopping centre next to the railway station in Utrecht.Police issued a statement on Wednesday saying they were investigating the incident. “We realise that the video has an impact and raises questions, including about racism,” the statement said.It was not yet clear what led police to intervene, but the woman who was being led away was charged with insulting a police officer. She was 23 and came from the Wadden island of Texel.Claims that one of the women had been involved in shoplifting were “entirely incorrect,” Boumanjal said in a statement later on Thursday.Erasmus University researcher Jair Schalkwijk told RTL Nieuws that it was difficult to say in what context the violence would have been justified. “I consider the kick and the use of the truncheon to be out of proportion because the police could have dealt with the incident without using violence,” he said.Dutch police are allowed to use their truncheon and pepper spray when someone is resisting arrest as long as this is a “secondary” measure and “in proportion”.