Amsterdam to create 'scum villages'

[mr friendly guy]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... lages.html

Amsterdam to create 'scum villages'
Amsterdam is to create "Scum villages" where nuisance neighbours and anti-social tenants will be exiled from the city and rehoused in caravans or containers with "minimal services" under constant police supervision.


Holland's capital already has a special hit squad of municipal officials to identify the worst offenders for a compulsory six month course in how to behave.
Social housing problem families or tenants who do not show an improvement or refuse to go to the special units face eviction and homelessness.
Eberhard van der Laan, Amsterdam's Labour mayor, has tabled the £810,000 plan to tackle 13,000 complaints of anti-social behaviour every year. He complained that long-term harassment often leads to law abiding tenants, rather than their nuisance neighbours, being driven out.
"This is the world turned upside down," the mayor said at the weekend.
The project also involves setting up a special hotline and system for victims to report their problems to the authorities.
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The new punishment housing camps have been dubbed "scum villages" because the plan echoes a proposal from Geert Wilders, the leader of a populist Dutch Right-wing party, for special units to deal with persistent troublemakers.
"Repeat offenders should be forcibly removed from their neighbourhood and sent to a village for scum," he suggested last year. "Put all the trash together."
Whilst denying that the new projects would be punishment camps for "scum", a spokesman for the city mayor stressed that the special residential units would aim to enforce good behaviour.
"The aim is not to reward people who behave badly with a new five-room home with a south-facing garden. This is supposed to be a deterrent," he said.
The tough approach taken by Mr van der Laan appears to jar with Amsterdam's famous tolerance for prostitution and soft drugs but reflects hardening attitudes to routine anti-social behaviour that falls short of criminality.
There are already several small-scale trial projects in the Netherlands, including in Amsterdam, where 10 shipping container homes have been set aside for persistent offenders, living under 24-hour supervision from social workers and police.
Under the new policy, from January next year, victims will no longer have to move to escape their tormentors, who will be moved to the new units.
A team of district "harassment directors" have already been appointed to spot signals of problems and to gather reports of nuisance tenants.
The Dutch Parool newspaper observed that the policy was not a new one. In the 19th century, troublemakers were moved to special villages in Drenthe and Overijssel outside Amsterdam. The villages were rarely successful, becoming sink estates for the lawless.
"We have learned from the past," said the mayor's spokesman. "A neighbourhood can deal with one problem family but if there are more the situation escalates."

Can some European members shed light on this?

[Zaune]

Oh, yeah, that couldn't possibly backfire.

My guess is the mayor has an election to fight soon and just wants to look tough on crime. The European Court of Human Rights will shoot it down in flames even if the city council don't.

[Irbis]

Shot how?

In many countries, communal blocks with cheap housing are often divided as being seen as 'scum' and 'clean' destinations, with the troublemakers being sent to one, normal families to other. Yes, it backfires because there is not enough of the first to fill whole block, so peaceful poor families are being sent to devastated, literally shitted over houses with almost-criminal dens, and you create ghettos perpetuating attitude with this, but no one shoots it down.

[Spoonist]

Can some European members shed light on this?

A quick wiki search later...

He is known for his strong opposition to multiculturalism. During his appointment as Minister of Housing and Integration, there has been an increase in the suppression of minority (immigrant) cultures in the Netherlands. Turkish-language and Arabic-language TV channels have been dropped off basic Cable TV offerings, and politicians have actively been discouraged against campaigning in minority languages. In the local elections, politicians were criticized by Mr van der Laan for distributing election leaflets in minority languages and in some cases leaflets were collected. Due to this anti-Multicultural stand in a multicultural city, van der Laan has been accused of hypocrisy by his own PvdA party's main candidate. Ironically he was subsequently appointed (in The Netherlands mayors are not elected) as the mayor of the multicultural city of Amsterdam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eberhard_van_der_Laan

That should about clear things up a bit...

[Simon_Jester]

Shot how?

In many countries, communal blocks with cheap housing are often divided as being seen as 'scum' and 'clean' destinations, with the troublemakers being sent to one, normal families to other. Yes, it backfires because there is not enough of the first to fill whole block, so peaceful poor families are being sent to devastated, literally shitted over houses with almost-criminal dens, and you create ghettos perpetuating attitude with this, but no one shoots it down.

This ought to be solvable by subdividing the housing blocks more finely...

I'm honestly curious; is the alternative better? Is it better to have 10 blocks with one guy each who pisses in the stairwell than to have one block with ten of them?

Because as a blunt reality, there are a certain number of people who simply do not know how to play by the rules in modern society. Many of them are at heart decent human beings, but either they never learned to control themselves* or they come from an environment where that's normal behavior.

Figuring out how to solve this problem might actually noticeable improve social mobility, along with other things- one big obstacle to the social advancement of the poor is the habits they pick up that make them look crude or ignorant when viewed through the eyes of majority culture.

Obviously you perpetuate the problem if you have designated dumping grounds for all the trolls and sociopaths. But equally obviously, everyone else would rather have some space separating them from said trolls and sociopaths. What do you think the best way to accomodate that is?
________________

*As in, never learned to not piss on the stairs, not stalk the neighbors, not cause sanitation problems by neglecting the cleanliness of their space and belongings...

[Siege]

As far as I can tell the Telegraph article in the OP is an almost literal translation of this article from a free Dutch daily that I'd personally say is a suspect source. It's not quite British tabloid level nonsense, but it's definitely right-leaning, sensationalist, and not the most reliable of news sources, as evidenced by this article which is most favorably described as reaching and specious.

What's happening is that Amsterdam is formulating a new approach to cases of extreme anti-social behaviour, specifically bullying and intimidation. There's been a rash of widely publicized cases lately of people being all but bullied out of neighborhoods (the city specifically cites a Moroccan family that was bullied for four years and finally moved out of their neighborhood because the father testified in a shooting case) and Amsterdam aims to prevent this from happening again in the future, as is its duty. It bears pointing out that this new approach is a fairly major program with contributions from case teams that confer with social organizations, housing corporations, the police, a hotline, the whole nine yards, all aimed at identifying problem cases and doing something about them.

Now, in absolute worst case scenarios, when the authorities' attempts to resolve the situation fail, a person or family can be forcibly removed from their houses. This is nothing new; the law has permitted this for some time. But in the past these cases were usually transferred to another neighborhood which, to the surprise of nobody ever, rarely resolved the anti-social tendencies of the people involved. It simply displaced the problem from one neighborhood to another. What the city aims to do is transfer the worst cases to a location of ten living units. Apparently the facility will be run like a Danish initiative called 'Skaeve Huse' which I'm not familiar with, but the goal according to the city is restorative rather than punitive. For those interested and conversant in Dutch a PDF outlining the program can be found here.

I'm no social worker so I have no idea if this approach is liable to work, but applying the term 'scum village' to a facility that will at maximum contain ten families is highly misleading. Firstly because there already exist a spectrum of voluntary and involuntary commitment facilities ranging from assisted living to psychiatric imprisonment; this would simply be another focused specifically on highly anti-social behavior. And secondly because the term 'scum village' in this case is a translation of the Dutch word 'tuigdorp', a phrase introduced by the right-wing PVV party lead by the ever so charming Geert Wilders who is, in essence, your typical dreary right-wing soapbox orator with aspirations of segregating the undesirables. His demagoguery and this plan may share a few superficial resemblances but they are in essence two separate things and are best kept that way for clarity's sake.

On a final note, I'm not a particularly big fan of mayor Van der Laan, but it's worth pointing out that the wiki article doesn't do justice to him, the complexities of Dutch concession-based parliamentary politics, or the role of a Dutch mayor. The elected city council holds the actual power, not the nonelected mayor who is essentially its figurehead chairman. Irrespective of whether Van der Laan endorses this plan or not (I imagine he does) it's fallacious to attribute it specifically to him because he didn't introduce it and he couldn't introduce it even if he wanted to. The city council greenlit this program, which it bears repeating consists of a lot more than just fencing the bad people into the projects. It's shoddy journalism on part of Spits, and shoddy journalism on part of the Telegraph, both of which are saddening, but neither of which is surprising.

[Ahriman238]

Well, I've never heard of anyone trying to segregate all the assholes from the general population before.

Of course, this begs the obvious question of who chooses people to live in the crappy apartments with neighbors who play loud music at night and piss on your door stoop. And I have a sinking feeling it will be the bigot mayor or someone chosen by him.

Yeah, I don't really see any way this ends well, except "asshole politician's career hilariously self-destructs for even suggesting it."

[Siege]

The reason you "don't see this end well" is because you are completely clueless about this particular topic. If you possessed even the tiniest quantum of understanding of Dutch politics, the function of mayor, the position of the mayor of Amsterdam, or even simply what this particular plan is and is trying to achieve, then you would know that suggesting Van der Laan's position might "hilariously self-destruct" over it is a particularly idiotic thing to say. And I must say that calling him a bigot doesn't do much for your credibility either.