Amsterdam has an image of tolerance, built up over the centuries, as
refugees from religious strife and ethnic persecution found a haven here,
and sailors brought the latest trends to the city from their travels across
the seven seas. We don't have a statue of liberty to prove it, but there's a
war monument, a big pole, on Dam Square. Libertarians are supposed to be
able to do all the things here that you couldn't do elsewhere, in a
reasonably permissive, chilled-out atmosphere which emphasises good sense,
individualism, compassion and pleasure. However... the awful news is that
knifing and shooting incidents in the Red Light District and the old Jewish
quarter caused two deaths yesterday. On the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, a man was
knifed in his neck - he walked bleeding into a shop and died leter in
hospital. In coffeeshop "Real Thing V" in the Goudsbloemstraat, the 41-year
old proprietor was shot dead by a group of men who presumably wanted to rob
him. In two separate knifing incidents in the South-East and North of the
city, another two victims of knifings were seriously wounded. The two
murders bring the total number of deaths in the city this year to 44, as
against 25 deaths in the whole of last year. We are not just talking about
wounding here, but killing.
When faced with these Wild West incidents, Dutch people often refer to
"American conditions" (""Amerikaanse toestanden") but actually, New York
City experienced a 10% drop in homicides last year ("only" 82 murders in
Manhattan, which never went below 100 murders a year for most of the 20th
century, and "only" 575 murders in the five districts of NYC). By contrast,
there were some 262 murders in Washington DC last year. "We were the murder
capital runner-up in 2001, we won the title in 2002, and 2003 is already
being heralded as a record year for death in the District," commented John
Aravosis, a cofounder of SafeStreetsDC.com. "All of this proves that this
year's 21% jump in homicides is hardly a temporary fluke." DC has a total
population of 570,898, as against 733,600 in Amsterdam, so, proportionally
Amsterdam is still doing vastly better, one might argue. Even so, the
statistics cannot never capture the disenchantment and disgust which many
Amsterdam citizens, including myself, feel about the increasing number of
murders.
Of course Dutch apprehensions about "Amerikaanse toestanden" are to some
extent justified: the overall murder rate in the USA - is higher than in
most other places in the world, and you are also more likely to be killed by
almost any other method in the USA. The risk of murder in Washington is
about 170 times greater than in Brussels. Perhaps before trying to solve the
world's problems, we ought to take a better look in our own backyard ?
Note: the US overall murder rate was 7.3 per 100,000 in 1969, at the zenith
of the long post-war economic boom. Dare I say it, could it be that the
incidence of murder is directly related to wealth and poverty levels ?
J.
