Not sure if this would interest anyone but in case anyone would like a little history lesson to learn more about how our police system was reformed to what it is now. Along witth how an infamous gang case from the 80s that has now been revived in full swing due to new developments has played a key role in the police reforms that resulted in our current law enforcement system as we know it today, as well as other major cases that played a role:
Belgium is currently going through a bit of its own conspiracy theory involving an infamous old gang case. This case was also instrumental in our police reform, more on that below. Back in the early to mid 80s there was a gang, dubbed the "Nijvel (town) Gang" or alternatively the "Brabant Killers". Throughout the early and mid-80s they committed a string of high profile robberies that resulted in 28 homicides and 40 injuries.
The gang consisted of several core members, nicknamed "The Giant", "The Killer" and the "Old Man". Very little is known about the power structure of this gang, though The Giant was assumed to be a key leading figure. The Killer's nickname speaks for itself and he was the primary individual committing the execution-style homicides. The Old Man was presumed to be the getaway driver.
The Killer committed most of said homicides, including executing women and children in a very bloody grocery store robbery that resulted in a mere ~$6000 loot.
However nobody was ever caught despite the high and frequent string of robberies throughout those years and the very violent aspect of them. To this day, there is still no real conclusive evidence to even identify the members of this brutal gang. The case has remained open for all these years but last week there was a new development in the case. A man came forward and stated that his brother confessed to him on his deathbed that he was "The Giant" in that notorious gang. This confession actually happened 2 years ago but the brother stated he was scared and didn't know what to do with it. The brother matches up almost perfectly with sketches of The Giant, his name was already in the case files but without any conclusive proof, and he was in a special unit of our now dissolved Paramilitary Police.
In light of this new development, the case has gone back into the national news cycle and as of yesterday the investigation has been thoroughly reinforced with much more investigators from various departments. Including our "Commitee P" agency, which is a federal agency that specifically investigates police misconduct and prosecutes police wrongdoing. Despite this case technically not being part of their job description, they are also working on the case due to their familiarity with the case from those theories about paramilitary police involvement. It has now been reported that the man who confessed to being The Giant on his deathbed happened to be away from work in his special unit of the paramilitary police during those robberies.
The part about the paramilitary police is where the conspiracy theories come in, though I don't believe that the key elements are unfounded or deserve negative connotations associated with the term conspiracy theory. As you will read throughout this post, our police has had an extremely bad reputation throughout the 80s to early 2000.
Throughout the case file, it has long been assumed that there was significant involvement of members of paramilitary police, including their special forces unit, in both the gang itself and the subsequent investigation. While the paramilitary police (for the sake of simplicity I'll refer to them as PMP from now) has always had a generally bad reputation for various reasons, it was the during the 80s that the PMP's stature really took a nosedive. While the Nijvel Gang already put them in a very bad light, there was also another high profile case in the 80s in which both the conduct of the PMP and potential high level involvement was questioned in a terrorism cell case. This was known as the CCC case, loosely translated to "Combative Commmunist Cells", a Marxist terrorist organization. They committed a series of terrorist attacks in the early 80s, including the theft of 800 kilograms of dynamite from a very secure location and subsequently detonating a large amount on a NATO pipeline. While 4 members were eventually arrested in 1985 by judicial police and the attacks stopped, there was also many questions about how those 4 men managed to steal 800kg of dynamite from such a secure location and use some of it to detonate on a NATO pipeline with such high professionalism. The identity and radical beliefs of these exact 4 individuals had also been in intelligence records since 1978.
The Nijvel Gang case combined with the CCC case resulted in the first step of police reform in 1992. At that time we had 3 police organizations; the paramilitary police, the judicial branch police and also the local police departments. The PMP was demilitarized and reformed into civil police. Along with the removal of all their military functions, they were also no longer supervised by the our Defense Department. In essence, they turned to an additional local police organization. Over here they retained the same name (paramilitary police was not the name we used for them but just a translation of their function), commonly referred to as the Gendarmerie. However in spite of the reform, it really didn't do much in terms of improving the gendarmeries' terribly stained reputation.
Around this time, the "Committee P" agency was also established, though as you'll read later it certainly wasn't the agency it is today.
Committee P stands for Permanent Oversight Committee On Policing, its function rougly explained in one of the above paragraphs.
I was born in 1994 and lived in a small rural town. We had a relatively small local gendarmerie department in our town and the original local police organization in the largest town of our district/community. (Feel free to skip the next paragraph if deemed unnecessary)
Not sure which of those 2 terms would be more correct, presumably district. While the term we use translates into "community", district or "community district" probably explains it better. For simplicity, my "district" consists of 3 towns. 2 smaller rural towns and a slightly larger town. The "district" is generally named after the largest town. I'll use my district as an example; I grew up in town A and now live in town B, however town C is the head town for our district and my town falls under the collective banner of the (town C name) district. While our towns do have their own individual town councils, the work they do is very minimal and the head town of our district does the real work. In our local elections, we vote for the mayor and council representatives of town C, who has jurisdiction over our whole district. Individuals from any of our towns can run for those offices of course but the districts have a centralized governing body.
As a final note, local police jurisdiction districts are a bit different. For example, at this time there is no police department in my town. Though it's not really necessary either way. If police needs to come to my town, they are called here from the local department in town C or the head department of our police district, which is located in a large town about 15km or so and is outside of our "Town C district".
I know I probably made this sound a whole lot more complicated than intended. Some parts of our language/terminology don't translate very well.
So back to the previous paragraph, in the town I grew up in we had a small local gendarmerie department but there was also the head department of the original local police in that larger town mentioned in the above paragraph. As you can probably imagine, this tended to result in conflict between the gendarmerie and the local police. In my experience, they both had strong negative views about each side and there were frequent communication problems. All this while the gendarmerie still had that black cloud of the 80s hanging over their reputation. I remember when I was little that the common idea was that local police = good and gendarmerie = bad. Even though the local police department was much further away than the gendarmerie department in the middle of our town, people often said to just call the local police instead of the gendarmerie if there was an inssue that required police.
That's how our dynamic between those 2 police organizations worked, just generally quite toxic. I can't say to what extend this was the case in most other areas but from what I do know it sure was common.
Our final police reform that has turned our police organizations into what they are today happened in 2001. Once again, the gendarmerie's reputation played a big role in that, though all 3 police organizations were heavily scrutinized. This was due to the terrible handling of the Marc Dutroux case. Dutroux was a child molester and later turned out to have killed a number of girls as well.
In 1989, Marc Dutroux and his wife were convicted of the abduction and rape of 5 young girls, the youngest being only 11 years old. He was released from prison after 3 years out of a 13 and a half year sentence. The parole board even received a letter from Dutroux's mother in 1992 that she was concerned that her son was imprisoning girls in his house again.
He had also managed to convince a psychiatrist that he was psychiatrically disabled and he was granted government benefits and prescriptions for sedatives. Those sedatives were later used on his victims. In 1996 he was arrested again in connection with a luxury car theft and his properties were searched. As it later turned out, he had 2 girls imprisoned in a hidden basement dungeon in his property but the police somehow failed to discover them. The girls died of starvation while Dutroux was in arrest and they were later buried in his backyard, when he was released once again for the third time. 2 months after his third release, he abducted another girl and imprisoned her in the same dungeon where the previous 2 girls died. Not long after, he abducted another girl but this time an eyewitness identified Dutroux's license plate on his van. This resulted in his final arrest in 1996.
As you can probably guess just off this paragraph, this whole case unleashed a public ****storm about the (lack of) effectiveness of our 3 police organizations, cover-up allegations and gross negligence across the board. 3 years after the final police reform in 2001, he was then convicted of all those crimes and sentenced to life in prison.
In 2001, both the majority and the opposition factors of our parliament voted to completely abolish all existing police organizations. The police structure we now know today was then created. The local police and the federal police. The police's reputation was slowly built back up again along with far more supervision and regulations. Our Committee P federal agency has also built up a good reputation in investigating and/or prosecuting police misconduct. While our police certainly is far from perfect and the language barrier between the northern and southern part of Belgium still has a terrible effect on inter-agency communication, I think our citizens can agree that the reforms drastically improved our formerly absolutely horrendous policing.
I'm stating the obvious, but just look at how people wanting the police to be fair towards black people/minorities gets twisted to an attack on police in general, an attack on the US, an attack on the flag, etc.
