NRC NEWSPAPER, TRANSLATION. FAILING LEADERSHIP, BULLYING, FEAR CULTURE: AGENT M’S HIDDEN DESPAIR, BY DUTCH JOURNALIST BAS HAAN.
Posted on by Cora Westerink ( 1965, Tilburg, The Netherlands)
( Translator, Cora Westerink, 1965, Sprang-Capelle)
Police Once again, there is a devastating report on the National Police’s National Unit. This time in response to the third suicide within two years of an officer in the Specialist Operations Department. The report will remain confidential if it is up to the Minister. 29 April 2022
‘You will have understood by now, that I am no longer here.’” Thus begins the farewell email of police officer ‘M.’. The 53-year-old policeman works for the police for more than thirty years when he puts an end to his life on August 8 last year. His body is found near the place where he worked for the criminal investigation department for years. Since 2020, he had been on a downward spiral. He had been having private problems for some time, but things went wrong when he transferred within the police in January 2020 to the Specialist Operations Office (DSO) of the National Unit – the unit that includes, for example, tackling serious, organized crime and terrorism.
He addresses his farewell email to “Marjolein.” That’s Marjolein Smit, his then boss at the DSO. The text continues with: “Unfortunately, in the past four or five months, you haven’t contacted me once to ask how I was doing. Not even a card or anything of note. That is indicative of you and E[…] and the culture within the DSO. I have cursed the day from January 2020 that I applied and was hired.”
The DSO is the department of the National Unit that deploys police infiltrators, among other things. The job of infiltrators is complex and dangerous: they build long-term relationships of trust with criminals undercover in covert operations to catch them later. The DSO is also the service about which disturbing investigations have emerged in recent years. About failing leadership, bullying behavior, intimidation in the workplace, a culture of fear, and above all, lack of intervention by the police leadership. At the time of his suicide, police officer M. was an account manager at the Deployment and Coordination Office of the DSO. He experienced his work for the service “as hell,” he wrote in his farewell message.
Third suicide at DSO
M. is the third DSO officer in a short time to take his own life. His supervisors from the National Unit are not welcome at the funeral. This is what the family decided after supervisor Marjolein Smit told them in a personal conversation that M.’s death has nothing to do with his work, it is a private matter. The next of kin see it differently, even though they do not yet know the farewell message.
That farewell email is not sent until three weeks after M.’s death. This is done by a good friend, for whom M. left detailed instructions. The mail is stored on a phone. The friend doesn’t start working on it until after the funeral. He sends it exactly as M. requested to a handful of people.
That message reads that the way of leadership is partly the cause of the three suicides. M. describes that in previous cases of suicide within the DSO, the leadership, who “conducted a competition of far peeing over my head,” was primarily concerned with themselves: “Saving their own ass, that was important. Found it really disgusting.”
Marjolein Smit has personally informed NRC that she does not want to or cannot cooperate with the article and refers for a reaction to the police management. So does a second recipient of the farewell email, the then head of the National Unit, Jannine van den Berg.
After receiving the email, the police leadership discusses how to deal with the suicide. M.’s immediate superiors doubt the authenticity of the farewell email and initially want only a confidential internal investigation.
Outwardly it remains silent. Until the beginning of October. Then the two largest police trade unions announced that they, too, had received M.’s farewell message through his friend. They kept it to themselves to see what the management would do with it. These police unions have long been critical of the functioning of police leadership in response to dozens of reports of abuses within the National Unit and the DSO and the earlier suicides. They see themselves confirmed in this if, after M.’s farewell email, an independent investigation does not start immediately.
On the work floor of the DSO, the relationship between M.’s death and the sour working atmosphere was still being denied at the time, according to internal police e-mail exchanges that NRC saw. Superiors who knew the contents of the letter, for example, dismissed its existence to colleagues with the suggestion that it was not at all certain that the letter had been written by M. In addition, they pointed to M.’s psychological and private problems as the cause of his suicide. After his death, colleagues and next of kin found no recognition for the culture of fear experienced by M. within the DSO.
At that time, however, an independent investigation into an earlier suicide within the DSO was underway. An undercover agent had lost his grip on himself during his undercover work for the Working Under Cover (WOD) service – part of the DSO. He had repeatedly indicated to his supervisors that he was having a hard time. Several colleagues had also warned him more often. But the alarm signals were not heard. The officer took his own life in April 2021. A committee led by Frisian mayor Oebele Brouwer was commissioned to conduct an independent investigation. Brouwer is familiar with secret police operations as a former detective prosecutor. He is almost done with the investigation when M.’s farewell letter once again causes unrest.
The text of the farewell message is initially shared only in small circles, and not with, for example, the Ministry. Previously, work-related suicides within the DSO led to social and political unrest, which NRC reported on extensively. Now the details remain unknown. What has been made public is that M. wrote a farewell message in which he links his death to his work. This, in combination with the ongoing investigation by Oebele Brouwer, led to the police force transferring Marjolein Smit to another top position within the police force two months after M.’s death. Jannine van den Berg had already announced her departure before M.’s death.
Sick culture
In his farewell message, owned by NRC, M. himself does not shy away from his personal circumstances. He acknowledges that his “diagnosed PTSD and depression” also played a role before his time at DSO. But his main message is addressed to his supervisors, where for him the core problem lies. Addressing himself to “Marjolein”, M. holds them jointly responsible for his death and that of his two colleagues in the last paragraphs of his letter: “Well, this is suicide number three in eighteen months within DSO. And you’ll probably wave it away again, it’s private and has nothing to do with the DSO. […] Just talk it over again, that’s what you are good at. Unbelievable that a E[…] became sector head. She has no empathy whatsoever and she is prepared to do whatever it takes. You are still trying to save your life, because the culture within the DSO is demonstrably seriously rotten. So, my suicide is due to private circumstances but also definitely due to the DSO and the terrible year I was a part of it. The total lack of interest in my well-being is telling. People don’t matter. Three suicides in a year and a half, think about that….”
In his farewell message to his superiors, M. outlines the working atmosphere he experienced: “There is absolutely no human touch. Only you yourself are important and not the rest. I remember like yesterday that Mike’s suicide took place, around Christmas 2019. I will never forget what you were orating at the coffee machine at the time. He felt bullied, but he wasn’t bullied. It was a scam by the union to make your head spin. The fact that someone was obviously so distraught that he had taken refuge in suicide, that didn’t matter. […] I can’t fully blame the DSO for my decision to leave. But know that my period at the DSO was terrible. The sickened culture, how you talked about me behind my back, the cronyism, the going over dead bodies, what a shitty organization. I’ve worked in the police department for 32 years, in various departments, but I’ve never encountered this.”
Last November 17, more than a month after Marjolein Smit’s departure from the DSO, Brouwer presented his findings to the earlier suicide victim. ‘Out of sight’ is the name of the report that remains partly confidential, but whose damning conclusions are published.
The report is harsh on management within the National Unit: “The committee finds that the WOD achieves great operational successes thanks to the quality of the employees, but that the professionalism of the organization as a whole leaves much to be desired.” The Ministry of Justice and Security acknowledges, “The report shows a distressing lack of professionalism, reporting, steering and supervision.”
Then-Minister Grapperhaus immediately announced yet another new commission. This committee, led by former minister Winnie Sorgdrager, was commissioned to “investigate how we should properly organize Working Under Cover with all the associated guarantees.”
In the meantime, Oebele Brouwer has been asked by the police to conduct another investigation. This time into the death of M. The Brouwer committee will speak with all those involved, except M.’s immediate superior Marjolein Smit. She does not want to be heard and will leave it at a written statement to the committee.
Broader problem
Brouwer’s new investigation has now been completed. Responsible Minister Yesilgöz of Justice and Security (VVD) decided to keep the full report, and thus also M.’s farewell message, secret because of privacy concerns. “The learning points for the organization are consistent with the previous reports,” the minister wrote about the report to the House of Representatives early this month, which she believes is sufficient information.
Those involved confirm to NRC that the conclusions are even tougher than those in Brouwer’s first report. For example, the committee found that executives did not tell the whole truth to M.’s relatives; and that personnel care in high-risk undercover work was not in order. Brouwer also dispelled the discussion about the authenticity of M.’s farewell message: that e-mail is real and doubt should never have been cast on it.
Another striking finding: the committee does not understand why M.’s mobile work phone could not be investigated. It could contain valuable but also incriminating information, for example in direct text messages between M. and his superiors. But for unknown reasons the reading of that phone was not successful. This is extra piquant, because in one of the other two suicide cases the information from the work phone with possibly incriminating information was inexplicably lost.
In addition to Brouwer, the Justice and Security Inspectorate also wrote critical reports, three in one year, on various parts of the National Unit. The first report appeared in January 2021 and dealt with the departments involved in international legal assistance and the Criminal Intelligence Team. There was “organizational and task neglect” there, the Inspectorate wrote. The second inspection report, published last December, looked at the Department for Counterterrorism, Radicalization and Extremism. In it, the inspection drew similar conclusions about failing leadership, which moreover was the cause of “such tensions and conflicts that the working environment feels unsafe for some people.” A third inspection report, on the Shielded Operations Department, found that “direction and culture” on the shop floor were going wrong.
And then, in addition to those completed investigations, two more commissions are now engaged in their investigations. In addition to a forementioned Sorgdrager Commission, there is also the commission of former Mayor Bernt Schneiders. Schneiders is investigating a ‘reorientation’ of the National Unit and whether it still has a place in the police system in its current form.
Schneiders found the problems he encountered so serious that he felt compelled to issue an interim report last month, entitled ‘Towards a future-proof National Unit’. Schneiders explicitly pointed out the role of the chief of police and that a lot has to change there: “‘The tone at the top’ is the first start; the highest management has to be convinced of the desired way of working and dealing with people,” Schneiders observed among other things.
In the House of Representatives, patience with the police leadership has now run out. Parties from left to right and from the opposition as well as the coalition want the minister to intervene. The House of Representatives will debate the police on May 11.
Comments: onderzoek@nrc.nl.
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