Following a Bellingcat workshop, a group of investigative journalists from the Dutch public broadcaster KRO-NCRV spent the last six months investigating social media platforms used by the Dutch National Police Force. After analyzing data and footage from YouTube videos, tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts, we reached the following conclusion: Dutch police are sometimes careless with the privacy of victims or suspects. Thomas Mulder, one of the journalists, explains how they conducted their investigation.
On April 12, 2017, we met with privacy expert Rejo Zenger in order to find out more about camera surveillance in the Netherlands. After a few minutes of conversation, Zenger mentioned bodycams and video material from the Dutch police as an interesting lead. The Dutch police are currently experimenting with body cameras, Zenger said, but this led to a series of questions: How do the police deal with surveillance camera footage? Do they have to ask permission when they want to use a camera?
The privacy expert also advised us to look into videos made by the police and uploaded on YouTube to help answer some of these questions.
Read more on Bellingcat.com.