Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 139, Nummer 1, 2026

Good thing there’s police, after all. The rise of the police psychologist and their contribution to public-oriented municipal policing in Amsterdam, 1945-1993

Urban interactions with the public provide a way forward for Dutch police historiography. In 1966 police rooted in a parochial post-war culture clashed violently with nonconformist youth in Amsterdam. This led to the hiring of police psychologists to ameliorate relations with the public. This article examines the role of police psychologists within the Dutch police from the 1950s onwards, the strategies and vocabulary they introduced and their contribution to a modern, public-oriented police culture. Their approach to the police’s public image, underpinned by a narrative of a democratizing society, addressed emotional management in dealing with demonstrations and youngsters. They trained police to view the street as an arena of emotions, broadening their repertoire of interactions with citizens with de-escalating, preemptive negotiating tactics. The first inhouse police psychologists were caught between the police corps culture and hierarchy and the public, risking their autonomy and professional distance. Although this led to the first police psychologist’s early resignation, gradually the psychologist acquired a durable position within Amsterdam’s municipal police force.

From ‘Hollandsdenken’ to decolonization: science, knowledge and the Dutch Empire

This review discusses recent trends in the historiography of science, knowledge and colonialism, and how they have been applied to the Dutch Empire. It shows how historians have characterized the relation between science and colonialism in the last decades. The review begins by identifying two broad clusters: The first emphasized how science thrived through the networks created by colonialism. More recently, the scientists’ descriptions and discoveries have been critically reinterpreted as forms of knowledge extraction, comparable to resource extraction. The second historiographical cluster highlights how science played a crucial role in the colonization and continued subjugation of the colonies, both technologically and ideologically. The second part of this review essay shifts the focus from science to the more general term ‘knowledge’, as this provides historians with a broader palette for writing about indigenous forms of knowledge. The challenge for future historians of knowledge remains to dismantle colonial frameworks and to make the field more inclusive.