Leiden Canal Pride – How stone-cold municipal bureaucracy led to violence against queer activists

On Saturday, September 2nd of last year, during Leiden Pride, queer activists were driven away and enclosed in the morning, and beaten by the police in the afternoon. The following week, the mayor lied about this in the city council, where five people spoke out about the police violence. This prompted Leiden activists, including those from Doorbraak who were present at both protests, to investigate the police violence and the underlying decision-making processes of both the municipality and the police. Why were peaceful LGBTQIA+ activists excluded from a Pride that should also be for them? How could it be that critique was silenced and queer people were beaten and arrested at Pride? And how can the municipality look back on that day with satisfaction?

For the interpretation of the documents obtained through a Woo procedure (the procedure for the Dutch Freedom of Information Act) it is important to note that the municipality of Leiden is not a coordinated group of civil servants acting as a single entity . Rather, it is a collection of individuals working within different internal organizational structures, each with distinct goals and job descriptions. These civil servants work together to achieve the municipality’s aims, as defined by law, the city council, and the mayor and aldermen. To assert that civil servants are effective in their roles essentially means that they perform the tasks assigned to them from above efficiently. Making political and moral considerations is not a part of their job description. Certainly, individual civil servants may choose to do so, but the documents show that they do not. This is how an efficient bureaucratic apparatus resorts to violence against marginalized groups and the curtailment of fundamental rights, as we experienced at the Leiden Canal Pride 2023. This also led to the civil service responding to criticism afterward in terms of damage control, with politicians refusing to engage with the organizing group unless it was entirely on their own terms.

Original text in Dutch. Originele Nederlandse tekst.
Part 1 in English
Part 2 in English

Stronghold

For the entire body of civil servants that forms the municipality, Leiden Canal Pride begins on March 20, 2023, when the Canal Pride Leiden Foundation submits a permit application for an event on September 2. A Pride, whether commercially set up or not, is not easily categorized along the lines suggested by the application form, however. As we wrote in the first part of this trilogy, the Pink Saturdays, the Dutch predecessors of the Prides, were both demonstrations as well as parties. Categories such as “parade or procession,” “festival,” or “musical event” are not entirely applicable, and, as the Canal Pride Foundation envisions it, it is not a “protest or demonstration” or “cultural or artistic event” either. A Pride is a combination of all these elements—ideally with input from the entire LGBTQIA+ community.

At the Leiden Canal Pride, the Canal Pride Foundation is in charge. On Friday, August 19, when they see on Instagram that an anti-capitalist block wants to voice their critique at the Pride, the Canal Pride Foundation immediately perceives this as a threat to “their” Pride. Without any evidence, they inform the municipality that it concerns “the same **** (censored by the municipality, ed.)” who “then vandalized the gay monument on the Haarlemmerstraat,” from “the Bulwark on the Middelstegracht.” The only real connection is that this vandalism was the topic of a debate organized at the Vrijplaats Leiden—which is located at the Middelstegracht and thus presumably concerns the ‘Stronghold’ referred to here by the Canal Pride Foundation. Although we read that the Pride organizer qualifies the claim of this supposed connection — “I’m not sure” — that apparently does not stop them from making these unfounded accusations. Because the municipality views the Canal Pride Leiden Foundation as the “owner” of the event, they adopt the “opponent” frame. On August 23, an unknown civil servant writes: “Succinctly: The anti-capitalist block wants to hold a demonstration on September 2 at 3:15 PM at the Catharinabrug, against the Canal Pride.” Note: against the Pride. But a “block” is a part of a demonstration, which participates in it but with a message of its own. In contrast to how the municipality refers to it in various places in the documents, the protest is not a “counter-demonstration.” In the final version of the designation decision, in which the municipality sets out the conditions imposed by them for the demonstration (a decision we never received, by the way), it even states that “the purpose of the demonstration is to voice an opinion against the Pride Leiden/Canal Parade” (bold added), while in earlier versions it was still called an “anti-capitalist counter-voice.”

The municipality wants a safe party without “disorder,” as was evident already from the spokesperson’s guideline discussed previously. The municipality considers the protest to be a “disturbance” of the festivities, instead of as central to what a Pride is. The organizer wants a Pride that mainly sells beers, tickets, and boats, putting Leiden on the commercial map. Both the municipality and the organization want an “orderly” day of fun, seeing no reason to facilitate any critical voices. Their focus is on “safety”—but safety for whom?

Activists or radicals

An example of this focus is the municipality’s “risk scan,” which is a form used by the Safety Region, and thus the “Senior Event Permit Officer,” to categorize events. The greater the risk, the more detailed the safety plan for the day has to be and the more deployment of “emergency services,” such as the police, can be expected. An event receives a number of points on the basis of 18 questions, placing it in category A (low risk), B (medium risk), or C (high risk). The Canal Pride score is 26, which is just about enough to be categorized as high risk, or C. This is in part because the Pride is an outdoor event, on and by the water (5 points), and because the event is both static and dynamic. The event also gets 5 points for the increased chance of “specific groups” attending, which, according to the form, may be “activists or radicals” or “conflicting or rival groups.”

By using so-called “objectified” factors, the municipality and the Safety Region aim to avoid arbitrary safety decisions. But reducing an event to a checklist can easily facilitate arbitrary decisions. The revealed documents show that the municipality does not consider the rich history of Pride and the Pink Saturdays that we covered in the first part. Whether the safety scan considers the nuances of the Pride or not is not a matter of concern for the Senior Event Permit Officer either. The municipality is concerned with Pride as an event, not with how a Pride should represent the entire community and be egalitarian. By proceeding in this way, the municipality wrests ownership of Pride away from queer people and denies them that ownership by viewing us solely as a risk that needs to be contained.

On Thursday, July 27, the Canal Pride organizer informed the Senior Event Permit Officer that a drag queen would be reading to children in the library on the morning of Pride. The organizer urges that the neighborhood police officer wanted him to inform the municipality about it. The Permits Team then forwards this to a Crisis Management Advisor. Although the advisor does not expect trouble at this time, they ask if the reading session will be advertised or receive extra attention on the day itself. Naturally, that would increase the risk.

In English, there’s a saying: ‘When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’ This means that if you only have one tool, you tend to view every problem through the perspective of that tool. The same logic applies to roles: a Crisis Management Advisor’s job is to manage crises, so they view every situation through the lens of potential crises. Similarly, the Senior Event Permit Officer focuses on minimizing risk, which leads to an approach where reducing risk takes precedence over all other considerations.

Safety mentality

On August 23, the Crisis Management Advisor orders that a message with a meeting request is sent out to Queer Pride March Leiden, the organizer of the demonstration at the Catharinabrug. They did not respond, however, as they sensed the municipality would be using the meeting to impose “agreements”: restrictions on the location, time, number of participants, and even on the manner of the demonstration, with the threat of a ban used as a coercive measure. In part 2 of this trilogy, we extensively explained why “engaging in dialogue” is not a guarantee that your protest will proceed in the way you envisioned. Often, such a ban or restrictions are announced only shortly in advance, which makes it difficult to challenge them in court. On September 2 of last year, however, going to court was impossible anyway, as no decision whatsoever had been communicated. The lack of legal recourse and the focus on safety thinking are two criticisms Amnesty pointed out regarding the state of the right to demonstrate in the Netherlands.

It is the Crisis Management Advisor who, on August 24, a day after sending the message, puts Queer Pride Leiden on the agenda of the ‘PO Safety’ meeting. The focus of this meeting, also attended by the mayor, is clear from its name. There is no ‘PO Demonstration Rights’ or ‘PO Historical Context,’ or even a ‘PO Fundamental Rights,’ where such a situation might be discussed. As a result, the anti-capitalist block is considered exclusively as a ‘safety issue,’ rather than as an important part of the Pride.

In all the Woo (Freedom of Information) documents, the Project Leader Leiden Inclusive, the municipality’s expert on LGBTQIA+ discrimination, appears only once. Of course, we do not know to what extent they are involved in other aspects of Pride organization because our information request concerns the handling of the demonstrations. However, it is striking that these demonstrations, which have queer themes and at least the protest on the bridge is organized by a queer organization, apparently do not require the municipality to involve this Project Leader. It is only on Tuesday, August 29, four days prior to Pride when a question comes in about “the reason this is also organized in Leiden if there is already a big Pride event in Amsterdam,” that the Project Leader for Leiden Inclusive appears in the documents. They, in turn, write that the municipality finds it important that everyone can be themselves and that there is also a need in Leiden for a positive event focused on LGBTQIA+ emancipation. The answer is relayed to the questioner by the Newsroom. Apparently, this is the only role the municipality sees fit for the Project Leader with regard to these demonstrations.

Obscuring

The Newsroom is the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth of the municipality in the world of (social) media. It is staffed by communication advisors, which clearly indicates their role: to advise on how the municipality can best promote itself. Their task is to protect the municipality’s image, both by supporting colleagues, such as the Crisis Management Advisor, as well as through communications. By curating which information is requested, and determining which civil servants are informed, they have a significant influence on municipal policy, whether they are aware of this or not. To fulfill their communications task, it is crucial that Pride is portrayed positively in the news and that any “crises” are “managed.” This is how, on August 30, the Crisis Management Advisor is informed by the Newsroom upon request about what is circulating on social media about Dina Diamond’s reading session. The relay concerned both Forum voor Democratie (a Dutch far-right political party) planning to demonstrate against the session, as well as the stir on Twitter about the so-called ‘sexualization’ of children. The Newsroom also attempts to reach out to Doorbraak because they announced a protest in favor of the reading session and against the far-right.

The two announced demonstrations are the reason the municipality creates an emergency order, which has to be published on the municipal socials in a news article. For this, the municipality decides upon “approach: positive,” writes an anonymous civil servant on September 1: “Reasoned from the children’s perspective (protect, they should have fun).” In one of the first versions of the posts intended for social media, demonstrators “appreciating the initiative” are mentioned explicitly. However, this part is removed later that day when the mayor’s spokesperson sends the post to the council for approval. The focus now shifts to the emergency order, likely because the municipality primarily wants to convey that they have the situation under control. This is also reflected in the draft of the social media post that is intended for publication after the morning demonstrations: “The reading session was well attended, and the children and parents were enthusiastic. In the vicinity, there were demonstrations. Protests took place at both Burchtplein and Hooglandse Kerkgracht, both for and against the reading session. Considering the well-being of visiting children, Mayor Peter van der Velden issued an emergency order for Nieuwstraat (the street in which the library is located, ed.). Shortly after the reading session ended, the area around the library was calm again. The emergency order is no longer in effect, and the festivities have moved to other parts of the city.”

However, positive reporting was also used to obscure the fact that the Pride was not a celebratory event for everyone who attended. As shown in the second part of this trilogy, the mayor’s spokesperson issued a general statement in response to media questions, which was written in close cooperation with the police. The spokesperson states, among other things: “Leiden facilitates freedom of expression and demonstration. The measures taken during Leiden Pride aimed to ensure the safety of visitors and demonstrators. The event proceeded without major incidents. […] We are satisfied with how Leiden Pride went.” These are empty words because the municipality didn’t conduct any investigation. So the spokesperson’s could only have based these assertions on what was convenient for the municipality.

Not responding

The statement first appears in the documents from the morning of Monday, September 4. On September 2, during Pride, we had already tagged the municipality in Doorbraak’s Twitter thread with a report of everything that had happened throughout the day. That same evening, we also posted a report on both the police violence and the restrictions on our demonstrations. In the municipal documents, we only see the police report that was sent to the municipality that evening. This seems to be the only source the spokesperson relied on when drafting the first version of the statement on Monday morning. By Monday afternoon, though, the spokesperson had been “alerted to a post by Queer Pride March Leiden,” likely the one detailing the police violence. Yet, the spokesperson continued to send out the same statement to the press.

On Monday evening, city council members from GroenLinks and PvdA (two Dutch political parties, ed.) submitted questions to the municipality addressing the police actions against demonstrators. These questions were picked up the following morning within the municipality and forwarded with the note: “Can you answer these questions for the LB (Urban Liveability , ed.) committee on Thursday? Some answers are included in the letter informing the council about the emergency order.” The attached letter from the mayor, which had not yet been sent to the council, is clearly based on the general statement his spokesperson sent to the press the previous day, given the almost identical wording. Thus, the same narrative is repeated without addressing the posts by queer people on social media.

And that’s no coincidence. In the Monday email regarding the post by Queer Pride March Leiden, the spokesperson writes: “The mayor’s request is not to respond to them. I believe he’s right. The officers who moved them explained their security choices calmly and neatly yesterday. Which is also what I saw reflected in the local media…” This is circular reasoning by the spokesperson, since the local media are fed by… the spokesperson himself.

They’re just seeking attention

The municipality wants to claim Pride as a success, despite queer people being beaten and Pride being taken away from them. The fact that these activists refuse to accept their loss and continue to post about it on social media is merely an inconvenience to the municipality, as is evident from what happened after the city council meeting on September 7, where five people spoke about the police violence. On September 8, the spokesperson for Fleur Spijker, one of the aldermen questioned about the police violence by activists, wrote about the municipality’s ‘direction’: the “advice remains not to react proactively. The YouTube channel of Doorbraak eu has 346 subscribers. That’s not a lot. There are 0 comments and 3 likes on this video. Of course, the video is shared more widely on social media, but aside from reach, there seems to be little commotion about it in the outside world,” the spokesperson summarized, presumably based on analysis by the Newsroom’s. Apparently, this line of reasoning about the police violence provides the municipality with a justification to do nothing about it, especially after a Newsroom “environmental analysis” on September 11 revealed that the video of the aldermen “has 739 views on YouTube” and “there are no comments under the video. Additionally, the organization has reported on their website about the council meeting on Thursday, September 7. There are no comments under the website article.” According to the spokesperson, this meant “that the videos did not make a significant impact.”

Their conclusion: “It’s also about getting attention for this group of people. Better not to engage with it (at this moment). We understand that it’s buzzing among the council members, especially since the video of the protest suggests that things got very intense.” The advice not to engage is followed, and the issue effectively vanishes from the political radar.

Or, at least … almost. On September 11, there is a final evaluation meeting between the mayor, police, and Public Prosecutor’s Office, where they look back on Pride with satisfaction. The minutes almost echo the self-congratulatory tone of the meeting: “Mayor Van der Velden indicated that it was a nice introduction for him. The involvement of all professionals is highly appreciated. Feels like we handled it well, if it hadn’t been so meticulously prepared it might have turned out differently. Mr. **** (anonymized) feels the same as the mayor. Very intensive preparation. Information was available late, it got very big in a short time. Everyone did a lot of work to manage it well. […] It is clear what is required from demonstrating parties if they want to protest in Leiden. Active contact was sought but not found.”

In the ‘PO Safety’ meeting on September 25, all loose ends were tied up as civil servants wrote about responding to the speakers’ questions about police violence: ‘Respond with necessary empathy, but also point to the safety of everyone in the city. The demonstrators did not report themselves. They also could not convey their message. Also, include something about this in the letter.’ In other words, everything went well, the demonstrators brought it upon themselves, and there’s no need to further address the exclusion of queer people.

Administrative indifference

The roles of the Senior Permit Officer for Events, the Crisis Management Advisor, and the Newsroom show that the municipality has three priorities: organizing commercially attractive events, maintaining control over those events, and protecting the municipality’s good name (and, by extension, that of Canal Pride). Anyone who read the first part of this series knows that a demonstration, especially a Pride, should be unpredictable and critical. This is what makes a Pride powerful, but it is precisely the kind of uncertainty the Canal Pride Leiden Foundation and the municipality are so wary of. And this wariness ultimately leads to violence.

The focus on risk avoidance and damage control, bureaucracy’s operation, and the administrative indifference to what a Pride is, not only led the municipality to label the protest a ‘disturbance’ of the ‘festivities’—it also led them to remain utterly indifferent when a group of people for whom the event is meant witnessed exclusion. The ‘disturbance’ of the festivities and the positive image the municipality wanted to project had to be neutralized and rendered harmless.

And what did the city council members, who represent the residents of Leiden, including the queer activists, actually do? For the more critical ones among them, the police violence, under the mayor’s authority, should have been reason enough to scrutinize the events closely, as we did in this series. But the council members are informed by the same civil service that collaborated with the police and thus bears part of the responsibility for the violence. The revealed documents show that the civil servants answering the council questions and the questions of the speakers are the same ones whose work is being criticized. You can’t expect an honest answer in that case.

But why did those council members hardly look beyond the pre-cooked information they received from the municipality? Lack of time? It is a choice how they spend their time. They did not have to settle for the incomplete information presented to them. Last year, Students for Leiden (SVL) and other parties submitted a motion to “protect the right to demonstrate.” In it, political parties adopted recommendations from Amnesty International. But soon, the motion was withdrawn to first “engage in dialogue with the mayor.” For him, the motion went too far—he wants the focus to remain on demonstrations being notified in advance. But that’s the point: demonstration rights also apply without notification, something Van der Velden seems keen to ignore. He wants to keep the option open, even if it’s against the law, to silence and cripple demonstrations that are not notified for that reason alone. The fact that participants are beaten by the police without warning, he merely shrugs off.

We certainly hold the city council accountable for withdrawing this motion, which merely makes explicit the rights that already exist in law. Also, the fact that council members collectively decided not to engage with the invitation from queer activists to discuss the police violence on their terms is very serious. It shows where we stand in the current system: politicians place more value on a good relationship with aldermen and the mayor than on their own critical stance and position.

The work of activists

Posting a report on the Doorbraak website, spreading the videos of police violence by Queer Pride March Leiden on social media, addressing aldermen, and speaking in the city council have put this issue on the map at least somewhat. Without all this work by activists themselves, the rest of society would hardly even know that Pride 2023 actively suppressed previous Prides, that our demonstrations were greatly restricted and made impossible, that violence was used against us, and that queer people were excluded from a day that was meant for them, while the municipality remains silent about it.

The stone-cold indifference of the authorities has been evident up to this day. We have spent hours requesting information, sifting through documents, and analyzing them so we could publish this. But we are still waiting for documents from the police that we should have received months ago, the release of which was even ordered by the court. We are compelled to do this because power itself is indifferent. In history, we find in various fields of struggle that in a situation of injustice and oppression, the underdog must always strive to understand and analyze the powers that be, if only for their safety. A beginning of justice would be for the municipality to put a fraction of the effort we put into understanding the objections from the LGBTQIA+ community. But no, the authorities themselves shrug off a bottom-up perspective. This sustains the police violence of Canal Pride 2023. But that is not acceptable— not now and not for Pride 2024 either.

Mariët van Bommel and Bo Salomons