Moroccan police to patrol Brussels and Antwerp streets

Police patrolling in certain areas of Brussels and Antwerp will be joined by colleagues from Morocco next year, federal home affairs minister Jan Jambon has announced. In return, Belgian police will go on secondment to Morocco. Jambon described the programme as “a sort of Erasmus for police officers”.

The Moroccan detail is expected to be deployed in areas that are home to a large number of immigrants, long the scene of poverty and unemployment and now the backdrop for radical Islamists to recruit young men to go and fight in Syria.

“The Moroccan police have a whole different way of approaching young people, which seems to get results,” said a spokesperson for Jambon. “The goal of the exchange project is to learn from each other’s methods and techniques.”

A number of young Belgian officers will travel in the opposite direction, to gain several weeks’ experience in cities in Morocco. “It’s well known that our people don’t always respond to calls from certain areas in the best manner possible,” the spokesperson said. “That’s simply a cultural difference.”

Moroccan police are, he continued, regularly confronted with Salafism, or violent jihadism, “and they approach the problem from their own cultural point of view. It could be useful for the Antwerp police to experience how their Moroccan colleagues approach these situations.”

Photo courtesy federal police