The Personal Data Authority (AP) informs the House of Representatives that the retention of police data longer than legally permitted is unacceptable. This is because the police now exceed the legal retention periods of data on millions of innocent people, with great risks for those about whom those data are concerned. If the House wants that data to be kept longer, it can only be done if the law is changed.
The Council of State advised the Ministry of Justice and Security (JenV) earlier also to ensure that the police comply with the law on this issue. Several members of the House of Representatives instead called on the minister not to destroy the data. In a letter to the House the AP points out that it is very important that the government - and certainly the police - comply with the law. And that this data is not needed for investigation of 'cold cases' but it does have major risks for millions of Dutch citizens if the police do not comply with the retention periods.
This involves a lot of data for which it cannot be demonstrated that longer retention would add value. For example, a note from the police about a neighborly dispute, a traffic violation, or a report from the neighborhood police officer about the daily round through the neighborhood. It expressly does not concern data that are part of cold case investigations or data about DNA traces, for example.
By law, this data must be deleted from the daily used police systems after 5 years and completely destroyed after 10 years. But the police have not been doing this for many years.
AP chairman Aleid Wolfsen: 'The law also applies to the police. It is unacceptable that the police structurally break the law. The fundamental rights of a very large group of people are at stake. Moreover, there are concrete risks attached to keeping police data for so long for the people whose data are in the police systems. For example, when data about their private lives fall into the wrong hands through misuse or data leaks.
Since 2019, the Minister of JenV has accepted that these police data are not destroyed, although the law requires this after a maximum of 10 years. According to the chief of police, the retention periods as included in the Police Data Act (Wpg) would be too short to use this data in cold case investigations.
The then Minister of JenV tolerated this situation because the Wpg and the Judicial and Criminal Records Act (Wjsg) were to be revised in the near future. Then a longer retention period could be included in those laws. But those laws have still not been revised, while the police continue to violate the law on this point all these years.
The House of Representatives asked the minister in May with a motion to regulate in the law that data that might be relevant to cold cases can be filtered out before being destroyed. The question is whether the ministry can draw up clear criteria about which data would be relevant. Whether this can be done and whether such a filter can be included in the law can be considered in the review of the Wpg and the Wjsg.
