In the Netherlands the government sends a lot of mails, both the electronic ones and the paper ones. The subject or subjects of the letters could be anything; it could be a fine, tax reminder, or a congratulation. The goal of a letter is to inform by carrying information, that is why they were invented for and are still used to this day. The problem is however that the language used is relatively advanced. Not only is that very hard for the 2.5 million people who are low literate, for the average Dutchman it’s also not easy sometimes. The government of The Netherlands is currently trying to improve this, but sometimes they just make it worse; for example the police department tweets in street language sometimes and sometimes they make jokes that most people do not see the humor. There are dangerous criminals in The Netherlands, shouldn’t they put their energy in chasing them rather than making silly jokes on Twitter? One good example is from the police officers in Rotterdam. Roughly translated the tweet says: heat alert, leave no children or pets in the very hot car like the days before, your stepmom however is alright. Lots of people became angry. Not only is it inappropriate and insulting to some people, it is a joke from the 1950s. So the more people would take it seriously. When more of this joking happens, the line of where to believe and not to believe a police officer gets more and more vague, until at some point impossible to tell. Some people asked them and they said that they are trying to bring the police closer to the inhabitants, but in my opinion they are just wasting their energy and destroying the image of the police by talking like criminals themselves; they are just bringing the police closer to the criminals, in a bad way. In my opinion they should where possible talk in normal language, but when it’s serious they could better talk in advanced Dutch to make clear it’s important and not a joke.
You can read the newspaper article that brought this up here.
By using this link you can see the tweet of the Dutch police officers .
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