Everyone was talking about the fat bike gang. But did it exist?

The message on September 21 gave the residents of southern Kennemerland reason to worry about what they loved. “Fat bike gang ravages Haarlem region,” read the headline on the website NH News. “From Bloemendaal to Heemstede they race through the region on fast fat bikes, looking for young victims. They are intimidated, threatened and abused.” The police and municipalities involved were powerless against the terror.

In the previous months, the article reports, got NH News several reports about a group of an estimated fifty young people, often teenagers, who were led by several leading figures, who would keep the region (Haarlem, Velsen, Bloemendaal and Bennebroek) in their grip with robberies and violence. The group behaved erratically and targeted their peers.

What was remarkable was the way in which the gang would operate: victims were located via Snapchat, after which accomplices were called in and quickly arrived on the scene on their fat bikes. In the photo accompanying the article, a police officer is drawing up a report next to one of those fat bikes parked on the sidewalk: a fairly small, black electric bicycle with wide tires and a moped saddle, a kind of children’s moped.

At the end of November, youth terror in Haarlem and the surrounding area seems to have been washed away by the excessive rain. The fat bike gang is nowhere to be found, not in the media and not on the streets. Was Kennemerland actually made unsafe on fat bicycle tires? Or, in retrospect, did the stories travel through the region faster than the fat bikes themselves?

In the summer they received the first tips about the fat bike gang, say reporter Melle Bos and news coordinator Antal Crielaard of NH News in a video call in December. Reliable sources, says Crielaard, who testified up close and in large numbers about the misbehavior of young people with those striking bicycles. When the police, after initially denying the problem, admitted that young people with such a description committed offenses, it was possible NH News come out with it.

“Then the ball started rolling,” says Crielaard.

‘The fear was real’

Reports flooded in to Bos’s email address below the message from parents who no longer dared to let their children go out into the street unprotected. They all wanted to remain anonymous. “The fear was real,” says Crielaard. “We are not here to question people’s fears.”

NH News set up an investigation team on the case. Reporters took to the streets. They found cigarette butts, candy wrappers and vape remains on Teylerplein in Haarlem. A trash can was blackened by exploding fireworks. Almost everyone they spoke to had heard of children being molested. NH News spoke to victims of intimidation and fireworks terror, says Crielaard. The problem was that not one of them wanted to go public by name, surname or even a description of what had been done to them, for fear of reprisals. “They will soon throw a grenade through the letterbox,” said a shopkeeper in Bloemendaal.

Other media did not lag behind. The NOS took over the message of September 21, it Haarlems Dagblad dived on it. The Youth Journal made one of the most viewed items of the year. Powned came to film children on fat bikes. Images emerged from a surveillance camera showing two boys with their fat bikes ramming the door of a Jumbo in the Haarlem district of Schalkwijk.

The reporters from NH News manages to get four boys (between the ages of thirteen and seventeen) from Bennebroek, who according to the channel belong to the gang, on the phone via Snapchat. “We just like to make noise, throw a bomb and cause mischief,” says ‘Amir’, a fictitious name, in an article on the site. “We will never intimidate or abuse people. The media makes it all a lot bigger than it is.” The conversation ends after five minutes, the reporter writes, because the boys announce: “We have to eat.”

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Helmets with red ears

On October 7, three fifteen-year-old boys were arrested in Bloemendaal, two on a fat bike, one on a Van Moof bicycle. The police catch them red-handed when they try to rob a peer of his cigarettes and phone. Wild rumors are going around in secondary schools about the gang: a girl is said to have been raped. A mother from Haarlem-Noord reports on Facebook that her daughter was abused in the Schoterbos by young people on fat bikes and scooters, the latter wearing helmets with red ears.

In a police photo of the arrest in Bloemendaal, published on the sites of regional media, the three boys, overpowered by officers, lie on their stomachs in the street, their hands cuffed behind their backs. They are restricted for three days and are subject to a restraining order and a curfew. The boys will also receive a summons for a hearing at the juvenile court, says a spokesperson for the Public Prosecution Service. They are suspected of attempted robbery.

In October, the Kennemerland-Zuid region was “under the spell of the fat bike gang”, as stated, among others Metro writes. Parents give children pepper spray, a library closes its doors during off-peak hours because of an ‘unsafe feeling’. Schools and sports clubs issue warnings.

“As everyone knows, a fat bike gang makes Haarlem and the surrounding area extremely unsafe,” writes the Bloemendaal football club in its website. In the neighborhood, “several children were pulled from their bicycles, seriously abused and robbed. (…) The police are working hard to put an end to it, but are still completely powerless, even after an arrest this weekend. We therefore urgently appeal to you not to let your children go to training alone in the evening.” The club asks anyone who has seen the fat bike gang to report it to the police. “With sporty greetings, the General Board of BVC.”

Doubts

In an attempt to calm things down, Mayor Jos Wienen of Haarlem declares that there is no such thing as a fat bike gang. It is true that the police have identified young people who may have been involved in violent incidents, he said in November NH Newsbut: “There is no hierarchical structure with a gang leader.”

The mayor’s spokesperson says on the phone that she has her doubts about a conversation about what the municipality does not want to call a fat bike gang. “With every publication you make it bigger,” she says, while Haarlem wants to reassure its residents. According to the spokesperson, this concerns young people with new, striking and fast bicycles, which therefore have a greater range than before. But youthful nuisance has always existed.

“These are young children on bicycles who go very fast,” says the spokesperson. “They have little traffic insight and are sometimes rude, people are annoyed by them. There have been incidents, but not always with the same young people. When a newspaper labels these isolated incidents as a ‘fat bike gang’, everyone in the region suddenly sees that gang. By linking misconduct to a drug, you suddenly see it everywhere.”

In a conversation with Mayor Wienen, concerned parents indicate that they know what is going on and which young people are involved. But if the mayor asks to share that information with the municipality or the police, they do not want to do so, even anonymously, for fear that they or their children will become known as informers.

news coordinatorAntal Crielaard We are not here to question people’s fears

Police data shows no alarming increase in youth nuisance in Haarlem last autumn. In August, September and October there were 45, 101 and 85 reports of youth nuisance, with a noticeable peak in September, after the first publications about the fat bike gang. Arnhem and Enschede, cities with a comparable population, had 98, 81 and 59 and 76, 83 and 67 reports respectively in the same months. Haarlem a year earlier, from August to October 2022: 73, 83 and 90.

“Good to know that there is a world behind the figures,” says spokesperson Derk Burger of the North Holland police. “One nuisance situation can result in twenty calls for us. Or one person can be responsible for twenty nuisance reports.” There have indeed been robberies and arrests by young people, he says, but the police do not keep track of whether the perpetrators have a fat bike or not. For the police, that bicycle is not a connecting element between separate incidents.

At the town hall of Bloemendaal, the ‘White House’ on a hill, with a view over the villa village, interim mayor and former State Secretary Ankie Broekers-Knol wants to be clear about one thing at the end of November: “You are asking about terror from a fat bike gang. It’s absolutely not like that. There is no terror, and it is not a gang.”

The media has made a mess of it. “There is no pattern in which things happen all the time, there is a pattern in which we receive messages from people who are worried or feel unsafe. Then in the evening an older lady walks past a group of ten or fifteen young people with bicycles and they say: hello, madam. Some people think that’s funny, others don’t feel comfortable with it. There have been incidents like that. Then people have an unpleasant feeling, but nothing happens.”

“We already know some of these youth,” says Astrid Nienhuis, Broekers’ colleague in Heemstede, who is talking via a screen. “They were already doing things that made you say: don’t do that. But there was no common feature, making them isolated incidents. It seems that the fat bike has made troublemakers recognizable as a group, making it a big thing.”

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Where has the gang gone?

On Friday evening, December 1, boas Kevin and Wouter will drive their route through Bloemendaal and Heemstede. It is a special evening of action against youth nuisance, they are in constant contact with the police via an action channel in the car. The enforcers drive past hotspots where incidents have occurred since the summer.

They don’t pay special attention to fat bikes, says Wouter. They do not see the terror from the newspapers on the streets. “In our system you can see right up to the day when the first reports about the gang were in the newspaper.” In week 37 (11-17 September) there were four municipal reports of youth nuisance to the municipality in Bloemendaal, five in week 38, to shoot up to 22 in week 39, after the first fat bike publication, and twenty a week later. “Most reports are that they have seen fat bikes, not of actual nuisance.”

We don’t see many fat bikes. Where has the gang gone? “I’ve never seen that before,” says Kevin. The enforcers see a girl cycling without a rear light. “Would you please turn it on?” “Great officer!” “Good evening.” “Good evening!”

Shortly after the interview with NH News in which Mayor Wienen denies the existence of a fat bike gang, Haarlemmer Ilan Sluis starts a petition on Petitie.nl: “Haarlem and the surrounding area have been plagued for months by intimidation, robberies and violence by a large group of young people (so-called fat bike gangs). We residents are not convinced that Mayor Jos Wienen is acting adequately.”

At the end of November, Sluis offers 1,500 signatures to Wienen. “1,500 concerned parents call the mayor to order,” writes NH News.

Looking back, news coordinator Antal Crielaard still fully supports last autumn’s reporting. “We have been so careful with this. We have only released 20 percent of what we know.” Moreover, the news channel is not the source of the commotion. “It was already there. We only took action after being approached from various sides.”

There is no point in looking at the places where things got out of hand in the late summer. “Of course you don’t see it anymore. But that doesn’t mean nothing happened.”

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