Safer Together is a community-driven incident map for Amsterdam. People report physical assaults and threats of violence, I verify and moderate the submissions, and the approved data appears on an interactive map with a pattern grid that shows when and where things happen.

The data is public and anonymized. No names, no emails, no phone numbers. Just pins, times, and descriptions. The dataset will be available on GitHub when there's enough consistent data to make it worth sharing.

Scope

This map tracks physical assault and direct threats or intimidation of physical violence. Not verbal abuse, not general rudeness. Someone hit, kicked, pushed, attacked — or someone threatening to do so in a way that makes you fear for your safety. That's a deliberate choice. There are many forms of violence and they all matter, but mixing everything in one dataset makes the data less useful and the problem harder to define. Physical assault and credible threats of it are concrete, unambiguous, and where the urgency is highest.

Why Amsterdam and not the whole Netherlands? Because this is an experiment, and experiments need boundaries.

The hard part is verification. Anyone can submit a report. How do you know it's real? Right now I verify through email confirmation and manual moderation. I read every submission. That works with dozens of reports. It doesn't work with thousands.

Scaling verification is genuinely difficult. I don't trust a machine to decide if an assault report is credible. Not yet. Building a network of moderators introduces its own risks. So for now: one city, one moderator, real verification. I'd rather have 50 verified reports than 5000 unverified ones.

If the model works, it can expand. But first it needs to work.

Why

A few weeks ago I intervened when a group of teenagers was beating a kid. I recorded and stepped in. They turned on me. I wrote about it:

• The cost of looking away — what happened that day
• Discriminations and safety — the invisible support from victims who shared their own stories
• The cost of doing the right thing — the missing tools for prevention in our system

That last article describes the broken 112 loop: you call, you wait, nothing happens, you're on your own. That experience is what pushed me to think differently. If the system doesn't have the tools to act in real time, maybe we can build something outside it. Not to replace institutions, but to fill the gap they leave behind. Safer Together started there.

There are stupid humans out there. There always have been.
But technology is making dangerous people more dangerous.

Civilization should stand on its name. And civilization is not just institutions; it's all of us. Every person who looks the other way is part of the problem. Every person who acts is part of the solution. That sounds like a poster but I mean it literally: if you see something, do something. Even if it's just reporting it on a map.

Open questions

I'm figuring this out as I go and there are things I don't know how to solve well.

Recency: an assault from five years ago and one from last week are not the same signal. The map shows both, but they shouldn't carry the same weight. Fading opacity? A separate archive? Weighted decay? I don't know what works best.

Scaling verification: manual moderation is honest but doesn't scale. What are the options? Trusted moderator networks? Structured evidence requirements? Community vouching? Each has trade-offs and I haven't found a model I'm fully comfortable with.

Legal guidance: what are the legal boundaries of a project like this? What can we publish, what should we not? If you're a lawyer with experience in privacy, data protection, or victim rights, I'd appreciate your perspective.

Criminology: if you study violence, urban crime patterns, or public safety, this data could be useful to you and your expertise could be useful to me. I want to make sure the methodology is sound and the data is structured in a way that's actually meaningful for research.

Institutions: if you work at the gemeente, the police, a victim support organization, or any public body dealing with safety in Amsterdam, I'd like to talk. This project is not adversarial. I want to complement what you do, not compete with it.

Press: if you're a journalist and this story is relevant to your beat, reach out. I'm happy to talk about why I'm building this, what I've learned, and what the data shows.

Spreading the word: this only works if people know about it. If you're a community organizer, a neighborhood watch, or just someone with a platform, help me get the word out. Share the map, share the article, tell people they can report.

If any of this resonates with what you do, I'd love to hear from you. Email me at info@ideabile.com or just open an issue when the GitHub repo is up.

Cameras and footage

Many streets in Amsterdam have private security cameras. Shop owners, residents, businesses: people who already have footage that could help a victim or the police but have no way to know something happened nearby.

The next step for Safer Together is connecting these dots. When a witness reports an incident, they can now mark whether they have footage available. But the bigger idea is mapping private cameras voluntarily: if you have a camera facing a public street, you can register its approximate location. When an incident is reported nearby, we can reach out and ask if there's relevant footage.

This is not surveillance. No live feeds, no access, no streaming. Just a willingness to help if something happens. A neighbor saying: I saw something, check my camera. The footage stays with the owner. They decide what to share and with whom.

The privacy implications are real and I'm not naive about them. But the alternative is that footage exists and nobody knows to ask for it. Victims go without evidence. Police close cases. The person who attacked someone walks free because the camera owner two doors down didn't know it happened.

If you have a camera and want to be part of this, the feature is coming. For now, witnesses can already mark in their report that they have footage available.

One more thing

I hate that for every problem there is an app. But what if there was an app that rings your phone when someone near you needs help? Not a social network. Not a feed. Just a signal: someone is in trouble, you're close, can you help?

That's a bigger idea and it deserves its own conversation. But it's where my head goes when I think about what "safer together" actually means. Maybe I'll write more about it.

For now: report incidents here, and let's see what the data tells us.