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Move over Poirot: Belgium recruits blind detectives to help fight crime

By Claire Soares in Brussels

Published: 23 November 2007

Hercule Poirot, the most famous - albeit fictional - Belgian detective,
jauntily swings a mahogany cane topped with a gold-plated miniature
telescope as
he concentrates his little grey cells on unravelling the mysteries before
him. The country's latest, real-life police recruits prefer a white stick,
however.

The six blind or visually-impaired detectives are the country's newest
weapon in the fight against terrorism, drug-trafficking and organised crime
and form
a ground-breaking unit dedicated to listening to phone-tapping evidence and
bugged conversations.

Not only can they separate individual voices from a cacophony of sound but
they can also pick up on clues which sighted officers might miss - whether a
suspect is talking in a railway station or a restaurant, whether the caller
is using a landline or a mobile phone and, in very rare cases, whether the
hum of a car engine comes from a BMW or a Citroë*.

"Being blind means you have to develop your other senses, so I hear things
that for other people simply blend into the background," explained Alain
Thonet,
one of the recruits working out of the federal police headquarters in
Brussels. Right on cue, he suddenly turns to a sighted colleague in the room
to tell
him that his phone is ringing in an office three doors down the hall. Once
it is pointed out, you can hear the faintest of sounds but, were it not for
Mr Thonet's super-sensitive ears, no one else would have paid it any
attention.

The pioneering team was set up partly in response to the Belgian government
passing a law which gave the police greater powers to use wiretaps in
investigations.
But the legislation also insisted that every wiretap had to be fully
transcribed, a time-consuming process. Now Mr Thonet and his colleagues,
using adapted
Braille keyboards and voice-activated software, are easing that burden.

It is a win-win situation. Mr Thonet, who was born with only 10 per cent
vision before going totally blind when he was 12, is university-educated but
until
now has had enormous trouble finding work. "I would get offered lots of
first-round interviews but then they would see I was blind," he said. "This
is
the first time I have been judged on my abilities and not on my vision. It's
a way for me to enter the world of Mr and Mrs Normal."

He added: "What needs to change is people's mentality. When people see blind
people in a concrete work environment, it is easier for them to envisage a
similar thing in their own workplace. Clearly, I'm not going to go to the
airport and fly a 747 or turn up at the operating theatre and perform
surgery.
But there are lots of jobs where it is possible to hire a blind person with
small adaptations like the Braille buttons we have in the elevator here."
Over
in the Flemish part of Belgium, Sacha van Loo is at work on the latest batch
of wiretap recordings which have come into the main police station in
Antwerp.
He has been working with the unit for five months and his acute sense of
hearing, as well as the fact he is fluent in seven languages and has a
library
of many more dialects in his head, has already proven invaluable in
obtaining vital clues. In one investigation, police had identified a drug
smuggler
as Moroccan from a poor-quality recording but, once Mr van Loo listened to
it, he knew at once that the speaker was Albanian.

The 36-year-old is currently working on adding another weapon to his
wire-tapping arsenal - training himself to deduce what number is being
called just
from listening to the tones of telephone dialling pips.

But he is modest about his contributions, saying: "I am not here to
single-handedly solve the cases. I like to think of it more as an
administrative role.
What I do will not necessarily lead to the crucial breakthrough but I help
fill in pieces of the jigsaw." Like his Francophone counterparts, he sees
himself
as part of a wider battle. "People are afraid of employing blind people. I
want to knock down these kinds of prejudices and widen people's perspective,
not just in the police force but in all fields."

The Belgian police were astounded by the response their adverts for blind
applicants generated. Although the first unit could take only six people
when
it launched in June, there are plans to expand it next year. Non-seeing
recruits are protected by a special status that grants then police powers
but bars
them from making arrests or carrying guns.

That has not stopped Mr van Loo from getting his sighted colleagues to give
him some supervised, off-the-job weapons training. On a wall behind his
desk,
a bullet-riddled practice target of a potential assassin is proudly
displayed. "I did not see, but I definitely felt, my fellow officers go
rather pale,"
he jokes, recalling his time on the shooting range with a trainer guiding
his hands. "My instructor's verdict? There are colleagues that do a lot
worse."
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article3187090.ece

_________________
Warmly,

Amit Bhatt
New Delhi, India
Mob: +91-9013323229
"Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much"-Helen Keller.

Move over Poirot: Belgium recruits blind detectives to help fight crime

By Claire Soares in Brussels

Published: 23 November 2007

Hercule Poirot, the most famous - albeit fictional - Belgian detective,
jauntily swings a mahogany cane topped with a gold-plated miniature
telescope as
he concentrates his little grey cells on unravelling the mysteries before
him. The country's latest, real-life police recruits prefer a white stick,
however.

The six blind or visually-impaired detectives are the country's newest
weapon in the fight against terrorism, drug-trafficking and organised crime
and form
a ground-breaking unit dedicated to listening to phone-tapping evidence and
bugged conversations.

Not only can they separate individual voices from a cacophony of sound but
they can also pick up on clues which sighted officers might miss - whether a
suspect is talking in a railway station or a restaurant, whether the caller
is using a landline or a mobile phone and, in very rare cases, whether the
hum of a car engine comes from a BMW or a Citroë*.

"Being blind means you have to develop your other senses, so I hear things
that for other people simply blend into the background," explained Alain
Thonet,
one of the recruits working out of the federal police headquarters in
Brussels. Right on cue, he suddenly turns to a sighted colleague in the room
to tell
him that his phone is ringing in an office three doors down the hall. Once
it is pointed out, you can hear the faintest of sounds but, were it not for
Mr Thonet's super-sensitive ears, no one else would have paid it any
attention.

The pioneering team was set up partly in response to the Belgian government
passing a law which gave the police greater powers to use wiretaps in
investigations.
But the legislation also insisted that every wiretap had to be fully
transcribed, a time-consuming process. Now Mr Thonet and his colleagues,
using adapted
Braille keyboards and voice-activated software, are easing that burden.

It is a win-win situation. Mr Thonet, who was born with only 10 per cent
vision before going totally blind when he was 12, is university-educated but
until
now has had enormous trouble finding work. "I would get offered lots of
first-round interviews but then they would see I was blind," he said. "This
is
the first time I have been judged on my abilities and not on my vision. It's
a way for me to enter the world of Mr and Mrs Normal."

He added: "What needs to change is people's mentality. When people see blind
people in a concrete work environment, it is easier for them to envisage a
similar thing in their own workplace. Clearly, I'm not going to go to the
airport and fly a 747 or turn up at the operating theatre and perform
surgery.
But there are lots of jobs where it is possible to hire a blind person with
small adaptations like the Braille buttons we have in the elevator here."
Over
in the Flemish part of Belgium, Sacha van Loo is at work on the latest batch
of wiretap recordings which have come into the main police station in
Antwerp.
He has been working with the unit for five months and his acute sense of
hearing, as well as the fact he is fluent in seven languages and has a
library
of many more dialects in his head, has already proven invaluable in
obtaining vital clues. In one investigation, police had identified a drug
smuggler
as Moroccan from a poor-quality recording but, once Mr van Loo listened to
it, he knew at once that the speaker was Albanian.

The 36-year-old is currently working on adding another weapon to his
wire-tapping arsenal - training himself to deduce what number is being
called just
from listening to the tones of telephone dialling pips.

But he is modest about his contributions, saying: "I am not here to
single-handedly solve the cases. I like to think of it more as an
administrative role.
What I do will not necessarily lead to the crucial breakthrough but I help
fill in pieces of the jigsaw." Like his Francophone counterparts, he sees
himself
as part of a wider battle. "People are afraid of employing blind people. I
want to knock down these kinds of prejudices and widen people's perspective,
not just in the police force but in all fields."

The Belgian police were astounded by the response their adverts for blind
applicants generated. Although the first unit could take only six people
when
it launched in June, there are plans to expand it next year. Non-seeing
recruits are protected by a special status that grants then police powers
but bars
them from making arrests or carrying guns.

That has not stopped Mr van Loo from getting his sighted colleagues to give
him some supervised, off-the-job weapons training. On a wall behind his
desk,
a bullet-riddled practice target of a potential assassin is proudly
displayed. "I did not see, but I definitely felt, my fellow officers go
rather pale,"
he jokes, recalling his time on the shooting range with a trainer guiding
his hands. "My instructor's verdict? There are colleagues that do a lot
worse."
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article3187090.ece

_________________
Warmly,

Amit Bhatt
New Delhi, India
Mob: +91-9013323229
"Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much"-Helen Keller.

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