What is the history and reasoning behind the police visit for address changes?
I recently moved to Belgium and I am currently waiting for the police to come check my address. To be honest, it has been a bit annoying that I cannot leave the house as much as I would like to explore my new home city, but mostly, I am confused because it just seems like a very strange rule to me, especially since it seems that this is done for everyone moving, even Belgian citizens within Belgium.
I have tried googling to understand the reasoning behind it, but I only find pages explaining the rule, not why it is in place or how it came about. Is it just tradition, maybe from back when things were more community and village based? Is it to prevent some kind of fraud, but if so, what kind of fraud, and how much is this really preventing? I kind of doubt that it's preventing enough fraud to be worth costs of sending all these police officers around, but maybe I'm wrong and I just haven't found any statistics. If anyone can point me to sources (in any language) explaining the history and reasoning of this I would be super interested.