Netherlands – ‘My late shift is relaxed until suddenly a report comes in from a local police officer. He found a sixteen-year-old girl in the parking lot of an amusement park. The girl is disabled and urgently needs help. The problem is she can’t talk. ‘
‘We usually resolve such matters locally quite quickly. Maybe someone is already looking for the girl? Amusement park employees indicate that the girl was part of a group of German tourists that were in the park today. That makes the matter a lot more complex. I’m afraid this search will take hours. That bus with tourists could be back in Germany a long time ago…
We receive a photo for the girl’s description. My heart breaks, poor child…
Together with the help of my colleagues on the street, we are making progress. I call various agencies to arrange overnight shelter and care, while colleagues try to find out who the girl is and where she belongs. Hours pass, but we still haven’t received a missing person report. We call colleagues in Germany, review images and search the reservations. With a randomly guessed first name and the last name from a clothing label (often used in institutions), the intelligence colleagues search the social media platforms. This way we find her account with a place name. Happy! We’re getting closer!
Taking a chance, we call an institution from that place… and we are lucky. The girl is known there, but unfortunately no longer lives. We continue our search in our best German, from institution to institution and department to department. We finally have the right supervisors. They tell us that today they panicked so much when they discovered that the girl was no longer there that they forgot to ask the Dutch police for help. They were on holiday in the Netherlands and in no time they will be back on our doorstep. Lesson learned…from now on count heads before the bus drives away…’
Information source: Politie.nl
