Netherlands – ‘The evening shift is as usual: the phones ring incessantly with emergency messages and we fly from here to here. Yet we only just manage to issue most of the reports to the colleagues on duty.’
‘I’ll take the next phone call. The detector sounds like a young boy and in the background I hear a lot of screaming and busy talking. A man with a gun appears to be walking through the corridors of a school community. The boy on the phone is panicking.
Images of a school shooting, like those in America, flash through my mind.
And now? School security is called, and feverish discussions take place behind the scenes. The specialist police unit must show up. And we ask if a helicopter can be taken into the air to keep an eye on things from the air.
Even before we think we have arranged everything, the redeeming words sound through our headset: ‘We have handcuffed and disarmed the suspect. The situation under control.’
The man with the gun turned out to be a student at the school. He was busy making a video of a robbery. How stupid can you be?
The next reporter has already presented himself. We go on; a complaint of noise nuisance…’
Information source: Politie.nl
