“One morning we heard over the radio that something serious was going on. Colleagues from Schagen and the operator sounded tense. Radio silence has been declared: everyone must then keep quiet and only colleagues involved in a very serious incident are allowed to talk to the control room.
‘I yelled to my mate, ‘Aad, let’s go out into the street.’ We jumped in our official car to support the colleagues. It gradually became clear that the Rabobank in ‘t Zand had been robbed. Our colleagues from Schagen chased the suspects towards Den Helder. When we were close, the radio said: ‘We’re being shot at!’ We stopped and took our bulletproof vests out of the trunk. Back then, about twenty years ago, such a vest was much larger and heavier than it is today. It pressed against your chin and thighs, making it difficult for you to steer. The adrenaline rushed through my body.
Bullet holes in the windshield
‘The pursuing colleagues reported that the robbers got stuck on Julianaplein in the center of Den Helder. They turned and came back firing automatic weapons. A motorcycle cop said over the radio that a girl was shot from her moped – she had been hit in the stomach – and then: ‘I fell, I’m behind my motorcycle.’ When you hear all that… Terrible.
‘When we arrived the robbers had just run away, we saw their empty Ford in the square. We left our car and walked onto Julianaplein with guns drawn. We lay flat on our stomachs behind a large flower box and shouted to bystanders: ‘Get out of here! Get out!’
‘I saw our colleagues’ police car and was shocked. There were bullet holes in the hood, eaves and windshield. Service cars were still unarmored at the time, and I thought, how are these guys able to survive this?
‘A colleague from Den Helder had hovered over the city with a Lynx, a military helicopter from the nearby naval airfield, later two police helicopters also arrived from Amsterdam. We cordon off the square. The girl who had been shot was picked up by an ambulance, the Forensics department came to collect traces – bullets, casings – recovery vehicles towed the Ford and the fired police vehicle for investigation.
The search for the robbers continued until noon. After that, the leadership stopped the search and everyone went to the office in Den Helder for the debriefing. With about sixty people we sat in the canteen, where we heard that the girl who had been shot was seriously injured, but fortunately had survived.
overpowered
‘When Aad and I drove back to Wieringerwerf, a colleague reported over the radio that he saw three men who matched the descriptions driving a BMW. Then everything started up again: the helicopter boys rushed back to the airport, the arrest team hung everything up and crawled back into the cars, and we happened to be driving close again and gave chase a kilometer away. Again that tension, again I built up an enormous amount of adrenaline. Aad drove, I looked at the sky and thought: come on heli boys, where are you staying?
‘It was only in Schoorl that the AT, the arrest team, took over the pursuit and we received the message: ‘You will shut down everything at our signal’. Then ‘Action, now!’ sounded, we turned on the flashing stop sign, threw open our doors and at the same time heard, “They’ve been overpowered.” That went terribly fast. I breathed a sigh of relief: no shot had been fired.
It turned out it wasn’t the robbers. One of them was a tinted marine who was wrongly pulled from his car for the second time by AT’ers with their automatic MP5s. And for the second time he wet his pants in fear, very tragically. The robbers were caught days later.
‘When I went home late in the afternoon, exhausted, I saw my wife driving on the road, she had just gone shopping. Out of nowhere I started crying uncontrollably. All the tension was released. Suddenly I realized: you never know how a day will go with the police. From that moment on it was no longer self-evident to me that you make it to the end of your shift alive; it could just be over.
‘Young colleagues tend to want to be present everywhere. Until then I had that too, but I have become more thoughtful, more sensible, I no longer needed to be always at the front. All the misery you experience comes in your bucket and one day it overflows. Fortunately, that never happened to me because I have a nice wife with whom I could always tell my story, but I saw and see it happen a lot. Since then, I’ve never run headlong toward anything like that morning. You only live once.’