The death of their son, a German fitness influencer, led to strong criticism from the mental health services of the police’s actions. Shortly after the incident, police chief Paauw claimed in The Parool that one of his officers “had been stabbed in his vest by the suspect with a knife.” From court documents, viewed by de VolkskrantHowever, it turns out that there was no damage to the vest. Forensic experts then examined the vest twice on behalf of the National Criminal Investigation Department, according to lawyer Richard Korver, who assists the parents.
The parents, who live in Germany, have been asking the police chief for a year to publicly rectify his statements and apologize. Paauw refuses this. He will be heard today by the independent National Police Complaints Committee. It is very rare for a complaint to be lodged against a police chief. According to a spokesperson, this has happened only three times before and all these complaints were partly justified. The decisions of the complaints committees are non-binding, but the police often follow up on them.
Sammy Baker, 23, came to Amsterdam two years ago, where he used cannabis with his friends and probably went into psychosis. “He was an athlete, not a drug addict,” says mother Justine Seewald. On the day of his death, Baker sat for minutes in the bushes with a knife tucked into his underwear and barely reacted.
Psycholance not deployed
Finally, a psycholance – a psychiatric ambulance – arrived but, to the parents’ surprise, it was not used. Instead, officers approached Baker with a gun drawn. As the young man began to walk, with the knife to his throat, a dog handler unexpectedly ran at him from behind with a police dog. The dog walked past him, whereupon the dog handler tried to knock him down. In the struggle that ensued, Baker swung around and was shot. He died on the spot.
His parents take Paauw, who is in charge of the Amsterdam corps, seriously with his statements. According to them, he thereby influenced the investigation into the case and tried to prevent his agents from being prosecuted. “The policeman in the vest hadn’t even been heard at that time,” says Mother Seewald. They feel damaged because, according to them, their son is wrongly accused by the police chief of stabbing a police officer.
Paauw does not want to apologize, he wrote to the complaints committee earlier, because it was ‘never my intention to influence people’. He “regrets” if he has hurt anyone with his statements, but stands behind his words. These were necessary, he said, in order to “some counterbalance the negative, critical claims made on social media” about the officers’ actions. In this way ‘I started to stand behind my people’, Paauw wrote.
Paauw says at the time that he based himself on information from the officers involved. Although no evidence has been found by the National Criminal Investigation Service, according to him, “it cannot be ruled out that the vest was hit.”
Deserted
The complaint against Paauw makes it clear once again that Baker’s parents and the police are diametrically opposed. They feel abandoned by the Dutch government and are not satisfied with the conclusions of the National Criminal Investigation Department, which did not want to prosecute the officers involved further because they acted out of emergency.
Baker’s parents don’t believe in that. “My son was confused,” Seewald says. “He didn’t threaten anyone. He needed help.’ To find out more details, the parents themselves started looking for witnesses and those involved who know more about the fateful day in 2020. They have now started proceedings to get a ‘fair investigation’, according to their lawyer Korver. The judge granted their request to have two independent experts look into the case.
The mental health services previously criticized the approach of the police. For example, psychiatrist and chairman Elnathan Prinsen of the Dutch Psychiatric Association said that the officers did not act in a de-escalating manner and that they were hardly trained to counter threatening situations involving confused people.
Dealing with confused persons poses more and more problems for the police. Of those who died in recent years after coming into contact with the police, 84 percent exhibited confused behavior, a study found in February. Often, that behavior was associated with excessive drug or alcohol use, or a history of it.