The topic of this year’s Premium proposal is on Zorg (Care) & Veiligheid (Safety). We, the Limburg Police, need your help:
65% of our community police daily work concerns Care and Safety related issues.

In 2021 the Limburg Police received

• 7136 reports on people with confused behaviour.
• 5499 reports were made to the organisation of Veilig Thuis (Safe Home).
• 30% of all incidents concerning manslaughter in 2021 were related to Care & Safety problems.
• 25% of violence against police officers can be traced back to people with confused behaviour.
• 2063 was the total of juvenile suspects in 2021.
• In an average week, the Maastricht Police responds to six cases of resuscitation in one day! We deal on a weekly basis with missing person cases. People who are mostly minors or confused individuals running away from healthcare facilities.

Unfortunately, the capacity of the Limburg unit is not unlimited. That is why we have to look more and more critically at where our primary task lies.

Within the domain of Care and Safety, the police cannot act independently. By definition, coordination with network partners is necessary. Attunement has the aim to prevent but also to prevent further escalation. This work cannot be made transparent. We do know that through a good internal process, high-quality employees and reliable screening of these matters, we can avoid many hours and capacity lost in the handling of these cases.

We, the Police, often feel that Police involvement in case of people with confused behaviour are not de-escalating. in such cases, rapid assistance from health care is much more effective.

Unfortunately other emergency services are often not reachable after 17.00 hours. We, the Police, have been raising this issue for many years now but it is very difficult to change this as many stakeholders are involved and many interests are at stake.

What we would like this year’s PREMIUM student team to do, is to come up with non-conventional ideas to get others (mainly Limburg health care organisations?) to step up.

We need your help to show us how other law enforcement agencies in the world are tackling these same issues.
What can we learn from them?

If you join this team your input can drastically change the way the police will function in the future!

The mission of the Dutch National Police is: vigilant and subservient to the values of the rule of law.
This mission is fulfilled by the police by providing solicited and unsolicited protection, limitation or validation, depending on the situation.

The police wants to achieve its mission by:

• building confidence in the way it achieves results;
• acting alertly and decisively in every situation;
• working in a de-escalating way and to use violence where necessary;
• working intensively with citizens and partners on the basis of involvement, sharing information and reciprocity;
• learning, innovating and relying on its professionals;
• being one ‘corps’ (body): from neighborhood to world. Locally anchored and (inter) nationally connected.