Chief of Police Peter Muyshondt: “We look back with a pretty good feeling”
The police are also satisfied with the two festival weekends. “We look back with a reasonably good feeling,” says Peter Muyshondt, chief of police of the Rupel zone. “Except for the two deaths that are regrettable, we had a safe edition.”
“It’s not over yet, for us the festival won’t end until tomorrow afternoon when all campers have gone home. This year we’ve had quite a few problems with climbers, people trying to enter the site via the wire. A lot of public drunkenness too, that’s characteristic of this type of large-scale event.”
The tasks for the police are many. “We are very concerned about mobility around the festival and try to give the neighborhood that has nothing to do with it the necessary rest. We also do crowd management and we try to protect people against thieves. In addition, we try to provide an answer to cross-border behavior and of course also on drugs.”
“We do a lot of checks at the entrances, but they are not visible,” he says about drugs. “I don’t want to say too much about it because then I would expose our tactics, but we are indeed active at the entrances and exits. We also send judicial teams to the field to make determinations.”
“I think that in addition to the repressive aspect, we should focus more on prevention, although that is not exactly the task of the police. I think we have to accept that at major festivals people take substances that they may not be familiar with.”
2023-07-30 16:39:00
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