The Minister of Justice, Koen Geens (New Flemish Alliance), will tackle the problem of violence towards the police and the emergency services this Wednesday. The minister’s department has announced that he will do so in a meeting with the College of Public Prosecutors
Several members of the police were victims this weekend in various cases of assault in Brussels, Liège and Antwerp. The SLFP Police trade union says that public prosecutors should issue new directives as regards monitoring attacks on the police. We need to move towards “zero tolerance” in this regard.
The Minister for the Interior also criticised the violence on Twitter. He wrote on Sunday, “The police and the emergency services deserve our respect. Every day. What happened in Borgerhout cannot be tolerated.”
The emergency services are also regularly victims of violence. Indeed it emerges from a thesis in which 3,726 doctors were questioned that 84% of them had, at some point during their career, been a victim of violence or assault. The cases of verbal violence are the most common (77.2%), followed cases of psychological violence (41.7%), physical violence (24.2%) and sexual violence (10.1%).
The Brussels Times
