- Campus
- 13/03/2017
Police exercise on TU/e campus and near Bunker
For three days the Bunker and the TU/e building Athene (at the rear of Helix and TNO) will be the stage for exercises by the police. Some fifty people are involved in the exercise sessions, including riot police (ME); police dogs will be used as well. Apart from locations on and around the campus, exercise drills will also be held at the Dutch Railways station and the Philips Stadium on March 16, 21 and 22.
On Thursday March 16, Tuesday March 21 and Wednesday March 22 three teams will be active in Eindhoven, featuring representatives from different police departments. Every day at least one riot police squad will be involved, supported by people from the arrest team (AE), the patrol dog team (TSH) and the reconnaissance unit (VE). Throughout the day the groups will rotate between the locations.
The exact schedule of the exercises is kept secret for now. Hay Becks from the TU/e department of Safety & Security is willing to say that near the Bunker and in Athene it will concern training around ‘amok procedures’. At one of the locations there will be shooting (with blanks) and there will also be ‘victims’ involved.
The starting point is that the exercise sessions will not cause any nuisance for students and employees of the university, although Becks does not exclude that TU/e students and employees will nonetheless pick up on some of the activities and “could interpret them differently”. He expects that signs will be placed at the said locations among other things in order to make it clear that there are exercises going on.
It is not the first time that TU/e figures in an exercise of the riot police. In March 2008 the then W-hal (now the MetaForum) was one of several buildings that formed the stage for two days for an exercise involving large groups of so-called football hooligans. Becks also remembers an earlier “spectacular” exercise on the yard on the east side of the site, for which not only a water cannon truck, horses and dogs were deployed, but also some one hundred and fifty students eager to take part.
Discussion