North East firefighters say more crews are being attacked on callouts
It comes ahead of Halloween and bonfire night
Fire crews in the North East say they are being attacked when they are out responding to blazes, as Halloween and bonfire night approaches.
There were 132 incidents last year until May this year, with the most common being objects being thrown at crews or their fire engines and verbal abuse.
Mark Stilwell is from the Fire Brigade's Union and has been threatened himself while out on a job. He said: "Most firefighters have seen this happen. I've certainly been threatened with knives and had things thrown at me in addition to verbal abuse. I think the verbal abuse is probably not recorded as much as you think it would be because people just don't bother with it as much.
"We do sometimes get problem areas where we know there's going to attacks on firefighters, we know there's going to be abuse, and we will send extra resources to that which inevitably means that somewhere else doesn't get the resources in the quickest time as possible. It's frightening this is happening across the country.
"I've known of an increase in incidents personally and I've seen in the people that I've been working with that they are suffering more abuse. A lot of it is verbal but there have been some quite serious phsyical abuse recently."