They could easily have said no.
After all, police facilities exist for serious purposes. Secure areas are controlled environments, and cells are not normally open for recreational visits.
Instead, officers recognized that the circumstances were exceptional and found a limited way to grant Annie's request.
They did not pretend that she had actually committed an offense.
They did not create a false criminal case.
They simply recreated enough of the experience — the ride, the handcuffs and the brief stay in a cell — to allow her to fulfill her wish.
The gesture required relatively little time but created an outsized amount of happiness.
It also presented the police in a role the public does not always get to see.
Law enforcement necessarily deals with emergencies, investigations, crime and difficult situations. Yet police officers are also members of communities, and sometimes community interaction can take much lighter forms.
For Annie, that meant officers temporarily transforming a place normally associated with punishment into the setting for a joyful memory.
It was an unusual use of a police cell.
But it was certainly memorable.
Annie Wasn't the Only One With the Idea
As unusual as Annie's request sounded, she was not the only older woman to have expressed curiosity about being arrested.
The Guardian, in its coverage of Annie's story, pointed to another case involving 102-year-old Edie Simms in St. Louis, Missouri, who had also wanted to experience being taken away in a police vehicle.
The circumstances were different, but the comparison revealed something amusing: apparently, a staged encounter with law enforcement can be an appealing bucket-list item for people who have spent long lives avoiding the real thing.
Perhaps that is exactly what makes it entertaining.
There is a world of difference between experiencing the appearance of an arrest as a willing participant and facing an actual arrest with legal consequences.
The first can become a story told with laughter.
The second generally cannot.
For Annie, there was never any ambiguity about which version she wanted.
She wanted the adventure, not the crime.
A Photograph That Tells Almost the Entire Story
Some photographs require a long explanation.
Annie's did not.
An elderly woman.
A police cell.
Handcuffs.
And a huge smile.
The contradiction told the story before anyone read the accompanying words.
She was exactly where most people would desperately prefer not to be, and she looked delighted about it.
That visual contrast helped the story spread.
It also preserved a moment that might otherwise have remained a private memory shared only among Annie, her family and the officers who helped her.
Instead, people thousands of miles away could see what happened when a nearly 100-year-old woman decided that being law-abiding for an entire lifetime had left her curious about the other side of the cell door.
The answer, at least according to those photographs, was laughter.
The Story Behind the Viral Headline
Years after the event, Annie's story continues to circulate online.
As with many viral stories, short versions often compress the details into a dramatic sentence: a 99-year-old woman wanted to be arrested, so police arrested her.
The verified story is slightly more nuanced.
Annie was a 99-year-old resident of Nijmegen who had apparently lived without getting into trouble with the law. Her unusual wish became known to local police through her niece. Officers made an exception to their normal rules, picked Annie up, put her in handcuffs and allowed her to spend a couple of minutes inside a police holding room.