A man.  A knife. Von Maur.

Those key words, in the initial dispatch received by Lincoln Police at 11:07 a.m. Tuesday, echoed that December day in Omaha, even when many other details didn’t.

“Is that in your mind?” Lincoln Police Capt. Jim Thoms said.

“Yes.”

But the police response he led Tuesday wasn’t skewed by the words “Von Maur,” he said.

“Does that change anything?

“No.”

The report of a man with a butcher knife walking twice through Lincoln’s Von Maur wasn’t the same type of threat Omaha authorities received Dec. 5 and responded to six minutes after that first call of gunshots came in.

In Lincoln on Tuesday, an emergency dispatcher was told during the initial call, at 11:05 a.m., that the man hadn’t been in Von Maur for the past 10 minutes, Chief Tom Casady said.

To police, it was a nonemergency situation at the time, he  said.

And the time it took police to respond to the store — nine minutes from the initial call to emergency dispatchers — was adequate, he said.

Police were dispatched to Von Maur at 11:07. The first officers arrived at 11:14 a.m.

The number of officers who eventually came to Von Maur and SouthPointe Pavilions — 12 uniformed police, a dozen or more plainclothes officers and two Nebraska State Patrol canine units — came because there was a large area to search and a man with a knife to find.

“The last thing you want to do is not have a proper response,” Thoms said.

Employees and shoppers were evacuated. Police arrived, set up a perimeter around the store and went in Von Maur with guns drawn to look for the man.

No assaults or threatening acts were initially reported, Casady said. The man was perhaps in his 60s, and described as wearing plaid.

Thoms said video from the nearby Scheels sporting goods store seemed to indicate a man matching the description sharpened his knife there, then left. Police didn’t find the man, and he hadn’t called police as of Wednesday afternoon.

Every response, Thoms said, is incident-driven. So even though the threat of bodily injury appeared low, according to the initial description given to police by the caller, the geographic scope was great.

 The search soon moved out of the store, and officers and police dogs went through the mall. By 12:45 p.m., police determined the man wasn’t in the area.

If the events of Tuesday had taken place in any spacious Lincoln store, Thoms said, the response would be the same. And he said he understood the concern Von Maur employees had about the man.

“I think Von Maur acted properly,” Thoms said. “Everything was resolved. Nobody was hurt.”

“It was probably pretty good practice,” Casady said.

Perhaps next time, the man will not walk through a clothing store on his way to Scheels to sharpen a knife.

“It’s liable to make people wonder what in the world is going on,” Casady said.

Reach Cory Matteson at 473-2655 or cmatteson@journalstar.com.