Today, legacy PMRs continue to be the only group of tested, verified and certified technologies for the Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) sector. For the fifth generation (5G) to follow suit, substantial hands-on experimentation with functional, architectural and deployment aspects is required, and further test trials need to take place in order to inform and enable future verification and certification procedures for 5G to become a proven PPDR technology. This paper studies 5G PPDR experimentation associated with novel virtualized and cloud-native 5G technologies, architectures and deployment options, as well as feasibility studies and field performance and verifications trials involving vertical-specific 5G infrastructures and applications. Key enabling technologies, such as massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO), device-to-device (D2D), network slicing and multi-access edge computing (MEC) are discussed and 5G PPDR architecture and deployment options are investigated. A dedicated 5G PPDR experimentation facility is presented, and a case study of hands-on experimentation is provided. Two distinct scenarios are discussed, i.e., emergency augmentation of the terrestrial 5G PPDR network with rapidly deployable on-site capacities in the area of a public safety incident, and availability and reliability of decision-support PPDR applications on the field. Experience with the deployment and verification insights are accompanied by the results of quality of service (QoS) and non-functional key performance indicators (KPI) assessment that were exhibited during the experiment. The experimentation outcomes confirm the ability of the facility to support emulated laboratory experimentation specifically designed to tackle 5G challenges for this particular vertical as well as field studies recreating realistic public safety operations.