Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Crime, Germany, and the Cops

ZDF (public-TV, Channel Two here in Germany) ran a 43-minute segment last night...."How Much Police Does Germany Need".

It was an interesting piece.  Lot of statistics....lot of interviews with experts and cops....talk over the type of crime now on the streets of Germany.

If you bring up crime with a working-class German.....most say that things are out of control, and that there is a major problem existing in Germany.

The thing that this show demonstrated is that there are various layers of problems.

Equipment is outdated.  Consequences aren't forthcoming to individuals who break the law. Cops now distrust the public when they arrive at a scene....so they might over-react.  Drug-trafficking is now a everyday job.  Burglaries are now commonplace and taking up a fair amount of investigative time.  Overtime hours across all of Germany for 2016 and the cops?  Over 20 million hours.  Nothing indicates that will be better in 2017.

It was a fair assessment by the news media.  The problem is that you really come down to the end, and you don't see some light at the end of the tunnel.

It would be stupid to sit and try to blame this on the immigrant crowd of 2013 to present.  You might be able to show some connection with the Tunisian guys who've become big-time drug dealers in urban areas of Germany.....but that doesn't explain or cover the robbery situation, or the terror acts. You can open up the regional news and note a couple ATM machines blown up every week now in Hessen....with little done in terms of prevention or solving this crime.

The cops being hired?  It's a massive number that's being talked about.  But by the time you recruit....get them through the police academy....and out in the field....it could be spring of 2019 before you start to see some change in the public perception.  To be honest, no one says that the additional 15,000 new cops will be enough.  That's generally noticed when you sit and watch these public forums.  You could easily get to the spring of 2019 and then there's suddenly talk of another 10,000 cops being hired.

At some point, some idiot in the public will eventually get around to asking....if you bring more cops on and they arrest more....won't you have to hire more prosecutors and judges, and then build more prisons?  That will shock the politicians a good bit that you were that smart to figure out the end result of this mess.

What the segment from ZDF does in an election year?  It'll force all the political parties to review their stance and how bad the situation is.....and perhaps go another step or two.  The public though....hasn't exactly seen anything improving.  The segment just confirmed what they already knew.




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