This is one of those essays where I talk to a number of topics and effects.
1. Car theft: This goes in two directions. First, just plain theft. This amounts to a fairly new (maybe one to two year old, luxury car (usually a BMW, Audi, or Porsche), that is stolen in the night. These are mostly 40k Euro or more type cars. Cops will generally say that they are driven across the country, into Czech.....and onto Bulgaria, Ukraine, or Russia. They believe (no real substance to the story) that the cars are registered with a different VIN there, and continue on.
The second direction is simply parts theft....where the guy takes the rims, the GPS screen, or the airbags....for a parts company. For you (the victim), it means your thousand Euro deductible falls into play....with you grumbling....as you go and spend a week waiting for parts and installation time. From the one occasion locally when someone was caught....this was a Ukrainian parts gang.
The effect here? My little village (4,000 residents) went through a serious year in 2015, with around nine cars stolen. One of the nine, was stolen from within 50 meters of my house (the renter's five-year old Audi station wagon). Folks were a bit shocked over that period (before the wall came down, they were lucky to see one car maybe every two years stolen).
2. Pickpockets. Before the wall came down, you usually worried about this to some marginal degree...in cities like Berlin or Hamburg. Today? Virtually everyone is more careful and this is a fairly frequent event. If your town is having a big fest episode....the odds are that at least one or two pickpockets are operating at the fest. At the bigger events (like in Stuttgart or Hamburg), you might have twenty of these folks roaming around the fest. The chief target is mostly cellphones and wallets.
3. Bicycles. I sat and watched a program last year where the guy had a bike rigged with a GPS, and placed in a public spot (locked). It disappeared within a day or two, and they easily tracked the bike to some location around 20 kilometers away. So the film-crew arrive and peek over the fence of this suburban lot, and there are probably 500 bikes sitting there (all stolen). It was a minor operation run by a couple of young guys.
Because the value of bike have escalated in the past two decades....it's a serious discussion. You have Germans spending way over 1,500 Euro ($2k in US currency). To suggest there is a big-time 2nd-hand bike sales situation going on? Well...not to the degree that you'd think. This leads some folks to think the bulk of the bikes are going into other countries (like Poland, Czech, or Ukraine).
4. Home burglary. I would divide this into two categories. First, you have the team that knows the guy in question is a collector of gold or keeps a fair amount of cash in the house (say over 100,000 Euro). This will be a guy who has a safe hidden in the basement or within some hidden area. The team will arrive....tie up the guy (and his wife) and then try to coach them into giving the location of the safe, and access to it.
The second category is the nickel and dime theft (usually a teen), who is ra
Ransacking the place (in and out in five minutes). He's looking for items of value (jewelry mostly). You can figure for each item of value....he's getting only 10-percent of the value when he unloads the item. Cops almost never catch these guys.
5. Store theft. Back around Xmas of 2015, I stood in a local upscale store of Wiesbaden....near the perfume department....noticing two security guys eyeballing a teen (non-German kid, maybe 13 years old). I have eyes on the kid for maybe three-quarters of a minute, and he turns.....seeing both them and me viewing him....then he takes off (a box in each hand, maybe the 50-to-70 Euro perfume). He's close to the door and reaches it before the two store detectives. So the race across the pedestrian area ensues. I stand there at the door for maybe five minutes, and the two detectives eventually return....without the kid. What the kid likely does with the two boxes? He'll sell them over to a middle-guy for around 20 Euro. That guy will have someone working for him at local flea-market operations....selling the 50-to-70 Euro perfume for 30-to-35 Euro each.
A grocery store operation in the north of Germany had a refugee center put into operation within walking distance in 2015. Some journalist had a discussion with the management. Almost daily, they had issues with theft to occur. They reached a point where they had a thug-guard at the door, and a guy actively viewing the security cameras. The cost of this? All added into the grocery prices, so that the normal guy was having to pay for the theft, and the added security.
This past year, I was in a multi-store operation within Wiesbaden, with a electronics shop on the 3rd and 4th floor. At the back-entrance (where I was coming), there's this escalator. Well, here's this large group of folks gathered at the bottom, and this 30-year old non-German being held to the ground by a store detective, and a Turk-German supervisor detective standing over him. Lot of talk going back and forth....obviously a theft, and the supervisor demanding an ID....which the thief only had some paperwork issued by the Auslander office of Wiesbaden. Cops might get called, but I doubt if the guy got more than a ban from the shop and some minor fine.
6. Drugs. Ever since the wall came down....I would say that in virtually every year....drug usage escalated slightly. There's a quarter of Frankfurt (a km by km area) where several hundred drugged-out folks hang out. It's mostly a heroin user group.....which adds a couple of folks each month, and a couple of folks overdose to relieve the local population of a handful of folks.
The dealers? It used to be purely Turkish and African. In the past five years....it's now a lot of North African guys and some Afghan folks. No one worries much about being arrested. The Frankfurt cops will make a round-up each week or two....but it does nothing to the drug escalation. Locals living around this are peeved and continually on the backs of the city council.....who seem unwilling to take major action because it'd trigger this to move into another zone of Frankfurt.
7. Theft from commercial delivery vehicles. There are various criminal gangs which actively go and look for vehicles to rob. It might be an entire truckload of chocolate, or in the case from the local area last year.....a trailer loaded down with Christmas-trees. All of this....requires 'fencing' (to a higher degree than you'd think).
8. ATM machines. There's hardly a day that goes by now in Germany....when an ATM machine isn't 'blown-up' and the money stolen. There's a science or technique to the idea....where a crew can arrive, and in a matter of fifteen minutes....blown up the machine to get at the 10k to 20k in Euro inside. The amusing thing to this....when you look at the remains of the machine (mostly costing in the range of 100-to-150 thousand Euro, and then you look at the building structure damaged (sometimes up into the 200k Euro range), it makes no sense. They caused 300k Euro in damage to get 10k in cash.
Some banks are actively looking at options (more security, more cameras), but the truth is....if the trend continues, then you will see a shut-down of ATM machines (It wouldn't surprise me if it occurs within the next fifteen years).
9. Untaxed tobacco. It sounds silly, but because tobacco taxes have risen so much over the past twenty years....you now have an active crime syndicate situation, where tobacco gets brought into Germany (from neighbors), and shady operations at shisha-bar operations openly sell the untaxed tobacco. You may think that you are buying regular German taxed tobacco, but at these shisha-bars....it's becoming popular to take a cut via untaxed tobacco.
How bad is this problem? Cops aren't sure. They know that they are making a dent into this with the night raids of the bars, but how much is questionable.
10. Cyber crimes. It's escalated over the past decade. Criminals have figured various ways to get into your emails, and your laptop. They stage fake bills....getting you to pay them for fake services. Some get your passwords for the bank account, and try to manipulate cash movements that way.
So you come to the end of this ask....who makes up this group? It's a big question. Some are obviously part of the migrant group that came in 2013 to present. But the bulk of these people are folks who came before that period, and represent various gangs and crime families (Lebanese, Serbian, Russian, Italian, Ukrainian, Gypsy, Bulgarian, Romanian, etc). Germans, in the minds of these people.....were not prepared for the extent of crime now being delivered. The German cops are motivated but generally lacking the tools or data to really go after major crime syndicates/gangs. Public frustration? It is growing and this crime discussion always fits into the top five to ten issues that Germans get hyped-up about.
No comments:
Post a Comment