The 80,000 Story

 I sat and watched the mid-day ARD (public TV, Channel One) coverage and the chief item of interest.....for 2022....the German Interior Ministry noted that just over 80,000 emergency services personnel (across the country) were attacked/assaulted, while trying to do their work.

It's one of those odd trends that probably didn't exist at all in the 1970s/1980s.

So, what's the deal?

More or less....this occurs primarily in heavily populated metro-urban areas (Berlin, Bremen, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, etc).  

You get a call that so-and-so drunk has fallen on such-and-such street.  You respond (two-man crew).  What you find is a drunk laying there, and maybe one friend, or passerby....who alerted the emergency services folks.

Then in the minutes that follow....other drunks or drugged-up dimwits show up, and think you are harming their 'friend'.  Yes, they are so boozed-up or drugged-up....that they have now become a threat.  

Cops get called, and two police will show up as some assault has started to occur on two emergency services folks (meaning two statistics for the national 80,000-number).  If the two police are struck or harmed....yeah, that adds two more to the 80,000-number.....in case you were wondering.  Need a second police car (2 more police)?  Well.....a bigger crowd, and now you have six folks for the 80,000-number.

Just around Hamburg?  I would wager in a warm month like July, there's probably sixty police/emergency crew member folks who are assaulted/harmed in some way.  

So the real question to ask here.....are drunks and dopers more prevalent now (2023) than they were thirty years ago?  I'd say it's an odd development where most Germans did drunk in abundance in the 1990s, but they weren't stupid enough or their brains fried enough.....to go attack the police.  

From my experiences around Frankfurt in 1978/1979.....if you saw an encounter with the police....you were smart enough to view from the distance and simply were a police-action-voyeur (not the sexual type, as you might think).  

Today?  I think a fair number of people just want to challenge the emergency folks or police.....being skeptical that they are helping their friend.

The problem here?  The police and emergency services folks are fed up, and they want some type of jail-setting (in a special way).....so that you might be drugged-up and do something stupid at the scene, and end up doing a year in some prison for your stupidity.  

So when you hear this complaint by an average German.....that's the basic side of it.