I first came to work in Germany in 1994. In Munich (München, if you want the German name). My boss, an American for whom I still have enormous respect (well he could recognise talent for one thing!) remarked of the city:
"I am amazed how safe it is here".
It is a general impression that you get of the country as a whole. Once in a while there is a significant crime reported and sensationalised by the press but not that often.
And as often as not it tends to be foreigners who tend to be at the forefront when such cases hit the headlines. I recall back in 1994 that the first murder that I heard of in Munich was committed by a young man who had been a member of the Bosnian Serb "mafia" (be careful with that word - the German press tends to overuse it and use it incorrectly for that matter) turned police informant, turned double agent who shot a policeman dead on a local railway station.
Later I learned of the existence of the Croatian "mafia" in Munich (this was incidentally the time of the Bosnian War, so matters involved with the Balkans got a lot of coverage), the Russian "mafia" all over Germany but particularly in Berlin, the Albanian "mafia" in Hamburg in a turf war with the Russian "mafia" on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg.
And the most recent notorious case of significance involving foreign nationals was when the Neapolitan camorra (not "mafia" NB) indulged in some internecine bloodletting in Duisburg (of all places?) in 2007 - much to the surprise and initial confusion of the German authorities.
But generally you would not have thought that there was a lot of dangerous crime happens here. I was a bit surprised when checking on Wikipedia (for lack of anywhere else to go) this afternoon to discover that there were as many as 690 murders in the country last year. Population, out of interest, app. 82 million. The UK (more on which later) had 722 (population app. 60 million). This 690 seems to me a lot, particularly when you read so little about it (who were these people, and even if you consider the numbers for individual cities in the US (2012 number samples - Houston 209, Detroit 411, New York City 414, Chicago 506) you have to remember those victims were an important loss to someone close).
No German criminals meanwhile? Apart from the murderous fanatics of the neo-Nazi NSU anyway? Not altogether true, when some dangerous villain breaks out of jail, you can rate the chances upon the individual in question having a German sounding name! Ar least the three breakouts that I can recall since 1994 involved such people. All sinister sounding people with sinister sounding records, and none of them on the loose for long enough to be a problem.
Anyway one thing you will note here is the fact that the death penalty has not existed since 1949 and nobody much is calling for its restoration except for the neo-Fascist parties like the NDP who have little substantial support. There is an increasing number of people locked up for life meaning life and I can believe that people are happy with that.
I cannot recall ever seeing the argument about a waste of taxpayers' money being involved (a good legal and incarceration system does not come cheap and it is what you would expect in a democratic society). Dangerous people need to be taken out of circulation and not released early to cause any further damage. As for religious fanatics without German nationality, they are liable to be deported if they overstep the lines of criminality. Again that makes sense.
There is an ordered society. People expect to be safe, people expect miscreants to be punished, they expect the rules to be obeyed, they expect the misfits not to cause problems. Conservative, but humane. Acceptable methods within an international framework which works for the good of the society and keeps its villains locked away in conditions which satisfy international standards. Firm but without excess and not too much by way of cosseting or complaint.
So far, so good. More to follow in Part 2.
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