Weapons prohibition zone in Wiesbaden, Germany: The threat in the pocket

Friday night, 22.30, it is cold and wet. In front of the area of Wiesbaden city police 30 officers gather. Prepare for a long night. You should check whether the Parts of the city since the beginning of the year current weapons ban is complied with. In several Teams of the police officers of los. One of them starts on the Mauritius square.

Here was stung in the summer of 2017, a nineteen year old from a 25-year-old students and killed. Two other people were injured. A police candidate was involved in the incident. The fact was, for many in Wiesbaden as a shock. Buildings in the city centre, but rather for their pretty and lots of shops as for violence and crime known. The case, triggered in the population and among politicians, an intensive discussion on the safety in the city. As a consequence, it was decided, in Parts of the centre of Wiesbaden, a weapons prohibition zone.

“Is also too cold to be outside, sitting around”

there’s Nothing on this evening, at the Mauritius, the place of violence. A few passers-by running through the streets, the employees of the “Winterstubb” close your shutters, and the colorful lights of the Ferris wheel lights. The officials continue to draw on the Kirchgasse to the Michel mountain. In front of a small side alley that runs behind the Park house at the Coulinstraße, stay where you are. Here would meet-often young people and drink alcohol, or smoke marijuana, they say. Today, no one is here. “It is also too cold to be outside, sitting around,” says a police officer. The officials are deliberating. It was unusually quiet for a Friday evening, they say. They decide to go to the well of Ritz road. Something was going on.

The road is located on the outer edge of the weapons prohibition zone. In addition to the pedestrian area also includes parts of the Inner West end to the bright mouth road. But even here, no one on the street except for a few men, standing in front of some of the Local and smoke.

“Actually, you can be happy when everything is quiet,” says Boris wide Meyer of the press the national police Agency. Only the day before, three people were in a neighborhood dispute, however, outside of the weapons exclusion zone, with a knife wounded. That such incidents, also confirmed by Karl-Heinz Brassat, police Director of the national police. Many young men would go out with knives in the bag on the road. You are not often aware that Carrying such a weapon will increase, inevitably, the danger that they will be used, he says. The fact, however, is: “knives make murderers.”

passers-by are astonished

Many passers-by show on Friday evening surprised by the large police presence. Jürgen Endres and his wife, Doris, from Eltville to find the controls. In the past few years have changed in Wiesbaden a lot. The tone had become more aggressive. You would not have felt safe. “If we come late in the Evening, for example, from the cinema, we look now, we come quickly to the Parking garage,” says Jürgen Endres.