Former Offenbach police chief Heinrich Bernhardt has stated that there is a serious shortage of staff in the Hessian police stations outside of Frankfurt.

In an interview with the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, he also reproaches the Ministry of the Interior in Wiesbaden for not having drawn the necessary conclusions from the racist attack in Hanau in February 2020.

In most cases, the specified minimum security levels for the police stations in the area headquarters are "more than questionable" and do not meet practical requirements, says the seventy-seven-year-old, who headed the Offenbach police force from 2003 to 2010 and was previously the deputy state police chief and police vice president in Frankfurt had been.

Ralph Euler

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung, responsible for the Rhein-Main section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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"In the police stations in the area there is a lack of sufficient staff everywhere," says Bernhardt.

The service group leader often remains alone in the station, while one or two patrols in the area of ​​responsibility have to take care of requests for help, taking criminal charges or accident reports.

"A preventive police presence that is repeatedly visible to the resident population cannot be guaranteed in this way."

Arm guards for special situations

If police officers are on further training courses or are seconded to large-scale operations, the situation in the departments even worsens, reports Bernhardt, who, even after his retirement, has repeatedly and critically dealt with the situation of the federal and state police.

The number of staff in the police stations must be increased to such an extent that the officers there not only do their core tasks and general patrol work better, but also “at least to some extent” can cope with a possible “special situation” like a good two years ago in Hanau.

In practical terms, this means that the local officials must be put in a position to keep an attack like that in Hanau – in which the murderer killed nine people in two places in the city because he regarded them as “foreigners” – for as long as possible to keep them under control until they were reinforced by other forces.

It was precisely these prerequisites and conditions that were lacking in Hanau, Bernhardt notes, and two years later nothing has fundamentally changed.

The police stations of the so-called regional presidencies – North Hesse (Kassel), Central Hesse (Gießen), East Hesse (Fulda), South-East Hesse (Offenbach), West Hesse (Wiesbaden), South Hesse (Darmstadt) – are to be staffed in such a way “that they are always able to to be able to fulfill their duties,” demands the ex-police chief.

He also thinks it is necessary – beyond the already existing special units responsible for all of Hesse – to set up “overlapping intervention forces” in the police departments as quickly as possible on the scale of a platoon (up to 30 officers).

In the event of acute emergencies, these deployment trains could immediately supplement the local forces.

"A special situation like that in Hanau requires the presence of an operations center that is very well staffed," states Bernhardt.

"They must be able to