Bremen’s interior senator admits that his deportation policy against the drug scene at the train station has not been successful. However, he relies on more of the same.
Not everyone is welcome at Bremen Central Station: the Senator of the Interior wants to keep drug addicts away Photo: Hauke Christian Dittrich
BREMEN cup | Bremen’s senator for the interior, Ulrich Mäurer (SPD), has declared war on the drug scene in the city centre: his police have spent a total of 2,996 hours around the main train station in the past six weeks, checking 1,293 people and filing 175 criminal charges.
There had already been important checks and extraordinary operations in the summer, with layoffs and lots of frills. The internal authorities also closed a pedestrian bridge for three months – no one there should be afraid of drug addicts, but no one could use it either.
However, the current template for a Wednesday internal delegation meeting reads: “Despite this great effort, there hasn’t been a noticeable improvement, as people, some of whom are very seriously addicted, have shown almost no change in their behavior.”
The failure comes as no surprise to the experts: the head of the drug advice center “Comeback”, Cornelia Barth, already predicted during the massive summer surcharge that users would stay: drug addicts would find their dealers around the train station . And the city’s official support facilities, such as the “Käfig” hotspot, are also located there. “But even regardless of offers to help, people will come together in the city center,” says Barth.
Carrot and stick, push and pull
The fact that Interior Senator Mäurer also rates the success of his hundreds as rather low in retrospect changes nothing in the basic strategy – at least for his department. Mäurer now talks about “pushing and pulling”, even though his department would like to keep pushing.
Others are in charge of the shooting, such as health and social services departments. From Wednesday it applies around local for long-term drug use in Friedrich-Rauers-Straße, 500 meters from the train station, a so-called acceptance point.
At the start, bollards were set up to ensure traffic safety, rubbish was removed and benches were set up. “I don’t want to say that this is an attractive place,” says Daniel Heinke, head of the interior ministry’s public security department, “but it can become an accepted space, a reasonable place for the target group.”
The main attraction that should attract drug addicts is not the benches, nor the social offers, nor the food assortment, which can still be built here; the main attraction is rather: drug addicts are not checked, not hassled and not expelled in the reception hall. The police and public order office look the other way.
Drug dealers should be expelled
In addition to this offensive ignoring, the Interior Department sees its task above all in pushing, in other words: in suppressing. Despite previous failures, a major special operation was carried out at the main station last weekend: according to the police, “countless people” were checked around the main station from Friday to Sunday.
In view of this, the success of the search is rather modest: the police announced a dozen criminal charges and the seizure of 100 units of sale of unspecified “drugs” as well as numerous knives.
Since none of this is fruitful, Mäurer is now planning even tougher measures. The new plan: drug dealers are no longer seen as individual criminals, but as a commercial gang. This increases the potential penalty. Furthermore, according to the interior department, the numerous checks revealed that most of the drug dealers came from Guinea and did not have the right to stay.
At the Citizenship Meeting last Thursday, Mäurer announced that he would be kicking out more dealers with this knowledge in the future – that’s exactly what he said in the previous debate asked AfD MP Thomas Jürgewitz.
Target street vendors
It’s explicitly not about the great minds: they are currently being prosecuted with some success because French investigative authorities hacked their secret chats via Encrochat. There have already been 68 arrest warrants, mainly against lenders.
The newly announced expulsion strategy, on the other hand, mainly targets the level of small street vendors. Unlike consumers, traders would also have to be prosecuted by the police upon acceptance. It is therefore questionable whether the retailers will actually change locations or continue to offer their products at the station.
In any case, the artist community at the goods station between Friedrich-Rauers-Straße and the main station already sees itself as a victim of displacement and relocation: it is clear that “our area is increasingly frequented by drug addicts and the homeless”. reads an open statement from the *Inside artists. Why: “For many consumers, Friedrich-Rauers-Strasse is too far from the main train station.”
